Birthdays...... a confession

You know how you feel when you are first married, it is sort of like playing house when you are a kid. Well, it was for me. The same thing happened when my first child was born. It was like playing dolls but she was real and she screamed and I could never put her away. In time both things became my normal life and I quickly felt like I was not playing pretend. In some ways birthdays for my adopted sons feel similar. I did not bear them, their birthday does not hold the same emotion for me as it does for my bio kids. For one of my son's we have enough info that I can make up what it may have been like, it bears some similarities to things I know. This is helpful for me, recreating a birth I was not part of. Making it real in my heart. Feeling the feelings of his birth mother and incorporating her love for our son into my own love for him. The other one is a totally made up birthday. It is unlikely that it is the day he was born, it is likely not anywhere close. No one will ever know. There is no significant information or knowledge to create a memory of early life. Suspicions, but even those bear no similarity to anything in my box of experience. This makes it harder to relate. But, it is the day we have chosen to celebrate his life. That is real. As real as the fact that he was born. Real as the love his birth mother must have had for him. Real as the love I certainly have for him. But when it comes around it just is not the same.............. Something I must fight to overcome in my own heart and mind. Something I must never let on to him or any of the other children. Something, I pray will be loosed to the winds of time by next year. I want to feel like it is real. For me, for him.

FDA alert for codine

I just read this article directly from the FDA and think it is worth you all reading and printing off and giving to your child's pediatrician and any other medical caregiver who may have cause to prescribe codeine for your child. Apparently some studies have shown that some pepole have a genetic process in their liver/blood that turns codeine in to morphine naturally. This can cause sever reactions including death in children. Interestingly enough the HIGHEST rate of this occuring is with African/Ethiopian people. This is at 29% as opposed to any other people group in the test which ranged from 6.5 % to 1%. I would say that this warrants a high precaution for your child who is Ethiopian.
Read the article here. http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm313631.htm#.UC7O6INrrmE.facebook