Sharon Astyk's Blog

Foster Care, Immigration and Where We are Headed

Four years ago we were foster parents to two wonderful children whose family was broken up by deportation.

The parents had overstayed their visas (ie, they entered the US legally), in part because their children were both born (while in the US, ie the children were citizens) with kidney disease and their homes in rural Central America had no hospitals to treat them nor adequate medical care. They left their country because they were part of a disenfranchised indigenous minority that was histo...

What It is Like to Be Me This Week

These are two of my sons, Judah and Zion. Adorable, no? Yeah, I think so too. And they are so sweet. Zion loves animals, he wants to know everything about them. And anything that begins with the letter Z ‘My yetter!” Judah is one of the sweetest natured kids on the earth – if someone tries to take something from him, and I tell them to give it back, he’ll say “It is ok, I will share.” He wants to help with every single thing in the world – he’s the first volunteer to do anything, to clean, t...

Pssst…Wanna Buy a Farm?

As I mentioned some months ago, we are planning on selling our farm in Knox, NY (The farm is in the town of Knox, but the address is 43 Crow Hill Road, Delanson, NY – for reasons obscure to us even after a decade and a half, the mail goes two towns away) and moving to urban Schenectady. Well,”The time has come, the time is now…” We’ve loved living here and chronicling our adventures, and are leaving our wonderful home, our wonderful neighbors and our small nurturing community and school syst...

Adoption Day!!!!!

More soon, but I can finally show you pictures of my whole family. We celebrated the adoption of Deniece, Rimonah, Judah, Malkiah and Hezekiah yesterday, to our incredible joy! I have professional pictures coming, and will do good ones of each individual child, but here’s the best one of the whole family so far. Thanks to my mother, who bought the color-coordinated purple clothes for all 10 kids months ahead – when we still didn’t know when there would be an adoption.

From left – Eli (16 in...

Growing in So Many Ways

We came back from the developmental pediatrician yesterday in a jubilant mood. Two of my sons came to us with significant developmental delays. Both of them have made wonderful progress, so last night was an occasion for celebration.

A lot of parents have children who are delayed in some ways. Some kids catch up. Some catch up part of the way. Some never do. It can be a huge struggle to trust that you are doing things “right.” After almost 16 years of parenting kids with significant disabili...

Black Children’s Books Worth Reading I – Younger Children’s Books

In one of my last posts, I argued that White children need to read Black children’s books as much or more than Black children, and more importantly, need to read lots of good children’s books with Black language, culture and heroes. They also need to read about other non-White cultures, but given the beginning of Black History month, I’m going to stick with Black books for today. Note, this is not a fully comprehensive list, merely a list of our family’s favorites. I’m going to do this in two...

Update on Our Lives

Since Zion’s arrival as a newborn in 2013, this blog has been quite quiet. First I wanted to give Zion the same time and resources that my other babies had. Then just as we started to get back on our feet, the flood of adding four kids to our home, including three under three (plus Zion who was 10 months at the time) took up most of our lives. As soon as things settled down, we had a difficult spring last year, and then got my foursome’s youngest brother, and then spent our fall dealing with...

Want Black Lives to Matter? Want to Help End Racism? Read.

I don’t know a single person on any end of the political spectrum who doesn’t want to see an end to police shootings of black folk. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want to make sure that shootings like the Charleston one never happen again. But most ordinary white people also don’t have a clue how they could help with that, other than posting the occasional facebook meme or generally feeling it would be a good thing if something were done. Or maybe they’d like to do something, but ar...

Not That There Was Any Doubt…

But just in case you were wondering, there is basically no chance whatsoever that Climate Change could be happening without human intervention. I realize that we’ll be hearing about this point 0.01 possibility until we all die, but just so we all know.

How To Take a Crap …or The Most Important Parenting Advice I can Give Anyone

Are you new to this parenting gig? About to give birth or adopt or take on a foster placement? Or maybe you’ve had one easy kid, and are about to go to two and sense that things are about to change radically. Or maybe you have them, but you feel like you are missing something in the “how to stay sane and meet everyone’s needs” department. I want to give you the single most important piece of advice I have – which is about how not to lose your mind as a parent. I know, I know the title isn’t a...