Happy Halloweeen! This year, the girls ventured out a little more with friends and did more than their usual once around the block trick or treating.

Click on the picture of Megan to get to the photo album.

Megan is slowly getting use to Kindergarten. Susan is responsible for dropping her off at the start of school and I am responsible for picking her up at the end of the day, quickly driving her a mile, and dropping her off at her after school care (I manage to take care of this during a daily afternoon 30 minute work break). Obviously, dropping her off at the start of school is harder than picking her up at the end. Megan cried at the start of day 1. Didn’t cry at the start of class thereafter. However, before leaving home for school, she has been coming up with stomach aches and other reasons for not going to Kindergarten that day. She has been happy at the end of the the school day and says that she played, made new friends, and had a good day.

We’ll see how well Monday goes.

GUATEMALA CITY — A Guatemalan judge has ordered a U.S. couple to return their adopted daughter to her birth mother, siding with a human rights group that says the girl was stolen by a child trafficking ring and put up for adoption.

..The rights group claims the girl was kidnapped in 2006 and taken out of the country under a new name two years later and was last known to be living in Missouri…

…The foundation doesn’t allege the U.S. couple knew the girl had been kidnapped…

…Guatemala’s adoption system once sent more than 4,000 children to the United States each year. But adoptions were suspended in 2007 amid widespread claims of kidnapping and fraud by suspect adoption brokers. Guatemala started a small, reformed program of international adoptions later but the United States has declined to participate…

More at this link: http://wapo.st/nnaHux

I am posting not to specifically single out Guatemalan adoptions but because the issue raises thoughts for me as an adoptive parent.

Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome to the year of the rabbit. Here’s Megan dressed up for school today.

On Sunday, I drove the family to Corte Madera (about 12 miles north of San Francisco) for the Northern California chapter of Families with Children from China’s (FCC) Between Two New Years Party. The two New Years are January 1st and Chinese New Year.

FCC is made up of families who adopted children from mainland China and Taiwan. FCC holds the party every year. There were over 350 people at the party this year.

There was a Chinese buffet lunch followed by entertainment that included a Chinese martial arts demonstration, singing, dancing, and a lion dance team. The vice counsel (who gave a speech) and his staff from the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco were also in attendance.

There was a classroom for arts and crafts and a room for vendors selling books and clothes.

Usually, the annual event is Emily’s and Megan’s opportunity to wear Chinese dresses and buy larger sized Chinese dresses for the upcoming year. But they didn’t feel like dressing up this year.

The party was at a private elementary school with multiple playgrounds. Each playground had a play structure so the Emily and Megan were worn out by the time we left. Megan napped during most of the entertainment but was awake in time for the lion dancing.

China remained America’s No. 1 source of adopted children, accounting for 3,401, according to figures released by the State Department on Monday for the 2010 fiscal year. Ethiopia was second, at 2,513, followed by Russia at 1,082 and South Korea at 863.

Guatemala was the No. 1 source country in 2008, with 4,123 adoptions by Americans. But the number sank to 756 for 2009 and to only 51 last year as the Central American country’s fraud-riddled adoption industry was shut down while authorities drafted reforms.

The overall figures for 2010 showed 11,059 adoptions from abroad, down from 12,753 in 2009 and down more than 50 percent from the all-time peak of 22,884 in 2004.

More of the article at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41357694/ns/us_news-life/

Click on the picture to see all three pictures from the photo shoot.