Last Training Session

Thursday night we finished the Russian adoption training course!  My favourite quote of the night was, "adoption is like marriage without the dating."  How true!

This last session focused on survival skills and psychologist's recommendations for dealing with the five archetypal coping behaviours.  The survival skills were relatable to many situations but the main point that was repeated was, "don't blame yourself."  Just like everyone has bad hair days, we are entitled to bad adoption days where we all get frustrated and nothing right seems to happen!  A lot of information pertained to reminding ourselves that we keep on living our lives but we have to adapt to her special needs and be aware of how others react to her.  For example, she might not want to be spoken to directly, it might cause her to freeze up, so we have to speak for her in advance.

We also explored some case studies of young adoptees.  All of these kids were under 3 years of age and had a family age of less than 6 months.  It was interesting to hear about how even a 9-month-old girl could become a 'rock' by just curling up and refusing to react to any stimulus.  In each case, the psychologists went showed the parent how to teach and practice proper family behaviour with their child.  It took time and, in some cases, they regressed when entering daycare, but then the parent had the knowledge with how to deal with the coping mechanisms and could do so for any regression. 

I really, really enjoyed this course.  It had a lot of general knowledge that I think all parents should hear and it made you think in advance about situations we might not have even considered.  It is so much more about adopting a child from an institution now as opposed to a child from Russia. 

There were a lot of tips about Russian culture that would help us relate to the probable routines in the orphanage.  We were told Russian families often have a 'tea party' at the end of the day with the whole family.  This lets everyone get together and enjoy each others' company before going your separate ways the next morning.  I think we can certainly do this considering, Dania included, we all like tea!