Ruminations Too

what can you say?

2009-07-25T21:04:00.003-04:00

My second adopted daughter has been struggling for sometime now. Her involvement with significant drugs has led to an addictive lifestyle which has led to her being estranged from us, refusing all treatment and becoming homeless. She had been drifting about the city, keeping a little contact with us (mostly to ask for money or new clothes) we were never sure where she was but she seemed to be capable of making "friends" who let her crash with them for a little bit.

We had done everything we could, pulled every string we could, called in every favor created over twenty years to try to get her a placement that would work for her, but she wasn't interested in changing her life. We were still trying to assist her in accessing SSI and mental health services, both systems difficult to navigate if you really need them.

Anyway we got a phone call on Wednesday from pre-trial services asking if we would be willing to post a $20,000 bond for her. (the answer was , of course "NO!") After some checking we discovered that she was in jail facing serious charges. When my DH went to the arraignment he found a compassionate judge who is ordering a competency hearing. As much as a lot of our friends seem to think this is a horrible thing, we are sort of saying "at least we know where she is, she is relatively safe and they may even be able to get her back on her meds." I am hoping that the competency hearing gets her out of jail and into a lock-down psychiatric facility. At least there would be some hope for her.

So that's what we have been dealing with. It's always another surprise around here.

DBG and the harvest

2009-07-23T06:12:00.012-04:00

Well here is DBG with the harvest she helped me to gather. I have a nice garden this year and we have had plenty of rain. DBG is still coming by about twice a month for weekend visits. She is also going to dance class (driven by me) once a week and her little group will dance at the State Fair at the end of August. Much excitement about the dance class, as we had scheduling problems during the school year and she didn't get to dance then. DBG is pretty busy learning to read and write. We are the proud recipients of lots of cards on which she has written important messages about how much she loves us. She will be going to pre-kindergarten in the Fall, her birthday is well beyond the cut-off but I am sure she is well beyond the pre-kindergarten curriculum. What are you going to do?

KD is teaching dance class this Summer, her first solo teaching assignment. She has her permit but not her license. Still the search for the vehicle is on (she will be buying her own), she wants to get an old, old pickup truck and by old we are talking early to mid 1950s. We will see how realistic that is.

DJ had an opportunity earlier this summer to work on an island off the coast of Maine! And now he is working maintenance for the Children's Home that I work for. It seems to be a good fit. I am trying to either get him back in school to finish or work harder at preparing for the GED. He is not terribly motivated.

Son JM graduated from University of California Santa Cruz this June and has a retail job while he is considering his next move. He is very happy and settled out in Cali, I don't think we will see him home except for short visits from now on. :-(

So there's a little update on the kids.
I am working full time and more. DHubby's business is consulting for Foundations, and he hasn't had much work as all the Foundations portfolios suffered a 30% loss or so and their income was similarly effected. As you can imagine no one is beating down the doors to get help with technology upgrades right this minute. So the financial struggle continues for the family.

it's been awhile

2009-07-20T09:27:00.002-04:00

It's been awhile. Life got complicated and busy, mostly I wanted to run from seriousness and responsibility. But hopefully things are on a more even keel now and we can move forward.
I am working full time now at the children's home, doing foster care recruitment and general PR work. Still training new foster and adoptive parents. At home I am gardening to can and freeze, baking sourdough bread and attmepting to live very frugally.
I will update further when I can access my home computer.

An answer

2009-03-19T17:15:00.002-04:00

I have finally figured out why I have not posted in so long, I hate my computer and its keyboard. Now this may sound like a hokey explanation to you, but it is actually the truth. My new computing situation is awkward and uncomfortable and it gives me a backache. It is one thing to pop in and check Faceb**k for a minute, it is another to sit for a while and try to type anything lengthy.
Ever since my old computer crashed I have not enjoyed using my loaner replacement computer so I have not found the time to blog. There is nothing I can do about the computer, replacing it is so far down our list of things to spend money on. I should simply be grateful that I still have something akin to a computer and Internet access.
So hopefully I will be back soon. Being stubborn, once I figured out what was impeding me I have resolved to overcome it. I will make the computer work for me. Speaking of work I had better get back to it, having snuck a quick break.

