Supplément d'âme sœur

Le Prince des Fleurs en guest star et en Anglais dans le texte (Je voulais vous mettre le lien, mais il aurait fallu dire adieu au pseudo anonymat)

Encore pas mal de larmes, surtout quand les angelots courent retrouver leur Papa sur scene sous un tonerre d'applaudissements! (300 personnes tout de meme!)

Our Family


I would like share with you, dear reader, my happiness to be an adoptive father. This story starts ten years ago, when my wife and I decided to have children, but we didn't succeed, even with medical help.

When we left France five years ago to live in the United States, we stopped this heavy treatment. After two and a half years of integration and thinking, we decided to take the adoptive route, a way passing through a jungle populated by lawyers ready to help for a "good" price (something above $30,000) to adopt a Chinese baby and adoption agencies asking us if we were baptized at church. These were not our values. Children are too precious to be traded like merchandise and our spirituality has nothing to do with adoption.

So we contacted Social Services of Missouri (where we were living at this time) and engaged the public process by enrolling in a sixty-hour class for future foster care and adoptive parents. Following this was a home study, and finally came the time to choose children.

We had three criteria guiding our choice: we wanted siblings, as young as possible, with the least possible psychological and physical problems. This particularly after hearing all the stories and experiences from social workers during training sessions (alcohol syndrome, drug exposure, aids...)

Then, we made a great great great great great great great great (sorry) choice! We adopted DEJA and LAMONDRE, sister and brother, three and four year old, handsome and wonderful African American kids.

Adoption is always two-sided. Parents adopt children and children adopt parents. The big challenges of the first year, and even after, were in building bonds with our kids, knowing them, doing the right things, finding the right answers to their questions, and, most important, building trust.

At the beginning, it was difficult, as both of them were attached to their foster care family, and once more they lost their family. We were strangers. Deja attached rapidly thanks to the tenderness we provided. Lamondre showed a perfect behavior, but with time, we discovered, he felt pain and anger as consequences of attachment disorder.

Now Lamondre is almost seven and Deja almost six. Both are in elementary school. Lamondre is a good student, and Deja is one of the best in her class. Lamondre is gifted in sports. He plays soccer with eight and nine-year old children and practices karate. Deja plays guitar, dances, and also practices karate. Their behavior is so much better. They seem happy, and we are, too.

Like my wife says, if God didn't allow us to have birth children, it is because he knew Deja and Lamondre needed parents to give them a new beginning in life and a chance.


A ne manquer sous aucun pretexte: L'exposition d'Eaux-Fortes de Rembrandt au Petit Palais d'Octobre 2006 a Janvier 2007 ou l'art du clair-obscur en noir et blanc, bleuffant.