[carnation]

When we knew we'd be adopting Asian children, we threw ourselves into preparing. We got adult and children's books about the countries, got to know even more people from their countries...we were the poster children for preparing for intercountry adoption. The children came to us as infants.

Once they got to be about 4 years old, all that preparation went down the toilet. They did not want to go to Atlanta for Japan-America Society picnics. They didn't care for the Filipino food at Phil-Am picnics here. Carrying the flags of their countries in parades was not going to happen. In many ways they let us know they were all-American!

We have dozens of friends who adopted from overseas and every one of them got the same reaction from their kids that we did- more or less, "okayourculturesaregreat, now can we have a hamburger?" Baby Berry and Baby Berry Cousin are so funny..you just don't expect those drawls to come from those beautiful faces, plus they're major country music fans.

One of our teenagers is from Central America, although she was born here in town. There are lots of kids from her birthparents' country at her school and she said that they can't seem to understand that she can't converse in Spanish, only say a few phrases, and they keep trying as though the language will spring to her lips!

I don't regret all the prep work we did. Maybe someday they'll be interested in their heritages but so far, they've been too busy "living life" to care much.