Bonding and Attachment Progress

Many people have been asking how our bonding and attachment has been going with Grace. We have to honestly say that it is really still too early for us to tell. We have been home for almost two weeks and have had Grace for over three weeks. I don't think we are going to see true attachment that quickly.

We are lucky though that Grace is an easy baby. She is happy, playful, quick to smile, barely ever cries, is easy to put to sleep and eats well. When she was first handed to us she didn't cry, she just checked us out and we had her laughing by the time we were back in our room. Our bonding and attachment to her was quick and easy, we instantly fell in love. We think she likes us, but we don't think she knows yet that we are here for the long haul. She has a very outgoing personality and smiles at everybody. When the baby snatching incident happened in China Jen noticed that Grace never looked back for me when the waitress took her. Probably because it was too soon for any attachment to be formed. By our last days in China we started to notice a little attachment where she would cry out a little when either of us would leave the room. She is also starting to snuggle into us more than she did the first week so we are definitely seeing progress.

We have read quite a bit about attachment and were expecting Grace to develop some anxious attachment behaviors toward us. We haven't seen any anxiousness yet although nobody has held her other than us since we were in China. Maybe it is just her personality and she will never get that stranger anxiety or maybe she already does realize that we are her parents and are here to stay. It is so hard to know for sure. I do think when she is truly attached to us we will know. I don't think it is going to take just weeks but probably more like months until she trusts us and realizes we are her parents. So we are going to stick with the attachment parenting thing as long as we feel we need to make Grace realize we are her forever parents.