Attachment in adoption is something that adoptive parents desire the most – we wish that there could always be an instant connection when we meet our child for the first time, but the reality is that often attachment is something that you have to work towards and grows over time, even if the love is instant. Alexa shares some great advice for those of us on the attachment journey in this short piece. Thanks Alexa! Continue Reading
Sonja and her husband Paul are the proud parents of four kids: Mia, Micah, Max and Macy. Sonja is a hands-on multi-tasking stay at home mom who home schools her eldest two. Thanks for finding the time to share the story of your rainbow nation family with us, Sonja!
My husband and I stay in Johannesburg and we have four adopted children. Two beautifully free little girls aged nine years and 11 months. And two wonderfully wild boys who are seven and two years old. Building a family through adoption has been a truly incredible journey that turned out being much less scary than people think. In most aspects we are just a normal family and yet I will never forget how the gift of adoption has brought these four remarkable kids into my life! Continue Reading
Bridget is an amazing young lady who works as a freelance hair and make-up artist and I met her and her skills at a blogger event recently. We got chatting and next thing I know we were talking about my kids (I do this a lot) and Bridget told me that she was also adopted. It’s really amazing that we met like this. And so we hugged and became friends and I’ve asked Bridget to share her story with us as it is such a beautiful story of adoption and family and resilience and triumph. Thank you for sharing your story, Bridget!Continue Reading
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 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!
