A Letter to Our Family and Friends about Bringing Sadie Home…

A Letter to Our Family and Friends about Bringing Sadie Home…

First….several of you have asked how we feel about people meeting us at the airport to welcome Sadie home. YES! We would love to have you there to greet us and to meet her! Anyone who would like to be there is welcome to come.

We arrive at the Atlanta airport at 9:25am on Saturday, March 8. We will come in at concourse E or F and we were told that people can easily find us at the INTERNATIONAL ARRIVALS HALL. The ground transportation area, passenger pickup curb and hourly parking facility are just outside the arrivals hall. In addition, for anyone who would like to meet us in our driveway in Newnan instead of wading through people at the airport, you are welcomed to do that instead. We would love to see you. Please understand we will not be able to invite you inside the house as this will be Sadie’s first experience with our home. But we will hang out outside for a bit to see any friends and family that are there. It will be a celebration that Sadie is finally home for good! We love each of you who are a part of our lives and are so happy that you will soon be a part of Sadie’s life too! 

I cannot say enough how grateful we are for all of your prayers and support. So many texts and emails and phone calls yesterday and this morning to let us know you were thinking of us and praying for us as we travel. Thank you! We know this little girl will be so loved by our family and friends and we thank you for loving and supporting us.

We are on the plane to Seoul, Japan currently. Four hours down, eleven to go on this flight, then a couple hours in Japan and another 2-3 hr flight to Beijing where we’ll arrive at 815pm China time Saturday (815am US time). We’ll spend the night in a hotel there, and then Sunday afternoon we will fly the rest of the way to Taiyuan, the capital city of Sadie’s province, Shanxi. Then on Monday 24th (middle of the night Sunday for you guys) we will go meet our daughter and she is ours from there forward. We will be updating this blog as often as we can so that you can keep up with how it’s going and see pictures! Please continue to cover our family in prayer through this journey.

Now…a request and a few things we need you to know.

As we prepare for the arrival of our Sadie, we are aware that while decorating her room and getting things physically ready for her is important, even more important is the emotional health of our daughter. In her short life, she will have gone through more changes and life altering experiences than many adults could handle.  While she may not consciously remember the events, she will still experience immense loss, including feelings of grief and trauma. She’s already experienced the loss of a birthmother and will soon experience the loss of her foster family as well as the sights, smells, and language of her birth country. Her world will turn upside down. She will struggle with feeling safe and secure and she may lack the ability to trust that we will meet her needs.

We have been waiting anxiously for Sadie to arrive but she has not been waiting for us. She may show her grief and confusion in many ways and we are prepared to help her through it and prove that we are her permanent family and this truly is her last stop. We trust that as our family and friends you will help us to do what is best for our daughter, and we thank you in advance for your support and understanding.

A couple requests:

We ask that you don't ask to hold her or give her anything at the airport. For awhile, we need to be the only ones who hold her, change her, feed her, instruct her, snuggle her, give her toys, basically meet any of her needs. If she reaches for you, please smile and point her back to us. If you have special gifts, you can save them for later or give them to us to give to her. She needs to see that we are the ones that things go through for her. We know how hard it will be for you in the beginning to not hug and hold her, give her food, or offer her a drink. We understand that some of you have waited and anticipated her arrival as much as we have, but we promise you that the reward will be great! Once she is securely attached to us, she will be able to give love to and receive love from all the other very important people in her life. In time, when she understands we are “her people” you will be encouraged to give out plenty of hugs, kisses and snuggles.

Think of it from Sadie’s perspective. Just a few weeks before she sees you, she will have met two strangers (us) who sound different and look different than anyone she has ever seen, who took her away from everything that was familiar to her. At 17 months old, after spending a couple of weeks starting to bond with us, she has no idea if the next strangers she meets are going to then take her away as well. We are willing to do whatever we can to help her learn that she can trust that we are hers for good. She will have to learn that we are the ones who meet her needs, who love and care for her in a different way than others, who make decisions for her and are her family.