Ice Storm aftermath

2009-02-07T10:42:00.003-05:00

It's a beautiful day today, they say it might hit 61*. We are still digging out from the ice storm, there are still folks without electricity more than 10 days after the storm hit. We lost power twice for a day or so but were some of the lucky ones. We have chain saw massacred the fallen limbs and made big piles of such for the city to pick up. We still have 2-3 inches of hard, slippery ice to navigate anywhere you want to walk. The roads are clear but the sidewalks, parking lots, driveways, etc all have very treacherous spots.

My office was closed for almost a full work week, although I went in several days to kind of be around if needed and make some calls canceling trainings, groups, etc. The schools were closed for a week and went back with some schools still operating on generators. These kids have so many snow/disaster days to make up that they will be in school until mid June!

We had Dancing Baby Girl and Imiki for a weekend as Lani and Pawpaw lost power in their trailer and they had to evacuate to a friend's house. They had no power either but had a fireplace, but the situation made Imiki ill with asthma and bronchitis so we took the two kids. Lani and Pawpaw spent that weekend thawing pipes and cleaning up after one pipe rupture. Still everyone fared pretty well.

I know some of you northern folks might scoff at how we can't even handle a little snow and ice, but let me tell you when the ice is thick enough and heavy enough to crumple the tall steel transformer towers that carry the trunk lines, that is a problem. It wasn't just random branches falling on lines, it was entire transformer towers crumpling right over and taking the lines with them. There are still over 100,000 customers in the more rural areas that do not have power more than 10 days after the storm.

Since this is the second power disaster in less than 5 months for our area (the first was the windstorms with Hurricane Ike) many folks are questioning why the power lines are not underground or otherwise better protected. I have joined a Facebook group called "bury the damn power lines already" that is engaged in an awesome civic discussion of the pros and cons of such a venture. Good grassroots debate.

Although I am a winter person I will be glad to see the last of the ice. Snow is good, I like to sled, cross country ski, make snowfolk and snow angels, but this ice is nasty.

Beautiful but costly

2009-01-28T19:42:00.003-05:00

We have been having a winter storm, (I guess most of the mid-west and now the east coast as well) and besides about 9 inches of snow we got several layers of ice. The last application covered the trees and power lines with about an inch of ice. So down came the tree limbs, sometimes whole trees and out went the power for many. The temperature is dropping again and over 100,000 homes are without electricity, not to mention some of the hospitals, fire houses, police stations and the usual Red Cross Shelter.

We have been very lucky, although a number of trees shed limbs our power has remained on. We had a few flickers very early this AM but since then we have had heat and light. We had to move the cars from beneath a menacing tree and our backyard is littered with branches which crashed down. First there is a slight grinding noise, then an audible pop and then watch out as the limb rockets to earth shedding daggers of ice as it goes. It hits with a crunch as it punches through the layers of ice and snow and finally shatters and scatters across the icy yard.

So we have been having snow days for two days now and the school system is closed until further notice since 54 of the schools do not have power and the electric company is saying it may be 7-10 days until power is restored. We have been playing board games, a little Wii and facebooking (flair can eat up a lot of time). I am trying to get started on a fabric project but may just have to finish some other stalled ones as I do not have a crucial piece of what I need and given we are in a state of emergency and no one is allowed to be on the roads I can't go shopping at the fabric store.

I went to work yesterday, the only one in my whole department but I got a ton done. No driving today, snow was fine, 3 inches of glaze ice is quite another matter. I am hoping we can get out tomorrow. I have terrible cabin fever, I need to go talk to other people and work on other projects.

Aside from my whining we are really doing great, we have enough staples and even milk, we just refilled meds on Monday and as I said we have power and water. More snow tonight and through tomorrow but only in slight snow showers.

I am having trouble remembering to be truly thankful. Wish I had a book.

Dear Annie

2009-01-28T11:17:00.002-05:00

dear Annie,

I wish you could understand how much we love you and worry about you. Are you warm? Are you safe?

I know you think you don't have many choices so you run to what looks like freedom. But if you have nothing, not even hope, you are not really free. We want to see you gain the skills to be able to take care of yourself, you are not going to learn job skills and financial management and good mental health out on the street.

You are so much danger, without your meds you will have seizures and no one will take you for medical care. Without your meds you will begin to experience increasing periods of psychosis and your tentative grip on reality will become even more stretched. The folks around you will not have the patience, expertise, or even empathy to help you. Also, the choices of mixing drugs and alcohol with your medical issues is so scary.

I wish you would let us help you. Since you won't, know that I am praying for you and think of you often. You can always come back.

