Meeting new people
This is one area I actually feel a bit weak in. Lots of adoption research suggests keeping your new little one close to and limiting contact with anyone other than Mom and Dad. For me, I found this to be really hard to discuss with my family. And I'm not exactly sure how we will implement it. I have talked about it with my family but it still feels a bit up in the air. (I'm planning to use a sling when we go out in public because I think this will kind of send a subtle message that Kenson need to stay close to me." But other than that, I'm not sure.)
Anyway, I do want Kenson to know how much others care about him even if they aren't holding him and hugging him. And I also want him to learn the names of our family members even though we live at least 2 hours away from our immediate family. So I have 2 things ready to go.
The first is a homemade book. I bought a cheapy photo album and printed out photos of our family members plus their names. I also put photos of Conleigh, Kenson's nannies, and his birth mom in it. And then I made a title page with the words "People who love Kenson." Simple, easy, and probably something that will be part of our bedtime routine.
The other thing I did was to ask my family to pose in someway so that their hands were free from their bodies. I then took a picture of them from head to toe. I imported the photos into a photo program and cropped closely around their bodies. Voila! Paper dolls! I then printed them out and laminated them. I am adding magnets to the back of these and will put them on my fridge for Kenson to play with. As he plays we can practice saying their names, where they live, that they love him, etc.. I also covered a piece of posterboard to make an envelope for them so they can be stored in one place on the fridge when not in use.
(Sorry, Blogger keeps posting it sideways. Don't know why.)
2 comments:
Great idea the paper dolls.
Christina
I've thought a lot about the keeping them to ourselves at first. Our family is 16 hours away but there is still church. We've talked about keeping them totally at home for six weeks and then having an open house for anyone who wants to come meet them. I don't know if that will actually work out but it's a plan. I did not do this with my first adopted ones and I think it would have helped. But the church was really involved in Adam's adoption and they had a shower and we passed him around etc. He was 5 mo old.
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