You may see Sadie and think she is friendly and adaptable and adjusting so well because she may happily go to anyone. This is actually a survival mechanism that children in orphanages pick up. They learn to be charming and cute towards adults to have their needs met and get what they want. Children from orphanage settings are prone to attach too easily to anyone and everyone – which hinders the important, primary relationship with parents. We want her to turn to us when she is hurt, hungry, tired or sad, not just the closest adult around. Until she has a firm understanding of family and primary attachments, we would be so grateful if you direct her to us if you see that she is seeking out food, affection or comfort.

This will be hard especially for extended family.  It will be hard for us too because we want so much for her to bond with all of you. But we have to trust what the attachment/adoption experts have told us on this and do what is best for our daughter.  They recommend that we have a time of “cocooning” with Sadie, a time where we focus on connecting and bonding as a family and help her to learn that we are her family and we aren’t going anywhere. Helping her to create a security in her identity as daughter and sister is vastly important to her attachment in the long run. We have learned from other families who have adopted before us that when an adopted child develops a strong bond with a grandparent or other family member or friend before the parents, it can significantly delay and complicate attachment. We have spent time focusing on building bonds between our extended family and Carter and Myah, and want to do the same with Sadie but this will have to be at a slower pace because it is so important for her that she bond with us first. Biological children form this attachment quickly and easily as newborns. In fact, they do a lot of things naturally that an adopted child may have to learn.

So basically, with adoption, it's backwards. 

Where we may have encouraged our bio kids to be comfortable being held by others or taken care of by others, we will have to help Sadie first do what biological children naturally do – prefer us and trust us more than others. Where we may encourage Carter and Myah to be “tough” or “shake it off” when they are hurt, we may make a huge deal over a little scrape so that Sadie begins to trust that we are going to care about her hurts in a way that no one has before and that she can seek us out for comfort. With Carter and Myah we may encourage independence and we may let them work through things that are upsetting to them in a way that we won’t do with Sadie in the beginning. You may see us keeping Sadie close in a carrier even at 17 months of age like people often do with little babies. We may feed her a bottle, let her sleep in our bed, and in general treat her like an infant. It may seem like we spoil her or like we are keeping her from others. Please understand that this is all based on a lot of research and what we have been taught is for the good of her attachment. Please understand that we want our friends and family to bond with her. We just have to do it on her time.

How long will that take? We have no idea. We have been told a few weeks to a few months or longer. We will look for signs that she is securely attaching to us and follow that. We are optimistic that, having been in a foster home, it won’t take her as long to attach as if she had been in the orphanage, because hopefully she has learned what a family looks like and learned how to securely attach. But we just don’t know yet.

So, we don't want anyone to have their feelings hurt or feel that we are keeping her from all of you. Everyone in our community and family have been a huge part of this journey and helping us financially, physically, emotionally and spiritually. So, we are asking you to join us on the second part. This isn't the glamorous part. This isn't just the precious adorable smiling child, or the energy of fundraising. This is when we parent and love and grow into a family with a new child who has come from a hard place.

This does not mean we do not want visitors or that we want to be left alone! Quite the opposite, we very much welcome visitors and want you to play with Sadie and get to know her. Please call or text any time and let us know you want to come over and if it is a good time, we would love to have you. We welcome any of our friends to come over just to visit, play, bring food, take Carter and Myah out to do something fun, etc. In fact once John goes back to work I will probably be going stir crazy and will welcome a chance to have company! We just ask that when you are there you keep these things in mind and point Sadie to us to meet any need she may have.

We also ask that whenever you see us, you please pay lots of attention to Carter and Myah, too. They will need lots of extra attention and nurture as their little worlds are going to be turned upside down too and we will be needing to focus so much attention on their new little sister. 

Also, if you have any questions on the attachment or don't get why we are doing something, please feel free to ask us! We are not offended by questions and we will explain it the best we know how.

We so appreciate all your support in this adjustment. Thank you for loving us, giving us so much grace, and being with us through all of this.

We would love for you to pray for Sadie as she learns to trust and to love us in return.