Creating A Beautiful Lifebook: Gathering Information On The Country, Province and City

Hello everyone! I am so happy and excited to be back in the space with you! Thank you for your patience and understanding - August was a crazy month!

The first step to creating your child's lifebook is to gather information, which was your assignment before I abandoned you all!  If you haven't stated yet, no worries! Here is some help.

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An essential component to a lifebook is information about your child's country. Dig a little deeper (in international adoption) into the province. If you can, even information about the town is a bonus. Besides information, pictures are wonderful! As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

For simplicity's sake, let's talk about this in relation to China.

It is easy to find a map of China. Find a nice one that shows the provinces in different colors. Print this and put a big star on your child's province, or on the city if you know it.

Here is a caution - make sure, if you are highlighting the city, that you choose the city she was found in, not necessarily the city you will travel to. In my case, Mae was born in Huaihua City, though we adopted her in the capital city of Changsha.

Once you have a map, try and find pictures of the province, or city. (Don't worry - we will get to pictures of the orphanage soon).) A wonderful resource is chinatoday.com. Go to the Cities and Provinces tab on the left and select your choice.

Another wonderful resource is a Yahoo! group, if your orphanage has one. My Yahoo! group had an astonishing five pages of pictures! Besides pictures of the orphanage (which will be useful in a few weeks), there were so many beautiful pictures of Hunan province.

All of this information will inform the rest of your lifebook. You'll discover so much. Off you go! And enjoy!  

What have you discovered? Do share in the comments!