Are you in the process of adopting and feeling out of your depth?

Do you already have an adopted child and are feeling overwhelmed?

Sharing the secrets that will enable you to face the challenges of adoptive parenting with confidence, Sophie Ashton offers tips and strategies which have worked for her family. She discusses preparing for the journey ahead, parenting with empathy, facilitating your child’s attachment, helping your child feel listened to, and providing structure and consistency in order to successfully integrate your child into your family and go on to have a stable happy family life.

An honest and reassuring account of what it can really be like to be an adoptive parent, this practical hands-on guide will help you prepare for the highs and lows of being a parent and give your child and your family the best chance to flourish.

About the Author: Sophie Ashton is a mother of two wonderful children, a birth son and an adopted daughter. Professionally she has spent 25 years working with individuals and teams, helping people better understand themselves and each other and the impact they can and do unknowingly have on each other. She has worked with a wide variety of people from senior executives in the corporate world to young offenders and prison inmates. Sophie lives in the South of England with her husband, children and an ever growing number of pets.

Jennifer Joyce Pedley is a birthmother and social worker whose twenty years of both personal and professional experience will help you start your forever family more quickly and with less anxiety than you ever thought possible.

Secrets to Your Successful Domestic Adoption reveals how to:

• Create your perfect paper or video profile

• Set up a savvy website and effectively utilize adoption networking sites

• Prepare for and experience a stress-free home study

• Spend less money and know exactly what each dollar will accomplish

• Reduce the anxiety and fear about talking with expectant mothers

• Explain adoption to family members as a beautiful, life-affirming process

With passion and candor, Jennifer Joyce Pedley shares insights from her own adoption story, from the experiences of countless other birthmothers, as well as from the parents she’s helped. Her insider secrets will help ensure that you embark on a successful adoption journey that expands the hearts of everyone involved.

About the Author: Jennifer Joyce Pedley is a birthmother and social worker who has helped people build their families through adoption since 1995. It was her own personal experience of placing her son in an open adoption, following his birth in 1990, which prompted her to become a social worker and make the field of adoption her primary professional focus.

Gellhorn’s correspondence—chronicling friendships with figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells, as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway—paints an indelible portrait of the twentieth century as she lived it. The letters introduce us to the woman behind the sometimes inscrutable correspondent, a writer of wit, charm, and vulnerability. They also contain sparkling sketches of noted public figures of the time, as well as vignettes of Africa, Cuba, Panama, and many of the great cities of Europe.

Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn’s critically acclaimed biographer, was granted exclusive access to her papers. This expertly edited volume provides prefatory and interstitial material written by Moorehead to contextualize Gellhorn’s correspondence within the arc of her entire life. The result is a definitive yet intimate portrait of one of the most accomplished women of modern times.

About the Author: A distinguished biographer, Caroline Moorehead has also served as a columnist on human rights for two British newspapers. The author of the National Book Critics Circle finalist Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees and Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life, Moorehead lives in London, where she is currently at work on a biography of Lucy Dillon, marquise de la Tour du Pin.

Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, the letters between Gellhorn and her adopted son, Sandro (“Sandy”) Gellhorn, with whom she had a “troubled” relationship.

About the Author: Niels Peter Rygaard is a Clinical Psychologist, specialist approved by DPA (the Danish Psychologist Association), Private practitioner, m.o. The International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD).

In a suburb north of Manhattan, Julie grows up on a block where children play outside from morning until dusk, as their mothers play bridge and smoke cigarettes, while their fathers take the 7:02 into the city. Her family looks like all the other families, except in Julie’s family, babies are picked up, not delivered.

Julie Kerton blends a story of coming of age with a tale of living on each side of the adoption triad; adopted child, birth mother and adoptive mother and tops it off with the despair of alcoholism and mental illness. In this candid memoir, Julie links love, loss, shame, secrets and belonging to the fragmented pieces deep within herself as she explores the origins of her identity, ultimately discovering what family really means.

About the Author: Julie Kerton is an active contributor on adoption issues, including hosting her blog, shenamedyoudonna.blogspot.com. She is a strong proponent of adoption reform, pertaining to the civil rights of Adult Adoptees. In addition she advocates for families affected by mental illness and is a member of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). Julie holds a B.S. in Human Development and Psychology and lives in Connecticut.

