Generational adoption, where adoptees choose adoption for building their family, makes for interesting reading, as evidenced in the previous post, but especially when the job of parenting being done is spectacular and breaks a cycle of abuse.

Adopting eight older kids after serious neglect and abuse, the variety of issues these parents dealt with is heartbreaking. One sibling pair, boys ages eight and seven at adoption, are still unable to feel hunger, thirst or pain because of tremendous neglect in their first three years of life.

'Because their hunger and pain sensations were not responded to, they faded altogether, and these issues remained unresolved until they came to us four years later. For years, Wayne couldn't feel even the most extreme physical pain because his brain had effectively switched off - he once burnt himself on a gas ring and only realised when he saw the deep burn.

One of the boys realized he was experiencing a breakthrough at the age of sixteen when he realized he could feel the difference between hot and cold water while washing his hair.

While we're looking at children post-neglect, I'll add this report of right-now-neglect of a one-month-old.

Police in Minneapolis are reporting the arrest of a woman who walked away from her infant daughter, leaving her in a car seat sitting on the ground in an overgrown spot along an interstate freeway. Spotted by a passerby who challenged her leaving the child and threatened to call the police, the woman is quoted as answering, "You go ahead and do what you have to do."

When the police arrived and found the mother, she told them that she had gone to a friend's house to have sex for money. She's been convicted of four felony drug charges and one misdemeanor prostitution charge since 2005.

Staying in the Twin Cities for a minute, here's a really strange story involving a missing fifteen-year-old runaway who was believed to be pregnant.

When found, the girl wasn't pregnant, but eventually led police to an overgrown area near a freeway (What's the deal with grass, freeways and babies in Minnesota, I must ask?) where she said she had given birth and left a baby boy in hopes a passerby (Not him again!) would discover the infant.

THEN she said she gave birth in a car, then she said she hadn't been pregnant in the first place.

Whether or not she had been seems difficult for even the medical professionals to establish, and no one is entirely certain of just what the heck did happen.

There was some speculation when an infant's body was found floating in the Mississippi River, but that didn't match up.

Did she, or didn't she? Is there a baby out there somewhere, or isn't there? You'd think this would be easier, wouldn't you?

Strange.