Festival and Final Post-placement Visit

Anju was still a reluctant long-distance traveler, and she did not appreciate my brother's cat living indoors, but otherwise she enjoyed her trip to the cities to see her grandparents and uncle and to attend the Festival of Nations.  She really enjoyed watching the performances of kids representing different cultures dancing in their beautiful costumes.  She especially liked the ones that made noise--like the Dakota kids with their loud costumes, or Japanese ones with their loud drums.  The most enchanting part of the festival is the international café section with booths from about 30 countries.  She and I enjoyed a plate of chicken and potato curries, mango chutney and rice from Nepal and of course she washed this down with a dill pickle and a piece of lefse!  

Yesterday the social worker from LSS came for the last post-placement visit.  They don't have experience placing from India, so weren't sure how to do the IR-4 adoption, or an adoption from guardianship.  (Most int'l adoptions have you adopt the child abroad, get an IR-3 visa, and then just finalize here, but we need to do the full adoption here.)  We will need to go to court when all our paperwork is done to adopt Anju.  The documents the IR-4 process demands are a birth certificate from her home country and an adoption decree, neither of which we have.

She said that many families have complained about therapists/schools/medical professionals pushing various therapies for "delayed development" because the tests they use compare adopted kids to Caucasian, Western, normally parented children.   Our adopted kids should be analyzed by looking at how far they come in development in comparison to their time with their family.  When you consider how far Anju has come with gross motor skills and language in the 5 1/2 months she has been home, and how much she has grown physically, it is unrealistic to expect her to have accomplished much more.  She said if our primary care doctor isn't concerned, to just blow it off.  This has been my gut thought, and I've gotten several other opinions from experts- mothers- in the past few days and it's good to hear a consensus.  Thanks, Jackie!