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Adoption is a process that takes weeks or months, and has many legal steps. You can’t just visit, and get adopted during the visit, unless it were a very long visit, but even then, there’d be a hurdle:Adoption “happens” when the natural parents, or in the case of a ward of the state, the country or origin, rescinds its parental rights. So, if you visited Canada from, say, Brazil, and a Canadian couple magically went through all of the hurdles at lightning speed and was ready to adopt, everyone would still have to head back to Brazil and convince the parents there, or the state, to terminate their relationship. There would be Brazilian court appearances, and whatever steps and hurdles their social services mechanism deems necessary.Before you even get into that Brazilian court room, you have to know whether Brazil (in my example) even permits foreign adoptions—that they even have a defined program, a process to follow. Having a process generally means, having a system in place to comply with international rules designed to prevent the adoption system from being used as a vehicle for child trafficking (what background checks will be required on you?). Brazil will have to have addressed whether an adoptive child’s consent required (generally the answer is “yes” unless the child is very young, but what is that cutoff age?). What else does the Brazilian social services system want, to satisfy itself that they are putting their children into good homes? Imagine that all of this is on a big checklist. No country will develop that checklist just because you showed up eager to adopt on of their children. Rather, the country will have a developed a program, a considered system or mechanism. They will have to spend months or years perfecting their “checklist”, their “program”.Most countries do not have such programs; they have not developed the mechanism to permit international adoption. In fact, only a small minority of countries around the world have foreign adoption programs.Adoption is not an event, not a moment in time, that can happen on a visit. It is a process (legal and social) that has to have been laid out and developed beforehand, and that will take many months to complete.

No. I was completely sure this fan-theory and all variations of it were unfounded, that Rey’s parents were a red herring, and that she was more a spiritual successor to Luke than a direct descendant. I spent the whole year leading up to the release of The Last Jedi warning people that they had no reason to think she had some bloodline connection, that they were jumping to wild conclusions, and that their pet theories about this were full of logical faults.Let’s poke holes in these one last time just to put them to bed.First, let’s examine the original “I Am Your Father” twist and why it was so good, because the meaning of the twist is as important as the logic within the story that permits the twist to happen.Luke Skywalker defined himself by following in his father’s footsteps, training under his father’s old friend and preparing himself to one day do battle with the man responsible for killing his father, Darth Vader. In this way Vader represents everything Luke hates about the Empire, and defeating him means avenging everything the Empire has taken from him. This is a swashbuckling adventure formula so classic and so superbly executed that everybody thought they knew everything that was going to happen.Then, surprise! “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father!” “He told me enough! He told me you killed him!” “No. I am your father!”Bam! The man in the mask is the person whose footsteps Luke has been following in this whole time. This challenges everything Luke ever assumed about his place in the world, how he thinks it works, and what he sees in himself, making Vader even more of an insurmountable obstacle in Luke’s journey than he already was — and that’s after beating Luke senseless during their duel. Everything Obi-Wan has told him is a lie, he’s the descendant of the most vile traitor in the galaxy, and moreover the same seeds of aggression and recklessness that led to Darth Vader’s fall are within Luke as well. Thus, now knowing the truth, Luke has to re-think his entire quest as well as his approach to “defeating” Vader.In short, what makes this twist so good is what it changes about the story, causing it to grow more intriguing and increase the overall drama of the story’s conflict.Meanwhile, the logic that permits this to happen is secondary to that affect, but for what it’s worth there is no reason that Vader couldn’t have been Anakin the whole time anyway. As Obi-Wan states, all it takes is a shift in point of view, selective omissions of a few details about the vague and open-ended story we already knew.Now let’s address Rey.The logical faults in her being a Kenobi or a Skywalker mostly boil down to the fact that, if either of those were true, the way all the other characters act and play coy about it during The Force Awakens doesn’t make sense.If Han or Leia knew this then either of them at any point after meeting Rey could’ve spoken up. If it were really that important then Leia would’ve armed her with that information before sending her to Ach-To to find Luke. If when Maz asked “who’s the girl?” Han told her anything other than “I don’t know,” Maz has no reason to lie to Rey moments later; Rey is desperate for the validation of belonging, and telling her that she’s related to the main characters would instantly bolster her resolve.If any of the characters deliberately erased her identity or hid her on Jakku to conceal her that just plain doesn’t make sense, being that Jakku is in the middle of First Order territory and is an extremely hostile planet; take note that when Luke and Leia were hidden they were given to families that looked after and protected them rather than given away as slaves to a salvage baron in a place where they could easily be killed. Luke’s life with Owen and Beru might have been humble and un-glamorous, but it was safe and he grew up with friends and loved ones around him. This is all setting aside the various ways in which the timeline doesn’t make sense, being that she’s a young child when she’s left on Jakku, but Kylo Ren is still Luke’s student as little as six years before The Force Awakens, which would put Rey in her late teens by the time any need to conceal her would come up.The villains putting her there to keep her out of the way makes even less sense, in that … well, why wouldn’t they just kill her? If their goal is extermination of all the Jedi or if Kylo Ren is trying to get a rival out of the way, why wouldn’t they just slay her and get it over with rather than engaging in such a labyrinthine and nonsensical course of action as marooning her on Jakku? Kylo killed all of Luke’s other students who wouldn’t join him, after all, so what would be the hang-up over this girl?The Kenobi theory is even worse because the logical knots you’d need to tie the backstory into in order to justify little more than a piece of fanservice are frankly absurd. Going by Rey’s age she’d have been born somewhere around a decade after Obi-Wan was already dead, and somewhere in-between Obi-Wan would’ve needed to have an