With so much love, Mom

AWOL and maybe really gone this time

2009-01-24T15:55:00.006-05:00

Well Annie is AWOL again and this time the rehabilitation center will not take her back if she comes back. She took no meds (has a seizure disorder not to mention major mental health issues) and has basically ditched the long term waiver we worked so hard to get for her. She didn't finish her SSI application and she has no health insurance. The 36 year old man she left with, apparently she has had a 2 year relationship with him, is indigent and also brain damaged. But because she is still her own guardian the police will do nothing.

We worry, we wait to hear and we struggle with feelings of rage, inadequacy, and helplessness. Although she is 19 she only functions at about an 8 year old age in terms of her understanding of reality, her ability to handle money or make important decisions. We were in the process of trying to get emergency guardianship but this has also thrown that all out of whack.

I don't know what to say. I can't even cry or scream. I am numb.

Texting with Douglas

2009-01-19T08:09:00.003-05:00

Douglas went to Texas to work on a ranch and it turns out he is in the Four corners area. It is very peaceful he says. He seems to be enjoying himself quite a bit. He says he is learning how to drive, something he strongly resisted. The buildings on the ranch are all smaller than 20 feet to a side to avoid taxes so it is an interesting little compound, one building for the kitchen and dining, one building for the living room, various buildings for bedrooms. Sounds quaint and rustic.

I am still not really clear on what he is doing down there. He was blathering on about hoping to see wolves. I think he is helping to clear brush etc. He claims he is very chilled out and he really likes how quiet and calm it is. I do think he is a nature kind of guy, this city living we have is pretty stressful for him. Maybe he is finding a career path!

More Catch Up

2009-01-19T07:08:00.008-05:00

Dancing Baby Girl is at that wonderful age where she can begin to do real projects with multiple steps. Above she is working on one of our gingerbread creations. She stayed engaged all the way through and was able to wait for icing to dry and whatnot. She was so thrilled with her creation she didn't even want to eat it right away!

We are getting the pre-reading questions, "what does that sign say?" and "how do you spell....?" In addition she is displaying quite the humor. She got fascinated by the new T*co B*ll commercial about Black tacos and was cracking joke after joke about it. We would be out driving and she would start in on saying the commercial but since she didn't know it verbatim she would throw in other things, like black road, black hair, black sky (it was at night). She is a screech.

We are still getting some worrisome behaviors from her, they seem to be very balanced out by her wonderful caring side, but boy I get nervous when she starts her manipulative, selfish, self-centered, mean stuff. Our new behavior policy of not tolerating the nasty talk backs and sending her to her room has seemed to help. I just need to stop feeding into it all and take that emotional step back. She is often doing these behaviors when I am at my worst, think she knows that?

Things with Lani, DBG's mother seem to be going well, or at least better. She weathered the Christmas visit from DBG's Dad and did not waver in her determination to hold him to sobriety before he can come back into their lives. Imiki's heart surgery (catheterizing to fix a hole) went very well and Lani did great with that also. Lani's dad, Pawpaw, who had heart and kidney trouble before Christmas is back home and seems to be coming to terms with his disability. And the good news, CPS closed the protective case on DBG and Lani is just feeling on top of the world with getting that last worry off her back. It was good for her to have that oversight, especially to keep her strong in her decision to kick out druggie dad, but she seems to have internalized a lot of what she needs to do as a Mom and she is doing a good enough job of it.

People seem to have a hard time understanding Lani's and my relationship, they assume that there must be jealousy and repressed resentment. But there is not. We have worked past a lot of stuff and now we trust one another to love and raise our precious DBG. It works well for Lani to have a break every two to three weeks and we love to have DBG visit. We also have Lani visit, she was with us Christmas morning and stayed for Christmas dinner. Sometimes she hangs out when she drops DBG off. The best way I can describe it is, it's like she is my daughter-in-law and I think that is kind of how she might feel about the relationship. She calls me her second mother. All in all we have stepped through the minefield of reunification and come out the other side an extended family.

Catching Up

2009-01-17T08:01:00.007-05:00

Oh, I have been a bad blogger. So sorry. Work has been absolutely crazy, a lot of stress and tension over budgets and thus over whether we have jobs. Plus I have a new class of prospective foster and adoptive parents beginning their journey, so that has been and will be intense. We have an awesome class, 15 families are starting out, I am hoping that about 12 will finish and become certified homes. That would be great, being able to place 12 kids in the first quarter of the year!!

