Adoptive Parents

THE WHOLE LIFE ADOPTION BOOK: REALISTIC ADVIC FOR BUILDING A HEALTHY ADOPTIVE FAMILY. By Jayne E. Schooler. Pinon Press. 217 pages. $12.IF YOU'VE been involved long enough in the world of adoption, support groups and information exchanges can start to seem like the norm. So an assertion like Jayne Schooler's, that "adoptive parents generally have no role models to steer them through the process," comes as a healthy reminder of how it must seem to parents and aspiring parents who are just starting out.Mrs.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable. As a self-proclaimed geek and former math teacher, I love this quote. I have a great deal of respect for researchers and statisticians who help us better understand our lives, through the most beautiful language in the world — mathematics. But while numbers don't lie, they can be twisted to represent almost anything we want. Most of the misinformation — intentional and accidental — can be traced to the reader or reporter.

Christopher and Karen Franklin had some reservations about going to a picnic designed to introduce children awaiting adoption to prospective parents.The Randallstown couple, who want to adopt, said they envisioned a "shopping market" for children.Nevertheless, the Franklins attended the picnic yesterday at Piney Run Park in Sykesville. It was sponsored by One Church, One Child, a minority adoption recruitment program administered by the state Department of Human Resources.They were pleasantly surprised.

Peter Sprigg's diatribe against same sex marriage ( "Same-sex marriage is contrary to the public interest," Feb. 2) is so full of contradictions and half-truths that it is difficult to decide where to begin responding. Assuming for the sake of argument that "the public purpose" of marriage is the procreation and rearing of children — although there is no reason to conclude that marriage has any one, exclusive "public purpose" — even Mr. Sprigg acknowledges that heterosexual couples marry for a host of "private purposes" and the state recognizes those marriages as valid even if the couple never intends to nor has children.

A group of adoptive families from Howard and Prince George's counties is forming a summer class for residents interested in adoption.The organizers are volunteers of a nonprofit group called Patapsco Families Adopting Children Everywhere.Course topics include overcoming depression associated with infertility, making the decision to adopt, U.S. and international adoption, independent adoption, agency adoptions and adjustment issues."We go over the good and the bad," said instructor Arlene Stephenson, who adopted a Korean girl nearly 10 years ago. "We arm them with questions to ask agencies."

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Emily Welsh, a cherubic 2-year-old with little blond ringlets framing her face, frolics in her room tossing stuffed animals, doing backbends off her crib and tumbling on the carpet."

In the first century A.D., the apostle Paul, the first Christian missionary, established a church in Philippi, a prosperous Roman colony in what is now modern-day Greece. Later, while in prison for his missionary work, Paul wrote a letter to the young church urging them to follow the example of Jesus Christ. Paul's letter, preserved in the New Testament of the Bible, has served as inspiration for Columbia's Korean-American Church of Philippi, said its senior pastor, the Rev. Young Sun Song.

It is becoming clear that Otakar "Otto" Kirchner, the sperm-father of Baby Richard, is not a man to mess with.He is now so angry at the adoptive parents who raised Baby Richard to age 4 that he might not let them ever see the boy again.That, of course, is his right. The courts have held that as the sperm-father, Otto owns the child outright. He doesn't have to let the adoptive parents or anybody else see the boy.Or, if he so chooses, he can set up meetings according to his own terms.He could decide that he'll let the Doe family come within, say, 100 yards once a month just to wave at Baby Richard.

SOONER OR later, adoptive parents must decide when to tell their child he is adopted. The thinking these days is to do it as soon as your child joins the family.It's not that anyone expects an infant to understand. You are the one who benefits."It makes you more comfortable, it reduces anxiety. By the time the actual dialogue with your child begins, you'll be better equipped emotionally to handle it," says Susan Miller-Havens, a Cambridge psychologist and researcher who is director of education for the American Adoption Congress in Washington.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable. As a self-proclaimed geek and former math teacher, I love this quote. I have a great deal of respect for researchers and statisticians who help us better understand our lives, through the most beautiful language in the world — mathematics. But while numbers don't lie, they can be twisted to represent almost anything we want. Most of the misinformation — intentional and accidental — can be traced to the reader or reporter.