illegitimate child who we’ve never seen or heard of before in order for Rey to have a parent in his family tree. That’s particularly unlikely, being that Obi-Wan was decidedly very, very celibate, and the only woman he ever loved, Satine Kryze, died an even longer time before Rey was born, during a Y7 animated series that most of the audience hasn’t watched. Any alternatives to this are only worse dead-ends, where the relationship to Obi-Wan is so indirect as to be close to meaningless.In essence the proposal here is that the characters deliberately avoided talking about Rey’s identity just for the sake of surprising the audience, creating a lot of (genuine, real) plot holes in the process just for the sake of employing this narrative device in the first place. Moreover, the amount of time and energy the story would have to give over in order to explain any of this, let alone make it plausible, is just patently absurd and would grind the ongoing story of the battle between the heroes and the First Order to a complete halt, ostensibly to change nothing about the conflict.Which brings us to the more important issue: the so-called “twist’s” effect on the narrative. Given what we know from The Force Awakens, if Rey is a descendant of Luke, Han, Leia, Obi-Wan, or any of the other heroes that we know if, nothing of import changes. Her goals don’t change, her character doesn’t change, her beliefs don’t get challenged. She nods understandingly, hugs whoever’s telling her the news, and then her central conflict in the story — that of trying to find a sense of belonging — is resolved with little more than a hand-wave. She wouldn’t actually earn a resolution through action, she wouldn’t learn anything important from it, just one day she blunders into the Resistance and Leia goes “guess what? I’m your mom!”In effect this is a way to very blandly substitute some other character’s motivation in place of her own. “Rey, carry on the quest that I’ve started!” “Okay.” Go off and beat the First Order, The End.This is obviously not an improvement over the situation that was developing. It doesn’t increase the drama of the story, but rather it undermines it by vastly simplifying characters’ roles down to who their parents are and what they tell them to do. It doesn’t add richness or depth to Rey’s character, but rather it makes her shallow and uninteresting by making her a pawn or proxy for someone from a previous story.In short: trying to make Rey the descendant of one of the other protagonists is a prime example of lazy writing. In fact, I want to point out that this is one of those prime cut items from the Mary Sue checklist — less a real character trait and more an excuse for the character to buddy up with the mains and be their favorite person without actually having to do any work to get to know them or build a relationship with them.While there may be a story somewhere that could slate Rey as a descendant of one character or another and not be terrible, we’d have to begin that story under the pretense that she’s Luke or Leia’s daughter so as to make that baseline information that informs her character rather than irrelevant fan-pandering just for the sake of setting up an impotent twist. But, that’s not the story we got. Instead, Rey is an unknown who was orphaned on a bleak desert planet. While this sets up obvious parallels to Anakin and Luke before her, it all but precludes her from having this kind of proxy relationship with past heroes. While she obsesses over trying to find the same kind of connection with the past that Luke did, she will never find it — so her challenge will be to find purpose in the here and now despite the pain of being disowned. While I think this is a story that could have been executed better than it was, it’s a much better target to shoot for than the kind of lazy fanfic writing presented above, illustrating a lesson that good doesn’t come from a bloodline, but rather from deeds and the will to act.

Is it okay to let a newborn cry if nothing is wrong?My first question would be are you as the mother/father/caregiver okay? That is important to know because it absolutely determines how I would answer.If your newborn is crying inconsolably and you are getting extremely upset it is 100%, absolutely, completely okay to set the baby in a safe place (crib, bassinet, even a safe place on the floor) and walk away until you are calm. It can be frustrating not to know how to calm a child down, especially if you are barely functioning on any sleep. Give yourself some grace. If you cannot calm down, or just need support, call a trusted family member or friend to help you out. Have a plan before you get to your breaking point.If you are calm and just unable to figure out what is wrong: know a newborn has a reason to cry. A newborn is still way too young to be able to self-soothe. That cry communicates something. Baby is hungry, wet, too hot, too cold, etc. It is not that your newborn (which is different than say an 18 month old) is fine, it's that you don't know what is wrong. Don't leave baby to cry, be Sherlock Holmes and figure out what is wrong.I would run through the checklist:Check diaper.Offer food (this is one reason I love that I was able to breastfeed—no mama shame—just it is comforting for baby).Change baby’s temperature by adding or removing clothing.Strip baby completely naked and give a good lookover (are hairs caught around fingers, toes, penis, etc; does baby have a scratch or injury, is a diaper rash forming).Walk around with baby. Make sure environment didn't change and cause an issue. I do not even change deodorant brands when I have a newborn as little ones are so sensitive to how Mama smells.Go outside with baby (temperature permitting) sometimes this works!Try putting baby in different positions to soothe them.Try moving baby's legs in a bicycle motion/light tummy massage in case it's a gas bubble.Put on white noise. Sometimes baby needs it to sound more like the womb.Try skin to skin--newborns are still learning to regulate their body temperature. This especially works well for Mom because baby recognizes her smell.Sometimes it's just that baby needs comfort! I personally would walk around repeated the mantra, “You are safe. You are loved. You are safe. You are loved.” It kept ME calm and reminded me that my child's brain was being wired. My actions were sending the message that someone comes when you cry and tries to make it better. My calm presence was teaching my child how to regulate. Keeping my focus on that helped keep me calm.Running through things often resulted in me figuring out what was wrong.If, however, your newborn is crying regularly for hours at a time talk to your family doctor/pediatrician at your first appointment! There is no shame in getting help to figure it out. Sometimes we are Watson not Holmes! Baby may have a food sensitivity, breastmilk may not have come in, you may be unknowingly over or underfeeding, baby may have a yet undiagnosed medical issue. Get help from your doctor and your support group (fellow moms/dads/caregivers).I think every caregiver of newborns should research brain development and the fourth trimester. Sometimes just having that at the back of your brain makes it easier to know what to try and how to keep yourself calm.Good luck!