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Our son, whom we adopted from Kazakhstan in January 2005, will turn two next month. We are really enjoying him at this stage. He is putting two or three words together as small sentences, and he absolutely has a mind of his own. He knows what he likes and doesn’t like, and has a routine that we rarely break. He is a complete joy to be around. As you may know, we are also in the process of adopting a little sister for our son from China, and the adoption will hopefully take place this fall (although if you follow China adoptions, you know there is a definite slow down, so even this is starting to look unlikely). We are starting to decorate our daughter’s room, which is next to our son’s, so we decided last weekend it was time to start talking about our daughter’s adoption with our son.
I had been reading a lot on our blogs, as well as some literature at home, that the best way to start the discussion of adding to the family is to try to make it as natural as possible. How do you do that with a two year old? I thought I had it figured out. I asked my son to help me with a project…starting to organize the nursery. I thought we could talk about whose clothes these are, whose toys these are….unfortunately I balked, but with some humorous results.
It went like this. We were all three “workin’”, as our son puts it, in our daughter’s room, organizing stuffed animals, and we decided to bring it up.
Q: Hey Aidan, do you want a brother? Wouldn’t that be fun, someone to play with? (we are open to this as well, and thought maybe he would latch onto this idea first)
A: (a very whiny) Nooooooooo….
Q: Well, Aidan, what about a sister?
A: Noooooo……….
Q: Well babe, what do you want then?
A: Waffles.
Our son has a one track mind, which gravitates to waffles. It’s the first thing he asks for at 5:30 a.m., or at any point in the day if you ask him what he wants. I should have known better. Needless to say, we will put these conversations on hold until we get a little closer to our daughter’s arrival. Hope this makes you smile today.
That sounds really familiar! At the time we were adopting Little J I think Big J equated getting a new baby with getting a new Thomas for his train set…
Although, in our case, we had lost a baby at 18 weeks so he’d already been prepped for the baby thing…it just didn’t work out as planned. We found that reading picture books about adoption and about little brothers/sisters was very helpful for starting discussions.