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Prepared not Scared – About attachment in adoption by Alexa Russell Matthews

Alexa

Alexa Russell Matthews is a Social Worker with a Master’s Degree in Social Work (Play Therapy) from the University of Pretoria.  She’s also a future adoptive mom and one of her most passionate work spaces has been engaging with children who are still in children’s homes or with children and families post adoption. I met Alexa at the Arise Adoption Conference at the end of last month and just loved how she explained the importance of attachment in adoption, so I asked her to put it down on paper for us.  Over to you, Alexa!

‘Prepared, not scared.’ I love this phrase which was repeated last weekend by Debbie Burt throughout the discussion on adoption and older children at the Arise Cape Town conference. During this session, a question arose, a commonly asked question about RAD – Reactive Attachment Disorder and its prevalence.  People who google ‘pros and cons of adoption’ or google ‘adopting an older child’ or read print stories of attachment are bound to encounter this term. It’s often used to dissuade people from adopting, or simply used to tell dramatic stories of ‘children gone bad’. Continue Reading

Our family shoot in the Company’s Garden with Heymama

Our family was treated to an afternoon family shoot in the Company’s Garden with Heymama and photographer Ilze Louw. Heymama is a style-driven lifestyle website for parents and if you haven’t checked them out yet, go go go! They’ve also just added a small, curated store to their website – they only stock items that they love and it’s updated every week.

Back to the photoshoot: Ilze captured some beautiful family moments despite the chaos – at least one of our three kids was always running off away from the camera, some over eager squirrels wanted to be friends and Judah kept losing a shoe. Oh, and a group of tourists decided to jump on the bandwagon and snap some of their own pics of us which was a bit distracting – having a family shoot in such a public space had some challenges! It was a whirlwind thirty minutes (with a lot of bubbles), but we had so much fun – you can read our interview that Heymama published over here.

I’ve chosen few of my favourite pics from this fun afternoon which was not easy as I LOVE them all. Thanks Charine, Jani & Ilze!

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