Happy Day to everyone. I am doing my happy dance because the 2009 immigration numbers were posted by the Office of Immigration Statistics. Children internationally adopted by American families are included in these numbers. I love playing with numbers and statistics.

With these numbers, I can look at average age or gender of children adopted from a specific country. I will be doing several different blogs on adoption statistics, but first I will start with 2009.

This isn't a big surprise but 47% of the children were adopted from Asia. (39% in 2008. 42% in 2007.)

Saturday night I saw down with my family to watch a biopic for Temple Grandin. I have been reading about Dr Template Grandin for years and years. I expected to love it ... and I did. It is a must-see movie.

Temple is a highly successful 62-year old woman with autism. She invented a career for herself in the cattle industry. She has transformed how autism is seen and how cows (and many other prey animals) are handled.

The movie quickly moved from "4-year old Temple being diagnosed with autism" to "33-year old Temple with a masters degree  in animal science."  

Sensory integration disorder was clearly explained. This is such a hard issue for people to understand. I still remember issues that happened in first grade. So I explained SID to Natasha's  first grade teacher. Seriously... the teacher thought that I was making it up... to excuse Natasha's bad behavior. (ARGH!)

Clean House is a reality show. A team of people clean up a family's clutter. And the show's host Niecy chats with the adults in the family. Niecy's goal is to get the family to acknowledge what caused the clutter. A very messy house tends to be an external expression of internal distress.

Watching The Jones Family episode of Clean House made me cry. The mother just couldn't hear her daughter. The failure to communication was painful to watch. Adoption is mentioned.

If an attorney does not have any disrupted adoptions, is this a good thing? What if an adoption attorney had more than a few disrupted adoptions. Does this make him a bad attorney?

Should the attorney be asked why the adoptions were disrupted? Seems to me the reason is more relevant than a number.

Maybe an attorney had to disrupt the adoption on ethical grounds. In my eyes this would not make him a bad attorney; this type of attorney would be placing the rights of the child in front and center.

.... I do not think a disruption should be viewed as a necessarily bad thing.

- unknown father

Dear Twitter Adoptee, my thoughts were too complex to express in 140 characters. I tried but I couldn't pack enough meaning into a tweet.

It does seem random for us to connect via twitter. I found you because someone was mean to you on an "adoption" blog. This drove you to vent tweet on adoption. I replied to your tweet. Then you replied to me.

People say that twitter may replace google for a search engine. I don't think it will, but I admit that twitter is a source for daily news.