FacePalm Friday

Welcome to our regular edition of FacePalm Friday.

This is where your hosts will list their top picks for this week’s FacePalm moment—something they learned or read about this week that caused the FacePalm to happen (you know, the expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, shock, disgust or mixed humor as depicted in our Rally FacePalm smiley).

We invite you to add your FacePalm of the week to our comments. Go ahead and add a link, tell a personal story, or share something that triggered the FacePalm on the subject of child welfare or adoption.

Your Host’s Selections:

Fundraising for Application Fee

See this blog. Part of the homestudy requires families to be able to financially take care of the child. Post-adoption expenses often can be high. It is bad enough if people can’t pay for the whole process, but not even the application fee?

Provoking and Offensive Blog

Hat tip to a reader who emailed this in to us. To further this facepalm, they were just featured in an Examiner article as a “humorous” adoptive parent blog, one that ” rise[s] to the top of their field:  http://fiveofmyown.blogspot.com/

Our reader told us that the blogger removed content  and negative comments from adoptees and other sane people after she “posted a picture of her Chinese child making a gesture most would consider offensive, titled it “self image” and was “oh so very surprised” to find adult adoptees and others take offense.

Unfortunately most commentators on her blog thought this was plain cute.

After some very emotional discussion, she then posted a “gottch day picture” of a second child of hers, the child looking clearly traumatized.”

This blog is NOT humorous nor is she at the top of her field, unless it is the field. Stop the exploitation!

AAI Adoption Awareness Turkey Trot 5K Walk/Run

Featured here. “All proceeds will directly benefit adoption and children in need. AAI supports humanitarian projects and sponsorships of children in several countries as well as offer funding for families adopting special needs children.”

Yes, you too can give funding to folks like the Williams…

University of Arizona President Description of His Adoption Process and Adopted Kids

From this article, ” “In your early 20s, you and your wife began adopting children. Can you go through that process chronologically?
While I was still a graduate student at Stanford, we adopted our first child. We identified a second child, whom we adopted just a couple of months into my first employment as an acting assistant professor of engineering at UCLA. Our third child was black, and that was a really shocking change for the world to see. My wife saw this child on television through a program called “Adoption Interviews.” Once you have one black child and you’re a white couple in a white neighborhood, it’s really important to have a second black child. So we deliberately adopted our fourth child. Then my wife watched that damn TV show one more time and she saw Teresa, an American Indian child in foster care whose parents had both died. That 10-year-old, in coming to us, said, “Will you please adopt my sister, too?” So we adopted her sibling. That’s where the six all came together.”

Can’t you feel the love for the children he adopted?

Chicken Pox Lollipops

Have you heard the new craze? It’s an anti-vaccination campaign called chicken pox parties (so you can have your child avoid the chicken pox vaccine). This article explains how this child welfare concern has gone to an even further extreme. Parents are buying ” chickenpox-infected lollipops through the mail.” Besides being a crime that can land you 20 years in prison, it would be ineffective  to transfer the chicken pox as that virus usually needs to be inhaled to transmit, BUT you definitely can transmit Hepatitis that way. Of course, people are hooking up on Facebook for this. “Facebook group called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area” to link up people looking to share the virus.

One of the Facebook postings from Wendy Werkit of Nashville offered a “fresh batch of pox in Nashville shipping of suckers, spit and Q-tips available tomorrow 50 dollars via PayPal.”

Foster Children on Display at a Museum

This article shows that  foster parent recruitment has reached a new disturbing level by wiping out their privacy to the entire community.

“The Heart Gallery of Central Texas and the Adoption Coalition decided to tell the stories from one small group of local children.