[MrsC111007]

I am wondering if anyone stayed with family/friends while adopting in Poland. My husband has family members scattered throughout Poland, so if our child's orphanage happened to be nearby, he suggested staying with family. We also have two empty houses we could stay at if it is in the right area.

I have not brought this up with my agency, and I am concerned regarding having the privacy for my husband and I to bond alone with our child. Plus I would need accommdations for our facilitator for a portion of the time.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone did this or considered doing this! Thanks!

[hylo]

I would strongly recommend against having anyone BUT you and your husband during the bonding time. It not only confuses the child but it adds an added stress when you cannot communicate honestly with your husband in fear of being judged by your hosts. You need to have a completely private time with your child when they wake up and when they go to bed. It needs to be just you and your husband when you take your child to different places. If you have anyone else who speaks Polish in your vicinity, I guarantee that your Polish speaking child will prefer their company.

An empty house is definitely a better choice, but can you find one without running the risk of the owners "paying a visit" to meet your child? Not all visitors understand adoption and know their limits. They'll think that hugging and kissing a child is okay, when in fact they are coming in between YOUR bonding time and your child's.

Even now, eight months AFTER the adoption I still have to remind my child not to hug and kiss every stranger she meets.

Now after the two week bonding, when the adoption has been finalized - it's your choice what to do. But I'd still recommend strongly against having extended family around. Now, adoptive grandparents - totally acceptable. But cousins, aunts, and the likes are too distant for a child to fully comprehend his new family relations.

[lastpaige]

We have family and friends in Poland, and while we visited them after the first few weeks (don't go right away!), we did not, and would not have stayed with them.

The children you adopt will gravitate to those who speak Polish. If you don’t speak fluently, yet others in the home do, well meaning or not, they’ll butt in and you’re bonding and training work will be undermined. There also may be techniques that you wish to employ that other 'helpful' relatives may challange. That's not what you need.

Using one of the two empty houses would be FANTASTIC! Full accommodations, but no family or friends to take over when you’re having a rough time.

You are wise to leave the agency out of this for the moment. Ours had a cow every time she told us to do one thing and we told her we were doing something else.

You are also wise for guarding your privacy. We have a strong marriage, and were seasoned parents with well trained children when we went to Poland, and we went with our homework done and ready for the long haul. But like big things in life, you aren’t ever really ready for it. There were nights we were both crying and wondering what in the world we had gotten ourselves into and if our marriage was going to survive it. I really would not have wanted to go through that with distant family in the other room.

Perhaps if you had a house your facilitator could stay in a nearby hotel?

Good for you for considering what’s best for your family, situation and using what’s available for you! If you’re able to use some of those options, get ready for opposition – though it will be worth it.

[MrsC111007]

Thank you all for your comments, after finishing my second book on attachment, I had a bad feeling about staying with anyone, but I do not think my husband fully comprehends yet the issues it would cause. I didn’t even think of the language issue, which makes it absolutely impossible. My husband is fluent in Polish but I am not. Now I can show him this thread. The two houses are owned by my husband’s family and grandmother who is in a nursing home, so there is no chance of anyone “stopping by.”
My other issue is my husband’s desire to visit family while we are there. With the exception of his ailing grandmother (94 years old) in the nursing home who cared for him while he was little, I told him this was not the trip to visit family, we could do that another time. I don’t even want his parents, my parents, or his sister who is in Belgium to be there with us at all, or with us the first few weeks we are home in U.S. He just does not understand how we could not visit relatives who are only an hour away. Our current plan is that he can go alone if he wants to visit family, but I have a funny feeling when our son or daughter is with us, that desire to leave him/her to visit family you see every 8 years will dissipate VERY quickly. Thank you!

[lastpaige]

Like you, my husband is fluent, I am not, and he has family in Poland. I was the one to research post adoption issues and report my findings to him.

Language ~
Our boys immediately took to my husband and knew within two days that he loved them. However, they assumed that I didn’t love them because I couldn’t communicate with them. Through Piotr, I explained that I had loved them and had been praying for them for years before we had met.

Interpreting ~
Ask your husband to do a little research on interpreting. You’re going to need him to interpret for you – a lot! The problem here is that you’ll catch your new 7 year old daughter coming out of the bathroom and you know she hasn’t washed her hands, so you call in your husband to interpret. Within two sentences, he’s taken over the management of this teaching and/or discipline issue. Then what you get is he’s the parent and you’re only the cook and housekeeper. Your daughter will then learn that he’s the parent, and you’re the hired help. You must use simple phrases and concepts that are easy to interpret, and he MUST interpret the conversation, not take it over.

This is HARD! It is SO much easier to just manage the situation ourselves than to do the double work of interpreting, but it is absolutely necessary. He’s already going to have a leg up on you because he’s fluent. I’m NOT supporting feminism here; I’m simply saying that the children will already gravitate to him. The two of you will have to be VERY attentive to establishing YOUR love and authority in the children’s lives as well as his.

Family ~
Once the adoption was final and the boys were legally ours, then we were free to travel throughout Poland while we waited out the appeal time. (We stayed the duration, as we didn’t want to leave any of our children on the other side of the ocean.) During this travel we did visit some family, as Piotr hadn’t been back since leaving when he was 12. However, we did not stay with them, and my husband laid down the law to relatives upon arrival. (Not one was to meet any need of the boys, little or great, and if the boys went to them, they were to send the boys to me, specifically.) The relatives were really good about it, asked good questions about why, and understood why things had to be like this.

As for other family members being around. When we departed for Poland we flew to Florida and left our girls there with my in-laws. From there we flew to Poland and it was just us and the boys for 10 days. Then my in-laws brought the girls to us in Poland. The girls joining us 10 days in was fabulous. It gave us the first 10 days to solely concentrate on the boys and maintaining our own endurance (and trust me, we needed it!) Then once the girls joined us they were able to get an understanding of where the boys came from, and the boys were able to see how a family operates. My in-laws stayed nearby for another week, after which we parted ways. They did well, loving the boys, but deferring to us for the boys’ needs and issues.

Keep reading, keep researching, and remember, what works for one family may not work for you. You will know what to do when the time comes, and it’s going to be fabulous!

[momraine]

I don't know your work schedule, but would you be able to go early to do some visiting? I think you do need lots of alone time with the kids before having other people around. So the empty houses would be awesome if you happen to have your child in that city. We were required to stay in the city where court would be. If your child is in the same town where the family is, it's going to be tough to remind them not to take over, etc. I don't see a problem with short visits shortly before you go home. Spend an hour or so with each relative, etc. I do think that since it's so far away it would be a shame if he didn't get to see his family.