Babies

Michael can’t speak, talk or walk. His head is too big for his body which makes it difficult for him to support himself. Only liquids can be given to him because his stomach can’t process solid food. He spends most of the day relying on the nurse to feed him, help him fall asleep, and even dispense of his waste. When working with him I had to hold him steady.

He is also 6 months old.

Babies are cute - with they’re little smiling faces, especially after baths all dressed in their fuzzy pastel pajamas, with footsies. They smell new and their faces make me laugh.

However, today I was given Michael and a bottle. Between squirming, gurgling and feigned vomiting during the next rounds of feeding I lost interest in whether he was getting any of it actually down his esophagus. As I stood Michael up on my lap, ready to lay him on my shoulder and reluctantly burp him he turned his head with mouth open wide, saliva protruding, inhaling …

“Not on me!” I told him.

He wobbled his head over to the other side, mouth still hanging open, moving his legs up and down – trying to jump or something. I rotated him between my arms and my shoulders, even leaving him in the ball pit at one point, watching him slowly sink into the colors. I could feel myself getting strangely combative as he continued to defy the bottle, splashing the milk around and out of his mouth with his tongue. I eventually sat him down in a tiny blue seat in front of some dangling plastic shapes.

“So, you’re going to try to eat those but not you’re formula?”

When I bear children and master feeding them, I’m sure I will love them more than most things in the world because they will be mine. However, the challenge at an orphanage or with adoption is that you need to learn how to love ones who are not yours and who can’t take care of themselves.

There are no older kids here because they all get adopted. An American family may even be adopting one of our special needs kids, which is practically unheard of. Today a family from the Upper West Side of Manhatten, came to adopt Juan.

You can imagine the cultural differences.

Each family that adopts is required to spend two months in Quito with their new child. Two months of hotel expenses, transportation, speaking Spanish, braving different food, taking off from work, and pulling two little kids out of school. At ages 6 and 9, the daughter and son of this family are accepting this pleasantly plump toddler as their brother. Even more, these two parents are calling him their son.

For Juan, he is stepping into a life filled with more opportunity than most of the American population.

I asked the mother, “What made you want to adopt?”

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do!” she said, beaming. She resembled Sandra Bullock quite a bit in both mannerisms and appearance. She continued, “We wanted to have a third and we thought, ‘Let’s just do it all at once!’.”

She began pulling Juan and another toddler in a little green wagon around the yard. Meanwhile her two kids were jumping on the trampoline with the other children.

The shadows embraced the trees around me as I watched this little boy begin his first day as theirs.