Mommy’s Diary: Looking Ahead

It’s been a while since I wrote mommy’s diary last, but I could not help putting up a post after finding these photo of my daughter taken six months ago. The photos had been waiting to be edited and saved in the hard drive but somehow got lost in the midst of busy days.

We just came back from our 10-day vacation in the U.S. That was the fastest 10 days of my life! It literally flew. I was glad that Kiko was able to meet with her daddy’s side of the family. She spent time with her gam gam (grandma), grandpa and great grand mother. In fact, I barely saw her during the trip because she was always with them.

After the trip, all of the sudden she looks grown up – talking in longer sentences, explaining her reasoning behind her actions (saying “because….”) and looking taller. With the amount of time she spends with Andy (Andy is very involved with the child raising), I thought she would be very much a tom boy, but she, for now, is super feminine. She loves doing her nails with me, playing with beads to make necklaces and braiding strings whenever she finds one long enough . I’m really enjoying having a girl.

Some of you had asked how our adoption process has been going. We are still waiting for a child. It has been two and a half years since we got approved by the adoption agency. We hope that the child will come sometime soon and are willing to wait as long as it takes!

On the bright side, we started to foster a child through a program called “friend home”. There are many kids in group home that are neither adoptable or foster careable in Japan. This blog by Sophelia explains well about the adoption situation in Japan, so I won’t go into the details, but to sum it up, the parental rights in Japanese laws are very strong, which makes it difficult to have kids up for adoption or foster care.

So for the kids who cannot be adopted or foster cared because the parents’ unwillingness to give up the parental rights, Tokyo has a program “friend home” where the kids get to experience home life by visiting certain family on regular bases for a day out or sleep over. We registered with the program last year and finally got referred to a child who will be staying with us once a month. Both my husband and I are very excited and it will be great for Kiko to have another child she can care for.

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