At home things continue apace. Doug went down to court with Brooke and full guardianship was granted to the state. We will petition to take over guardianship, at least of the personal not financial aspects, in 6 months. It has been a long road with her but things are looking a lot brighter.

Annie, on the other hand is a hot mess. Doug and I traveled to see her over the New Year's weekend and she is not doing well. Her seizures have increased. Her weight is ballooning, she gained 11 pounds in a one week period, and it is all from overeating and not moving around. Her placement is in total jeopardy, her Medicaid was cut off on Dec. 31 and no placement in at all interested in taking her on the long-term Acquired Brain Injury Waiver that we were so es tactic about receiving. The main reason for their reluctance is how much of a flight risk she is. So we go around and around, calling this state agency and that ombudsman office and never do the right hands know what the left hands are doing. Frustration, fear, anger, hopelessness, determination and exhaustion would about describe my feelings about all this.

I had one adult son get to experience jail time for his poor choices about what to do before one drives. I am hoping it was an educational experience and may serve as a wake-up call. Some folks are terribly hard-headed.

Douglass is off to Texas to see his girlfriend again. That relationship really worries Doug and myself as the girlfriend is extremely manipulative and uses a lot of emotional blackmail. Douglass does not really have the capability to handle that well at all. We also are concerned about how immature and self-centered she is. But he is what passes for an adult these days so we try to remain supportive and carefully point out issues in ways that hopefully will not alienate him.

More on Kendra and Dancing Baby Girl and anything else interesting later as I must get Kendra off to a dance competition.

Reading Marathon

2009-01-07T11:56:00.002-05:00

Sorry I have been gone so long but I am on a "Twilight" reading marathon and nothing else is getting done. I only have the last book to go so I'll be back soon. I have to finish before my daughter wants them back, see it is finals week and she can't do anything except dance and study, so they have been mine, mine, mine for the last little while. Good books, very good writer, would have preferred different subject matter, but hey.

What I Worked On Between Thanksgiving and Christmas

2009-01-02T20:01:00.004-05:00

I made these four T-shirt quilts for the young adult children of my very good friend Diane. Even though they were all T-shirt quilts I made each of them a little differently. It was quite a bit of work. They turned out pretty big as you can see from my DH's head just barely peeking above the one he is holding and he is 6'4".

I really tried to capture each person a little with their quilts. The one above is done with delicate sashing and is done on point. The one below is for the guy and I incorporated his college colors as well as making his bold and very rectangular.

The one below was done for the younger sister and I did a crazy quilt idea with each block being totally different and a little well "crazy"

This final one is my favorite and I made it for my favorite one of the four. This is for Judy, she is severely mentally retarded and autistic but she is the sweetest, most loving person and I adore her. I made this one a combination of a T-shirt quilt and tied fleece blanket. The sashing is fleece and the backing and border are fleece and are tied together with fringe. I chose this style specifically for Judy as she likes to feel a variety of textures and it helps to soothe her. You can't really see, but the theme of the sashing is fish which she loves only second to bugs. I couldn't find any bug fleece this time of year :-(

Anyway I had a blast making these, loved the challenge of the crazy quilt and the effort of personalizing each of them to the person's personality. It was a lot right before Christmas and I think I will start earlier if I do this again.

My Absence Was The Computer's Fault

2008-12-31T16:29:00.002-05:00

I've really missed being able to post and comment lately. My old computer completely bit the dust and although I had backed up and moved all of my files to an old laptop it was not a seamless transition. So I have been struggling with this annoying laptop and have finally wrestled into somewhat of submission. Hopefully I can now use my files and favorites and all that good stuff to keep up with everyone and even let you all know what is happening here.

So belated Merry Christmas, hope everyone had some joy.

The big kids (written before Christmas but lost in broken computer land.)

2008-12-31T07:35:00.005-05:00

The "big kids" as viewed from Dancing Baby Girl's perspective! (see her head at the bottom of the picture. They were all discussing putting the star on top of the tree the day we decorated.
Interactions between these two are not always the best but they are getting better. They are the last two home and have been for a couple of years now so there has been jockeying for postion going on as well as just getting tired of each other. But still I see enough expressions of caring and compassion to know that they do care for one another.

We have been lucky so far with both of these teens in that we have not had a lot of the typical teen defiance and bad choices from either of them. Douglass' mental health issues can make him high maintenance and difficult to live with but so much of that is not choice of behaviors that we roll with it and go on.

