I’m off to a bad start in 2011… at least as far as blogging goes. I had some technical difficulties at the start of this month, and it took me some time to get back up and running. Unfortunately, “back up and running” meant buying a new computer while we tried to fix the old one!
The old one, as it turns out, is now nothing more than a rather large paperweight.
During the first couple weeks of this month, while I was dealing with the computer problems, I spent some time thinking of what I have been writing here, and what I should write about going forward. It seems everyone has an idea of what I should or shouldn’t say, what sort of “voice” I should use, what sort of topics I should cover. Serious to lighthearted, generic to personal, everyone has an opinion.
I’ve decided to just be me.
This is me, I am real, and this is what I have to say when it comes to adoption…
Nothing has happened lately. There have been no more matches, and we haven’t heard from the case worker we are waiting on. Absolutely nothing has happened lately.
So, since I have no progress to report at the moment, I have decided to fill in empty space with a couple things that I have learned that have come as a surprise to me. Things I never would have thought about…
Here’s one of these things… just to get us started.
Ethnic Hair & Skin Care
I don’t have any demographic data on the readers of these blogs… and you probably don’t know much at all about me. Let me just say that I am Caucasian and I have very easy to care for hair and skin. My husband practically shaves his head, and he’s a rough and tumble kind of guy who couldn’t give a hoot about his skin. That information is not good or bad or anywhere in between… it just is what it is. It tells you where we are coming from, and that’s about it.
Tom has a co-worker who wants to be a foster parent, and she is one of the few people who have been very supportive of our desire to adopt. She is African American, and she offered to help out in case we find ourselves adopting an African American child. He came home and told me this one day, and immediately I starting thinking of the things she could help us with… culture, maybe? History? I was certainly not expecting the answer that I got… and I was caught completely off guard. What did she offer to help with? She offered, for one, to teach us how to care for and style African American hair.
When considering adoption, hair and skin care was the furthest thing from our minds, but apparently it’s important!! I am not minimizing this, I just had no idea.
So when she approached us about this issue, I did some searching online. If you’re interested in learning more about ethnic hair and skin care, you can click here: Caring for Your African American or Biracial Child’s Hair.
Just goes to show, once again, that you just can’t talk enough about this. There will always be more to discover and learn about!