From dealing with infertility to the actual adoption, Field explores, in the warm, approachable style of one who has been there, the joys and pitfalls of this process.

For those whose adoptions are completed, Should You Adopt? offers guidelines for adjusting to instant parenthood, helping siblings accept the new arrival, and making adoption a natural part of the child’s everyday life. Throughout, Field invites us to “celebrate adoption.”

About the Author: Christine Moriarty Field, former criminal prosecutor and private attorney, is now a stay-at-home mom and author of Coming Home to Raise Your Children (Revell, 1995). She and her husband have three daughters and are in the process of adopting a fourth child. They live in Wheaton, Illinois.

About the Author: Suzanne L. Popke lives with her husband and three young children in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where she works as a psychologist, author, and public lecturer on adoption issues and Buryat culture. She is also a mixed media visual artist and musician who has exhibited work and performed throughout Wisconsin.

The family enjoys horses, raising koi (Japanese pond fish), turtles, cats, dogs, gardening, fossil hunting, and teaching about Buryat culture. Suzanne is a member of the Baikal Region Adoptive Family Fund which works to improve conditions in Buryat orphanages and provide mentoring to families who have adopted children from Buryatia, Siberia.

By the Same Author: The Buryat Journey Continues Overland: Siberian Pearls at Culture Camp (2009).

At just twenty-four, Amy was a typical type-A law student: smart, driven, and highly competitive. With a budding romance and a heavy academic schedule, Amy did not have time for illness even one that caused her heart to pound violently and erratically in her chest, for her to blackout, lose her breath, and suffer temporary blindness. When her family doctor suggested that her symptoms were due to stress and diet, Amy was more than happy to drop a few classes, think calm thoughts, and eat fistfuls of salt. At such a young age, how could she have guessed that her heart was about to give out?

Amy Silverstein a surprisingly irreverent narrator chronicles with grace and force her harrowing medical journey from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing and ongoing recovery post-transplant. Her memoir is made all the more dramatic by the deliriously romantic bedside courtship with her devoted boyfriend, Scott, and her uncompromising desire to become a mother.

Distrustful of her doctors and insistent in her refusal to be the “grateful heart patient” she is expected to be, Amy presents a patient’s perspective that is truly eye-opening and sometimes controversial. Amy’s shocking honesty and storytelling skills allow the reader to live her nightmare from the inside an unforgettable experience that is both unsettling and utterly compelling.

About the Author: Despite a ten-year prognosis, Amy Silverstein’s new heart has been beating strong for nineteen years. After practicing law and performing music, Amy has discovered a new passion, writing. She lives with her husband and son in New York.

With those words, Steve and Edwina Champion went to see their daughter for the first time on a cold, gray, winter day in Ukraine. They had never before flown on an airplane when they left their North Carolina home for a country where everything—the language, the food, even the toilet paper—was unfamiliar, and finding a simple can opener was nothing short of miraculous. After many frustrating days of being cooped up in a drab, soulless apartment, they were about to meet Lillyann, the little girl of their dreams.

This is the story of one couple’s experience of adopting a child from a foreign country—a child that not only had developmental delays but was deaf. Most of all, it is a story about God’s hand in the lives of everyday people. Adopting Lillyann led Steve and Edwina back to the Lord and made crystal-clear the importance of a loving church family.

Although they have since experienced numerous heartaches and trials, the Champions’ conviction that God always intended for Lillyann to be their daughter has never wavered, and their love for her has only deepened. Edwina’s letters to Lillyann capture the couple’s anticipation, anxiety, and joy with a freshness and poignancy that will touch your heart.

About the Author: Edwina Holman Champion, her husband, Steve, and their daughter, Lillyann, live in a small town outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. They are active in their church, Unity Baptist. In addition to their daughter from Ukraine, they have three grown sons and two grandchildren, Morgan and Johnathon.

About the Author: Terry L. Garlock is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Certified in Long Term Care (CLTC), Certified Senior Advisor (CSA) and Registered Investment Advisor. He helps business and individual clients preserve family wealth through financial planning. An advocate for adoption, he encourages and supports others as they seek to build a family through adoption. This book represents part of that support. He lives with his family in Peachtree City, GA. As a combat Cobra helicopter pilot in the Vietnam war in 1969, Terry received the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Distinguished Flying Cross. He is teaching his daughters that every man and woman in our armed forces deserve our gratitude for the freedom we enjoy.