I'd like to think that it is because of my wonderful parenting, and I do think there is a kernel of that, I have indeed learned something over the years, but I also think a lot of it has to do with the truly attached relationship we developed over the years of homeschooling. The level of respect between the parents and children (teens) is very high and because of that respect we treat each other differently, we interact differently and life is better than was possible with any of my other kids. In retrospect I really regret that I did not homeschool all of my kids through at least part of their school years.

What a Christmas Present!!!

2008-12-20T15:03:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted much about our funding problems with Annie because it has just been too life sucking. Suffice it to say that we have been doing the Medicaid denial of funds and subsequent appeal dance for the last few months. We have called in favors from our network of social service folk, and we have talked with our State Senator and Representative (or at least their minions). But we were really scared. We cannot let Annie come back home because she is too dangerous to the other people in the home, particularly Kendra as she has intense jealousy towards her and has physically attacked her many times in the past. But there didn't seem to be anywhere for her to go, I am not sure even homeless shelters would take her.

Well today the official sounding knock came at the front door and I was required to sign a certified letter for Annie. We opened it and to our surprise discovered that Annie has qualified for the Acquired Brain Injury Waiver. This is a new funding program and there were only 50 spots funded for this year and Annie got one!! Some one is looking out for her, her guardian angel pulled some major strings.

With this funding stream we can now seek a residential/group home style facility for her much closer to home and one that will meet her needs for brain injury rehabilitation. This funding stream was created to fill the hole between children's services which end at 18 and adult services which don't start until 21. It is totally amazing that Annie got funded. I mean, I am not saying that she isn't in desperate need but so are so many others.

The weight that has been lifted from our shoulders is immense. I feel like we can be happy at Christmas now.

There is still a lot to do, we have to find a case management agency and then start investigating programs. There is one we have in mind but we don't know if they have an opening or if they would consider Annie given her issues. But it so much more hopeful to know that now we can start looking for a home for Annie rather than worrying about her being homeless.

Our prayers have been answered and now there are just the ton of details to deal with, but I am not complaining.

The pictures won't work

2008-12-20T14:58:00.002-05:00

I wanted to post the pics of the other children (?), young adults helping to decorate the tree as they were having a great time also. It is rare for Kendra and Douglass to horse around together, so it was fun to see. But the pictures won't work for some reason. This new computer thing has me frazzled. I have been assured by my resident computer geek, aka DH, that all my files have been transferred, etc, but I can't access some of them because I am not the administrator. See it is a laptop borrowed from the business so it is frustrating to wdeal with right now. And I don't want to seem too grouchy about it all as DH took several hours to get me set up with this machine and he saved all my important files from the other machine. Still the pictures won't work as I can't connected to the network, argghhh!!

The Missing Letter

2008-12-18T07:37:00.002-05:00

My PC dies. An unhappy demise. I am using Kendra's lapPC which isn't letting me use the letter that resides between N and P in the alphabet. I will write using all letters except that 1. It may be a little stilted and very unusual. I am sure it will be a challenge but certainly an achievable thing. Glad I'm keeping this relatively unlengthy as I might wander in a state resembling despair!

Will I be writing again in the near future? Perhaps, but maybe using my PC at my engagement that pays.

Bad News, Prayers Needed

2008-12-15T16:08:00.002-05:00

Lani told me when I took DBG back that her, Lani's father had been taken to the emergency room again with heart issues, apparently an aneurysm. So prayers for DBG's PaPaw. He is the glue right now holding things together. If he cannot support the family financially I don't know what will happen. Lani is of course panicked, but luckily her big sister flew in to help out so the burden is not entirely on her shoulders.

Computer Problems and an Action Packed Weekend

2008-12-15T15:46:00.006-05:00

What could possibly be grander than seeing the big guy in red and getting to dance on the big stage? Dancing Baby Girl had quite a blast at the Christmas dance recital.
Then it was on to tree decorating. First DBG had to supervise the placing of the lights. Luckily my DH has the patience of a saint.

Then it was time to decorate. Boy did DBG have a blast. She looked at each ornament, wanted to hear the story that went with it and took real care in hanging them. She is wearing her Christmas dress here as we had a Christmas program at church. you may not be able to see, but the dress sparkles, her tights sparkled and she had on glittery shoes. She was in seventh heaven and the envy of the Sunday School classroom. Hey, what are quality hand-me-downs for?
After all that she changed so that we could make cookies for Santa Claus. I am not sure she really understands that Christmas is still a few days off. But we put milk and cookies under the tree anyway. Who can deny the hope of a 4 year old? (She kept looking up the chimney to see if he was coming down :-))

After all that she took her reindeer for a ride and had a wonderful imaginative playtime with the reindeer and the snowman, constructing an elaborate story. She was being such a delightful goober that we did a whole series of funny pictures with the reindeer.

