[Continued from HERE.]

Even if you manage to create the mother of all scrapbooks (uber-scrapbooking?), from my experience an equally important ingredient for helping your child become well-adjusted is to start to remember all the details the minute he/she enters your family ... and to verbally tell those stories often until they are a legacy in and of themselves. I believe storytelling, going over memories about a child again and again, goes a long way to helping a child get their bearings, acting as a super decoder ring for the puzzles of post-womb, welcome-to-the-ether shock and keep on working their magic as life gets rolling.

My mom remembered every single detail of the day she and my Dad brought me home. She would tell me what we all wore and how cute I looked in my little yellow outfit. She would tell how my grandparents and aunts and uncles and neighbors all gathered to welcome me ‘home.’ She would nearly coo as she would regale me with tales of how I looked just like the “Gerber baby…” which of course was the “Barbie” of baby-look of the day. (Other than having the requisite parts, big eyes, nearly bald head, and a baby-fat round face, I am not sure the comparison was anything more than love-blinded baby goo-goo stuff ... but of course, I’ll take it!)

The tale of the day I was “born” into my adoptive family was one that I heard in its entire detailed splendor at least as many times as I heard the birth stories for my two sisters. That is pretty impressive considering my younger sister was a bit of a ‘miracle baby,’ born premature and very tiny in 1974, the doctors believed she would not survive. Thankfully, she did, but that didn’t mean that her “birth story” got more airplay than mine. Well done, Mom and Dad, is all I can say.

I can’t remember asking questions about the actual process of being born or the pre-birth stories that I heard about for my older sister and witnessed for my younger. I do remember getting all the stories of my first steps. I remember reading my first book (one of those ‘personalized’ books, something about an alligator with my name, ordered by mail by my Gran.) I do remember looking at a number of ‘blanks’ in my baby book and just skipping those bits to get to the ‘juicy’ and endless handwritten pages Mom documented in the early days after my arrival. I didn’t ‘come with’ an information pack or photos in the hospital or orphanage (although batteries were apparently included,) but my parents snapped photo after photo, and, as soon as they could, took reel-upon-reel of homemade projector-style home movies of all of my antics, as they did for my two sisters.

We would sit as a family every now and again, hang a sheet on the wall, and watch these old takes while munching on a bowl of popcorn. It was a laugh ... then. I know how hard it is now to get your children to sit still, pull themselves from their game console and/or videos and watch family stuff together, but start ‘em young, make it fun (I’ve often imagined a home version of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” habit of acting out the film while it is being played.) Maybe it was a projector thing. Maybe investing in that kind of antique equipment would be intriguing for kids. Who knows? Certainly, not me ... but I do know that I had great stories about who I was and where I fit in my family in my early days. I know that I would not trade them for anything in the world, even if they couldn’t replace the information I missed because I was adopted.