About the Author: Richard J. Delaney, Ph.D., is an internationally known trainer and consultant who has worked with troubled youth since 1970. He has consulted with foster and adoptive parents, caseworkers and child care agencies over the past twenty-five years. Dr. Delaney received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Loyola University of Chicago in 1973. But his real education began when he met foster and adoptive parents.

By the Same Author: Fostering Changes: Treating Attachment-Disordered Foster Children (1991, WJ Corbett); Troubled Transplants: Unconventional Strategies for Helping Disturbed Foster and Adopted Children (with Frank R Kustal, Ed.D.) (1993, University of Southern Maine); The Long Journey Home (1994, Journey Press); The Healing Power of the Family: An Illustrated Overview of Life with the Disturbed Foster or Adopted Child (1997); Raising Cain: Caring for Troubled Youngsters/Repairing Our Troubled System (1998); The Permutations of Permanency: Making Sensitive Placement Decisions (1998); and Safe Passage: A Summary of the “Parent 2 Parent” Mentoring Program (2000).

Family by family, God challenged the members of Bennett Chapel to adopt seventy-two of the toughest kids in the foster care system. It was the hardest challenge this community ever faced. But they were determined to give the kids something they had never experienced—the power of redemptive love.

This heart-affirming story is so inspirational it has attracted the attention of the national news, has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on all major networks, and has appeared in articles in Reader’s Digest, People, and Family Circle.

This is their story. This is their miracle.

About the Author: For more than twenty years Bishop W.C. Martin has served the community of Possum Trot, Texas, as pastor of Bennett Chapel. In 1997, he and his wife, Donna, adopted two children and began a miraculous adventure that has become one of the premier adoption stories in America. Bishop Martin and Donna have appeared on such programs as Oprah, Dateline NBC, and Good Morning America to tell this miraculous story. Martin’s vision for the church in America is to encourage Christians toward caring for orphans so that no child will be left without a loving home.

The cream of Klose’s columns has now been gathered in this delightful book culled largely from the more than 250 pieces written for the Monitor. Small Worlds captures his graceful prose and engaging voice in brief essays whose subjects range from the joys of small town hardware stores and Converse sneakers to the challenges of learning a foreign language or traveling abroad.

In these pieces, readers will find themselves in the company of a wordsmith who is warm, funny, and smart a man passionate about many subjects. Within these pages are memorable stories about Klose’s life: his childhood pet piranha, his love of the clarinet, his attempts to learn Polish. He shares touching moments of his experience raising adoptive sons, from his first encounter with Alyosha in a Russian orphanage—a bond sealed with a Pez dispenser to learning to counsel six-year-old Anton about puppy love. Klose also depicts his life in Maine, where pursuit of warmth is a prime occupation and culture is best defined by a deserted Downeast beach or a pick-your-own strawberry farm. In addition to this breadth of subject matter, the wide range of forms in which Klose writes—social and cultural commentary, travel writing, humor, and more—makes these essays excellent examples for fledgling writers.

Whether poignantly reflecting on the parent-child relationship or nostalgically recollecting the old-fashioned ice cream soda, Robert Klose is a writer whose voice rings true and is sure to appeal to fans of other humorists like Garrison Keillor or Jean Shepherd. Small Worlds is a deft blending of wisdom and whimsy, a celebration of the art of the essay that lovers of fine writing will take to their hearts.

About the Author: Robert Klose is a native of New Jersey but has been living in Maine since 1981. He teaches biology at University College of Bangor. He is the single father of two adoptive sons, from Russia and Ukraine, and a regular contributor of essays to The Christian Science Monitor. His work has also appeared in Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Reader’s Digest, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere. He is a four-time winner of the Maine Press Association’s annual award for opinion writing.

By the Same Author: Adopting Alyosha: A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia (1999, University Press of Mississippi).

Compiler’s Note: Although not exclusively about his experiences as a single man who adopted two sons, the book includes relevant stories and observations; see, particularly, “A Son from Russia” and “A Son from Ukraine” (pp. 49-91).