Ode to Patty Cogen

One of the books I got last Christmas was Parenting your Internationally adopted Child, From the first hours together through the Teen Years by Patty Cogen. It sat on my shelf for about 6 or 7 months and I finally picked it up this summer to have look. So far I'm about half way through but I can't stop raving about this book to everyone for nearly every question I see online these days. Deborah Gray is well known and fantastic- when I saw her speak I was entranced. It was so positive- everything. My favorite phrase that I remember her saying is "we don't want kids to "bounce back", we want them to "bounce forward." That made so much sense. But her books are hard to get through. They are clinical, and while full of information, they don't absorb into my brain and stick with me in the same way that Patty Cogen's writing does. I would describe Patty's writing like "oatmeal"- you feel full a long time, you remember that you ate. Deborah Gray's writing is like a cookie- it's good, you can think back and remember a bit of it, but it's gone in a jiffy.

I am not one to underline books- I just don't write in books. But I don't pick up PYIAC without a pen or pencil in my hand, and I am constantly underlining things I'll want to easily access again.
here is one example:

The Polyvagal system is what regulates childrens emotions- it acts as a "footbrake", so how does this 'footbrake' develop?

"the first is sucking, we know that infants suck their tums in utero, and sucking is considered the first and primary means of self soothing...The second avenue is listening to the human voice, particularly a human voice that is directed at the child. third is the child's own vocalizing of others, and to sing to herself. The fourth is the child's developing capacity for perceiving in others, and then making her own facial expressions that convey emotions.

Okay, here's the stinger:
All four of these stimuli are embedded in the feeding experience of infants.
...Internationally adopted babies and toddlers have experienced repeated disruption in their feeding and care routines...many of these dopted children learned to feed themselves at an early age, and therfore missed out on early opportunities for stimulation of the vagus nerve during interactions with their mothers.

ta-dah! if you don't effectively develop this vagus nerve, you have trouble self regulating- and you are running on full speed ahead, or crash mode- very little "slow down" ability. We know this to be fact that most children from an orphanage situation in china will have had propped bottles. We said early on that our daughter was NOT to hold her bottle herself (made it clear to daycare providers) and explained, "she could teach a class in bottle holding- now we need to teach her how to let someone hold it for her and how to gain confidence in another person to take care of that need for her."

This book is seriously filled with tons of valuable insights like that above. And ideas- ideas of games, therapies, etc. One of them we started playing right away- it's done with a slinky. You each hold the end of a slinky and walk away from each other and say "away", then close together again and say "close" or "near" or "together". We added in a little hug when we came close again, and when one of us goes away (sometimes Maddie asks US to go far away, sometimes she goes far away) we talk about missing the other person, and if that makes us sad, and how happy we feel when our family is together. The first day after we started playing it, Jeremy came home from a few days out of town for work and they played it, and after 1x or 2x doing 'away' and 'close' she walked over to the sticker chart we had been using to count when Baba was coming home and said "Baba go away." It was the perfect opportunity to talk about how YES, Baba went away but then he came home, and he will always come home. I am grateful to have a book that gives us more tools in our "toolbox" to help our child become more and more the confident little girl she is!