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My fellow blogger Coley did a great post about adoptive parents welcoming a new addition into their family and I wanted to share one of my experiences with that as well.
When we added our second daughter to our family our oldest child was thrilled to say the least! Her extended birthfamily were not overly excited, but they also were not negative, they are just more reserved as people so we never really thought much about their reaction. Just a short eighteen months later however we were fortunate to adopt AGAIN and welcomed a son home! We were prepared for our oldest child’s birthfamily reaction, again they were not very expressive. Telling our second daughter’s extended birthfamily however was an experience.
We had not shared with any of the birthfamily members about the possibility of adopting our son. We saw no need to get the many emotions going if nothing were to occur, we had even held off on telling some of our own extended family too. As soon as our son came home however we made a call to everyone to let them know that the girls were big sisters and were pretty surprised ourselves with the response.
Our middle child’s great grandmother (who lives about a two hour drive away) was over to the house in less than three hours along with a huge bag of baby clothing, toys, bottles, everything she could find blue (she made Target and Wal-Mart very happy that day!). In all our own excitement, as well as the overwhelming experience we had just been through as our son’s birthmom had made her goodbye, we sort of forgot to even mention that our son is Kenyan/American (African). Although it was not so funny at the time, now I have to chuckle when I look at the picture we took of great grandma holding Carson for the first time and taking in this omitted fact. While I know she was a bit shocked at the time, she has gone on to be very supportive about our son’s presence in our family. I think this was an awakening about race issues for them as well, and a positive thing because when Cierra’s birthmom R welcomed a son last year her family was much better prepared for a biracial grandchild because Carson had already paved the way.
Looking back I might have taken more time to prepare everyone, including our other children’s birthfamilies about our son’s arrival, but happily things worked out just fine.
