Good practice

Adopting from Russia has become very difficult. Our agency is no longer accepting applications for Russia. So it seems that Ethiopia is going to be our place. With that I have been doing alot of thinking about what it would be to have children of a different race; the questions people might have for us; and the questions that our kids might have for us. I confess that I find myself spying around me, looking for multi-racial families. I'm not sure I really know why or what I am looking for.

This weekend my nephew decided to give me a little sneak preview of this. We were at the water park with his family and his grandparents. The big boys were off doing the speed slides while the girls were watching. My nephew and I were sitting down. I had him all wrapped up in a big towel as he had gotten cold. We were just sitting when I noticed something catch his eye. There were two older African American kids with particularly dark skin headed into the wave pool. Thankfully they were at least 40ft away when he stated very matter-of-factly "they're black". Well that caught me off guard. Uhhhhhh... I didn't want to be all "oh honey we don't talk about that" and trying to explain that they should be called African American... well it just didn't seem to fit when I knew that to him he was just talking about color, like he finds in his crayon box, nothing more, nothing less. So I said "yup"... brilliant, I know. Well that was immediately followed by "why?". I should have answered with what my Mom used to tell me, that God loves variety and so he used different colors when he made us. No, I replied "because their parents are and so they are too". About halfway through that sentence I thought "oh that's going to create confusion for him in about a year when we adopt, nice going".

Yes, nieces and nephews are good practice. I love that little guy.