Parenting 101

Colorado states that adoptive parents must take 24 hours of classes before they are allowed to adopt, so yesterday we were in Denver for another 4 hour class. Now, quite honestly, we don't always look forward to these with utmost enthusiam, but yesterday's class on attachment was fascinating! We learned a lot and met some interesting families, one of whom is English and lived not far from where Chris grew up. Small world!! What I look forward to the most in these trainings is going to the offices of CCAI, our Chinese adoption agency. Our agency, which is the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world, is in a large two-story office building just outside of Denver. The walls are plastered with hundreds of 5x7 picture frames of all of the Chinese children that have been adopted through CCAI, predominantly girls. Everytime we are there I look at each of these little faces and wonder what our little girl will look like. While there on Saturday, the Chinese Cultural Center run by CCAI, had an Easter Egg Hunt and there were over 100 Chinese girls, and about 3 boys, all running around with sheer joy. With the Chinese adoption process at such a standstill, I often try to push it all to the back of my mind and not think about it for my own sanity, but being at CCAI reminds us why we started this process.