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| Lions and Tigers and Babies in Airports, Oh My! |
| Saturday, July 08, 2006 |
We attended a class on traveling with children today. Our home-study agency offers various classes with topics from Basic Child Care to Parenting Strategies (and just about everything in between). You can go to as many of these classes as you like and it's all paid for as part of the agency fees (so it works out as a pretty good deal). Anyway, today's class was called Babies in Hotels but was more of the whole traveling with the child on that first trip (the return trip from their birth country).
It was really pretty interesting and although most of it we've heard before, I did still take some notes. Their classes are really good because they invite adopting parents (in this case recently returned parents from Guatemala and Ethiopia). And it was really great to hear their stories and not just get a quick two paragraph post on some forum,
The concept that you pack as little as you can (which we hear about by everyone) was once again stated loud and clear. The other thing that they confirmed was that the hotels seem to be pretty well prepared (and experienced) in helping out these "new" parents (it doesn't seem to matter which country you're talking about since all placement agencies seem to use the same hotels in whatever country or region so there are numerous adopting parents who have and are heading thru them).
One of the interesting tidbits that both families seem to stress was the need to really be in good physical shape. And this was also one of the main reasons they both validated that packing light was important. Since you're going to be having to carry a child who could be in the 20 lbs. range, it's important to make sure you can both carry the child and your luggage (while navigating an airport no less). So it's important to either be in good shape or try to get into shape (or at least build up those back and arm muscles you haven't been using to carry around a kid before).
Of course for adopting parents who already have a child or two, this is just another bit of information they already know. But for new parents it's just one more thing to learn. And for us, where the child will most likely be over a year old by the time the adoption is finalized, we better start getting use to carrying a sizable load around. |
posted by Steveg @ 10:05 PM  |
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| 1 Comments: |
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DEFINITELY bulk up a little. Buy a 20 pound sack of flour (or rice, or whatever) lean it into your chest, support it with one or two arms underneath, and practice walking around with it. Once you can carry it around like that for twenty minutes, you're doing great! And if you can't carry it that long, at least you'll appreciate what you're up against!
That's the single biggest thing I wish I had done before we brough our little one home. :(
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I'm Steve and this is my wife Stefanie. This is our story, mostly seen through my eyes, of the journey to create our family by adopting a child from Russia.
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"The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."
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DEFINITELY bulk up a little. Buy a 20 pound sack of flour (or rice, or whatever) lean it into your chest, support it with one or two arms underneath, and practice walking around with it. Once you can carry it around like that for twenty minutes, you're doing great! And if you can't carry it that long, at least you'll appreciate what you're up against!
That's the single biggest thing I wish I had done before we brough our little one home. :(