For those of you that are new to Chinese adoptions, when a baby is found in China, the orphanage is required to publish what is called a "finding ad" in the local newspaper of all of the babies that are abandoned and found. This ad is to hopefully "find the missing family" of the child and to eliminate any chance that a child was taken from the birth parents against their will. From what I understand, all children in China that are abandoned must have a "finding ad" placed prior to be made available for adoption either international or domestic.
When we received MeiMei's ad it was taken after her lip repair and my guesstimate is that she was around 12 months old in the photo. Her photo barely legible photo, is the earliest photo we have for her and it is very special.
HooHaa's photo is taken before his cleft lip repair. He appears to be around 4 - 5 months old by guesstimate. I know he was found at two months old in the center of a city square. His abandonment was clearly not an easy decision for his family since they kept him for two months prior to leaving him in a public place to be found. Most all of the abandoned Children in China are abandoned within hours of being born. I do not know the statistics but it is safe to say that any family that keeps a child for two months and then abandons for whatever reason suffered great pain in doing so. MeiMei was abandoned at two weeks old and HooHaa at two months. I cannot imagine the agony that both MeiMei's and HooHaa's parents went through when they walked away from their babies after caring for them for a length of time.
While I know it is virtually impossible to do, there is not a week that goes by that I wish there was some way to let MeiMei's birth parents know that their little baby is happy, healthy, safe and loved.
I would like to thank Brian Stuy (the research guy) for once again providing us with a little part of our yahoos past. If you are a prospective adoptive parent and want to know more about finding ads or to order your childs finding ad, please visit Brian at: http://www.research-china.org/
Posts
2 comments:
So very precious!!! I am looking forward to picking up little HooHaa and having him join our family!!
I had my passport picture taken and I have to say that I look like a criminal, just like every other passport photo I have ever seen! Hahaha!
Adorable chubby cheeks!
Oh, and if there was a way, I'd sneak ya'll up here in line with us, a couple of weeks ahead of you.
Cheers to a speedup! (yeh, right)
Love the tomato story. I could live in "watermelon-ville" on any given day in the summer on the interstates around here.
Post a Comment