Adoption

Books, articles, videos, blogs, and other resources for those who have adopted or are in any phase of the adoption journey.

Books:

Click on image to order this 7 x 10 journal from CreateSpace.

Click on the image to order this 5 x 8 autographed book from the author.

Reviews of Adoption books and other books–

Such as: Thriving as an Adopted Family; You’re Not My Real Mother; Detached: Surviving Reactive Attachment Disorder; When Life is Hard; Are Those Kids Yours?; Embracing Soul Care; Adopting and Parenting the Older Child; and more…

Blogs:

Nine Year Pregnancy

Delana’s World (on Adoption)

Three Days at Sea (soul flotation when the waves are pulling you under)

Articles:

5 Pros and Cons for Homeschooling Older Adopted Children

 Read about two great children’s books for helping your internationally adopted child deal with the many questions they ask. Click here for more info: http://delanasworld.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/making-connections-making-it-real/

7 Tips for the Adoption Journey: Surviving the Wait

Orphan Sunday: 5 Reasons Not to Adopt

November 4th is Orphan Sunday. A special emphasis is given in many churches on the need to adopt children. I have adopted a child, and I do believe that adoption can be a wonderful way to start or add to your family.  But, there are reasons why you should adopt and reasons why you should […]

Seeing Red? (not anger….something else)

Daily Prompt: Adoption

Adoption — Today’s Daily Prompt: Pick a random word and do Google image search on it. Check out the eleventh picture it brings up. Write about whatever that image brings to mind. The eleventh picture Google images brought up perfectly tells a story in imagery that I told with words in my book Nine Year […]

Unique Adoption Journal

Adoption in the News

I Googled “adoption” a moment ago and clicked on “news.” It amazed me that after going through 15 Google pages looking for news articles on adopting a child, I came up with three (over the past week). Most of the rest were articles about pet adoptions. I love animals and do think they need homes, but […]

4 Tips to Prepare Emotionally to Parent an Adopted Child

Adoption

Getting What You Asked For The title Getting What You Asked For actually has different connotations. It could be an answer to prayer according to God’s timing and choice, and it could be an answer given based on God giving in to your request … and/or a person taking a matter in his or own hands […]

Start as You Mean to Go

by: Delana H. Stewart “Start as you mean to go,” Trish Maskew says in her book Our Own: Adopting and Parenting the Older Child, is advice quite similar to what was given to me by a friend who runs a foster home. In my book Nine Year Pregnancy: Waiting on God—Our Journey of Adoption, I […]

What is a Paper Pregnancy?

Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child

Check out my full-length review in Adoption Today’s January 2012 issue! Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child By: Patty Cogen — Review by Delana S This is a fantastic book that I highly recommend to anyone considering international adoption.  Even those who have already adopted abroad would find this extremely helpful (even if you’ve had your […]

Choosing to SEE

Currently, I am reading the book Choosing to SEE by Mary Beth Chapman, wife of award-winning singer/songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman. After having written our adoption journey, Nine Year Pregnancy, I thought it would be nice to read the journeys of others. One of the things that really resonates with me about Mary Beth’s journey is […]

Reaching the Place of Thriving (book review of Thriving as an Adoptive Family)

A Time to Cry

We all have them. The ancients wrote about them. A time to cry. A couple of months ago at a marriage conference I heard about the medical properties — health benefits — of crying and tears. As the parent of an older adopted child, I am learning quite a bit about the grieving process my […]

Keeping You Company

Our daughter was 6-year’s-old when we adopted her into our family. During her first year with us, she struggled with being in any room of the house by herself. Even if I just needed to go get clothes out of the dryer, she would leave what she was doing and follow me. That year, we […]

Cultural Flip-Flop

During the past 13 years, my family has been living and working in Asian countries. Our three biological sons grew up as the minority in the communities in which we lived. Now, they are in college learning how to be American, and sometimes they feel like they don’t fit in (even though their skin is […]

|Death before Life [An excerpt from my upcoming book, Nine Year Pregnancy.] Years of persevering in prayer, waiting for God to answer, waiting for Him to fulfill a dream, I reached a point where the dream had to die. At that time, I sincerely thought that the dream died, the door closed forever, never to be opened again. […]

Dare to Desire

One of the books that helped me tremendously on our decade-long journey of adoption was The Journey of Desire by John Eldredge. Here is one of my favorite quotes from that book: “We all know the dilemma of desire, how awful it feels to open our hearts to joy, only to have grief come in. […]

A Season of Waiting

If you have been struggling with unanswered prayer or have been waiting a really long time for God to answer your prayer, then this is for you. If you have been waiting a long time for God to bring a spouse into your life or if you have been waiting on God to open your […]

My Hosea Story

Rejection and Love. Crucifixion and forgiveness. Shame and covering. Orphans and adoption. Today, I was praying for a friend of mine who recently adopted a child who is beyond toddler years. Like me, she adopted a complete package—a child who had already had likes and dislikes, a child who was the product of someone else’s […]

Addendum to Empowering Mothers: The symptoms of Attachment Disorder

Videos:

Nine Year Pregnancy, Perseverance, Trials to Blessings and other Adoption Videos

10 Questions Adoptive Parents Ask — Short video clips by Dr. Karyn Purvis, author of The Connected Child: Bring hope and healing to your adoptive family. The 10 clips address these issues:

1. How Do I Handle Manipulation & Control?
2. Will Trust-Based Parenting Work for My Child?
3. Why Won’t My Child Act His Age?
4. How Do I Handle Lying?
5. How Do I Find the Right Professional To Help Us?
6. Should I Parent My Adopted Child Differently Than Birth Children?
7. How Long Do I Have to Parent This Way?
8. Is It Adoption Related or Not?
9. Will Trust-Based Parenting Prepare My Child for the Real World?
10. How Can I Be Fair?

 

Nine Year Pregnancy: Waiting on God–Our Journey of Adoption by Delana Stewart has now been released in soft cover by CrossBooks Christian Publishing Company, a division of LifeWay. Check out an early review below and drop by the book’s blog and facebook page. http://nineyearpregnancy.wordpress.com and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nine-Year-Pregnancy/312101615473700.

The book is also available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. Soon it will be released in e-book version as well.

Review by Education Cafe writer, Mary H —

I know a family in my hometown in the USA who adopted two older children from Russia.  And then sent them back.  From that grievous example and other various news stories, I knew there must be something uniquely difficult about adopting older children.  I wanted to read a success story.  Nine-Year Pregnancy is that success story; the author also shares with great vulnerability about the trials of adopting an older child.  I had the opportunity to read this book’s manuscript during a pre-publication sneak preview, and I found the prose to be captivating.  I kept wondering what would happen next.

This book is much more than a narrative on adoption.  This book is about hope deferred, and deferred, and deferred.  It’s about having a dream which you think is from God but then questioning it as the years pass and the dream is unfulfilled.  As the author detailed for me her journey, I thought of my own steps and missteps.  I laughed aloud on more than one occasion but held back tears as well.  The book is also a treatise on unconditional love.  God loves us when we are unloveable, and He gives us the strength to do the same for others.

I recommend this book to anyone whose dreams are on hold and to all moms and dads and those considering adoption.

Photo by Mark Burtch