Four-year-old Ila Yslande Ann Hubner waddled into the Frederick County Courthouse the other morning, arms flailing, legs kicking this way and that, babbling about the Cookie Monster. "Everything is 'Cookie Monster,' I don't know why," said Christie Hubner. A year ago, when Hubner and her husband, Dave, took custody of Ila, the child knew nothing about the Cookie Monster. She was an orphan in Port-au-Prince, Haiti — frightened, hungry and stranded in the rubble after last January's massive earthquake.

Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, the ebullient Memphis, Tenn., couple who made Michael Oher their third child, enrolled him at Ole Miss, then cheered him on when he became a Baltimore Raven, have collaborated on their own version of the story that became the book and the hit movie "The Blind Side." With Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, they've written "In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving." Their book aims to bring the Michael Oher miracle off the big screen and back down to real life — and make sure that its message won't get lost.

At the Maryland Film Festival last month, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia said that his electric drama about primal bonds, "Mother and Child," the festival's closing-night attraction, would have been a top property for Bette Davis and would have received the full red-carpet treatment during Hollywood's Golden Age. As he spelled out in an interview at the Hotel Monaco the next morning, a director who wants to make an emotion-based movie in 2010...

Michelle Bedke attended Howard Community College's graduation Thursday with mixed emotions. The 20-year-old honors student was happy to receive her degree, and she will continue her education at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she will major in linguistics. There was also another feeling, spurred by the fact that she did not have any family in attendance to share in her accomplishment. "I'm kind of envious of other people," Bedke said Thursday of her fellow graduates.

Michael and Monica Simonsen, the Baltimore couple who have been trying to adopt a Haitian orphan toddler nearly all his life, were scheduled to fly home with him Tuesday evening. Michael Simonsen traveled to Haiti hoping to bring home Stanley Hermane, a 21-month-old who had been at an orphanage for most of his life. Simonsen and a couple of other adoptive fathers were able to bring seven Haitian orphans to the U.S. - far fewer than they expected - from Port-au-Prince early Monday morning.

For Cockeysville businessman Ron Ryba, the long walk from the parking lot to the stadium in Philadelphia was a 29-year trail of memories. He had come to meet the son he and his high school sweetheart had never dared to look at when they gave him up for adoption nearly three decades earlier. Now, the baby was a grown man. What would he say to him? What would he look like? For Phil Bloete, too, the 2004 meeting at a Phillies game, was the culmination of a lifelong dream. He was 28, a high school English teacher in New Jersey.

David Lipsitz was 3 1/2 months old when he left an orphanage in Calcutta, India, to join his adoptive Jewish parents, Gail and Allan Lipsitz of Pikesville. When he was 3, he thought he vaguely remembered something about India, but he wasn't sure.Today, the 6-year-old kindergartner knows much about his native country. A framed flag of India hangs above his bed. More than 20 books on Indian life and folklore fill his shelves. With help from his parents, he has even made a presentation to his class.

Claudia McNeil, a character actress best known for her stage and screen role as the Sidney Poitier character's mother in "Raisin in the Sun," died Nov. 25 at the Actors Fund Nursing Home in Englewood, N.J., of complications to diabetes.Miss McNeil, who was born in Baltimore, was 77 and had lived in the home for nine years."When I saw that face, I knew that we'd found the mother for my play," playwright Lorraine Hansberry said after she cast Miss McNeil for "Raisin in the Sun," which is about a struggling black family on Chicago's South Side.

The Mistress's Daughter By A.M. Homes Viking / 240 pages / $24.95 Some writers focus on the dark, rather than light, side of the human condition. Such writers achieve their narrative clarity from revealing the secrets and lies people tell themselves and each other, in exploring the hidden, rather than the obvious. Some of our greatest American fiction writers - F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates - have attended to that milieu in which redemption is rarely, if ever, accessed and despair is often the end as well as the beginning.

Henry Wylie loves all things Korean. From perfecting kimchi recipes to learning ancient folk tales, the 10-year-old absorbs each cultural tidbit like a sponge. The love of his native culture has been encouraged by his adoptive parents, Mary Anne and Gill Wylie of Baltimore, who each summer send Henry and his brother, Gill, to an international culture camp where they join other adoptees in activities geared to foster appreciation for the adopted children's native cultures. "It kind of makes me feel good inside," Henry said about the crafts, sports and other activities he took part in at a recent three-day gathering in Fairfax, Va., offered by the private Adoption Service Information Agency/Children's Home Society and Family Services.