Children

When my older daughter, Jessica, was in kindergarten she love to attend birthday parties. However, one day she came home from a birthday celebration very sad and very quiet. She wanted to be left alone and didn't want to talk about the party.

Carey Elliot* has a close relationship with her four adult children, a long and happy marriage, and a successful career. She also has two grandchildren: a two-year-old boy, and a six-year-old girl. The little girl was placed for adoption at birth.

When Carey's daughter Danika became pregnant at 25, she told her mom that she was considering an adoption plan for her baby. Though other members of the family found this idea hard to accept, Carey was supportive: the birth father was not involved, and Danika very much wanted her child to have siblings and a two-parent family.

The waves break on the shore. It’s summer on the west coast, and the Clarke family farm is in full bloom. Sara Clarke, 40, her husband Jack, 45, and their three kids, Taylor, 13, Anna, 7, and Hugo, 5,* wake up surrounded by fields of flowers ready to be cut and arranged for the busy wedding season. They live on 23 acres, four of which they dedicate to nut orchards, flowers, a vegetable garden, fruit trees, 50 laying hens, and barns. The rest of the property is natural forest.

All over the world, people are using the Internet to seek out information about their roots. It’s now the norm for adoptees and birthparents to use social media to search for missing pieces of their biological puzzle without any need for detectives, red tape, agencies, or intermediaries.

The growing body of knowledge about interventions and supports that promote success for people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs) often overlooks sensory sensitivities, which can compound their other challenges. While most of us can unconsciously screen out the slight smell of a cleaning product or the faint hum of a computer, many people with FASD cannot. In this article, David Gerry answers some of your questions.

Everyday occasions

A ritual, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a prescribed order of performing religious or other devotional service.” Rituals take place on occasions like Hanukkah, Easter, the Lunar New Year, birthdays, and Thanksgiving. They don’t have to be religious in nature; baking Christmas cookies with your mom and sister is as much a ritual as attending Mass. The simple daily things you do can be can be rituals, too.

In recent years, over 40% of adoptions in B.C. have been completed by foster parents who adopt their foster children. To find out more about this unique path to building a family, we interviewed a mom who’s been there and done that--more than once!

Jane and her husband have been foster parents for more than a decade, and are also parents to twelve children (seven biological and five through adoption).

Open domestic adoptions, where the birth family and adoptive family get together regularly for visits with the child, are the norm in British Columbia. In between visits they stay in touch through emails, phone calls, and text messages. If this is what an open adoption looks like, how can openness be possible in an international adoption where time zones and geography create barriers and birth parents may be unknown?

Three years ago, Dave and Juanita Alexander found themselves halfway around the world with 18 suitcases, 12 carry-ons, a year’s worth of supplies and four children. Dave and Juanita, have collectively lived and worked in five countries (including Canada), and have four beautiful children through adoption. In 2012, they uprooted their lives to move to Uganda for a year. Since then, they have settled back into their daily lives in Langley and continue to enjoy new adventures together.

Adoption across the Rockies

At any given time last year, there were about 5,300 children and youth in permanent government care in Alberta. In the same year, 449 of these children found a loving and permanent home. Alberta children are almost always placed with Alberta families in order to keep them connected to extended family, culture, community, and resources.