Catelynn and Tyler Baltierra aren’t scared of having tough conversations with their young daughters. They recently shared with E! News that their 8-year-old daughter, Nova, has started asking questions about her older sister, Carly, and their decision to put her up for adoption. But they also revealed that they already kind of have a plan in place to explain it to her.
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Thankfully, they have something to show Nova to explain their decision.
"We probably will show her our original 16 and Pregnant just to give her a lot more context to why we do what we did," Tyler explained to the news outlet. "She would get it. She's pretty wise for her age."
Catelynn explained that if they go that route, they would "need a day just to ourselves with no other kids," referring to daughters Vaeda and Rya. She explained that it would be "because we'll be a hot mess the whole time watching it with her."
This is the 'hardest part' of their journey.
Placing Carly for adoption has never gotten easier for Tyler and Catelynn, but they didn’t realize how much their younger daughters would also feel the absence of their oldest sister.
"It's harder on me to see the effect that it has on my children," Catelynn shared.
Vaeda and Rya are still too young to understand the situation, but Nova is becoming more and more aware of her older sister’s absence and is trying to make sense of it all.
They don't try to hide the truth.
Catelynn explained that during their most recent visit with Carly this summer, Nova was "being like, 'Why can't you come spend the night at my house? Why can't I come spend the night at your house? I don't want to leave.'" She added, "it's definitely hard."
"We explain things to them, truthfully, authentically, and to their age levels," Catelynn shared.
Tyler added that kids are "a lot smarter than people really give them credit for. And if you explain things to them from a really basic standpoint, they go 'Oh, okay, cool,' and they just run off. And then, like, 10 minutes later, they're playing with Barbies."
Neither Catelynn or Tyler could have anticipated the future.
When talking to Nova, Catelynn laid it out for her honestly.
"'Well, this is how it goes. Carly doesn't really get to spend the night and we don't get to spend the night with her. And maybe that'll change in the future,'" she explained.
There was no way that Catelynn could have guessed where her life would be now when she and Tyler decided to place Carly for adoption back in 2009.
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They are handling the situation to the best of their ability.
"I tell Ty a lot like, 'Man, I never thought about how it would affect my children that I have in the future,'" she shared. Of all the scenarios she imagined as a pregnant teen, "that was never a thought."
Tyler agreed. "I think that was the most surprising thing for us," he said. "Wow, we didn't really think about how our future children were going to react to our decision we made when we were 16. So I think that's been a really unique, difficult challenge to navigate with the kids."
For now, they’re just taking the questions as they come. "We just kind of go with the flow," Tyler shared, "and whatever they ask, we explain."