On another note, my computer is very ill. I backed it all up to the server and it is limping along but I do not know for how long. So if you don't hear from me for a bit it is just computer issues.

My Favorite 15 Year Old

2008-12-10T08:35:00.006-05:00

I love this girl. One minute gawky, fun loving kid, the next introspective, mature adult. This is by far the most pleasant of all my children to be around. (No offense all you other moody folk!) She has her things she needs to work on, like helping with chores and keeping any sense of organization of her own stuff, but aside from those things all is well in the 'ville. I think she has benefited from the luck of her birth order. I know if I still had a passel around the house, that the resistance to chores and the detritus of her life strewn about the house would really have worn on me. Now when she is often the only one about I have a higher tolerance for the mess. I still don't clean it up or take responsibility for knowing where anything is, but I have more time and less stress to let her cope with the consequences of being messy and disorganized.

She has been the recipient of the best of my parenting. All the skills I have learned, the books I have read, the techniques I have practiced were experiments on the other kids. By the time we got around to this darling I pretty much had a handle on how to do this parent thing in the least destructive manner to both the child and myself. It helps so much also that she has an easygoing and happy personality.

I truly miss the time we spent together homeschooling, although I love to see her flourish and grow at the Youth Performing Arts High School. I do not have the same sense of worry and impending doom that I had about a number of my other teens who when faced with the difficult choices of the high school years seemed to always choose the drama filled, negative consequence generating, sometimes life threatening path. This one has a good head on her shoulders and a sense of who she is and who she wants to be.

I don't think I am deluding myself, she will inevitably take some wrong turns. But she will take responsibility for her choices and be able to see appropriate ways out of her predicament.

It is refreshing after having been worn down by years of parenting difficult, sometimes violent, sometimes law breaking, sometimes suicidal, teens to not be under that kind of stress and still be parenting a teen. Almost, let me stress almost, makes me sorry she is the last of our long line of teens (she is 9 of 9).

Thanksgiving Day Hike pics

2008-12-06T08:16:00.003-05:00

As is our tradition on Thanksgiving we got the pies baked and the turkey in the oven and then we all went for a hike. usually we go a little further afield and find some actual forest/wooded park land for our hike, but this year we had a lot of rain and the trails were very mucky so we took advantage of the walk beside the river. From these photos it is hard to tell that we are right downtown. Even that little bit of nature was incredibly uplifting.

I was unexpectedly blessed...

2008-12-06T07:55:00.004-05:00

Sometimes blessings in life come in the most unexpected packages, from people and situations that we would least expect to see the hand of God at work in the world. I am no stranger to the incredible generosity of many, many good folk in the work area of my life. Working in the Public Relations/Recruitment/Development area for the children's home I am often amazed at the way people will reach into their pockets to help abused and neglected kids.

That being said, I was still unprepared for an experience that I had TWICE last Thursday. We were downtown at the central eating/shopping area during the lunch hour handing out fliers to the corporate lunch crowd about the Santa Sleepwear Drive that the local business association was sponsoring. It was hovering at 32* and we handed out over 400 fliers in a 3 hour period. The initial response was tremendous and hopefully we will see the fruits of our labors at the collection times that are upcoming.

Any time you hang out downtown you have a chance to interact with the homeless and the mentally ill. Thursday was no exception. We had the corporate executives in their business suits and cashmere overcoats as well as grimy, smelly, unkempt folk shivering in their meager clothing. As we were a diversion from the usual we drew any number of homeless who stopped by to chat and ask questions about our display. Most of them were interested in our giveaways, the ink pens, the post-it-note pads, the magnets, etc. And it was fine, that was what they were there for.

It was amazing how much compassion these folks expressed, any number of them revealed that they had grown up in foster care, and hoped that the children we served would have a nice Christmas. We were not specifically collecting money although we had our donation box out as we do whenever we have a display.

It brought tears to my eyes when two different homeless women, women with nothing to their name, women who were living on the streets, gave us a donation from their meager resources. The percentage amount that they gave to help another was incredible. I was reminded of the Widow's Mite, etc. But to see it in action, to see people who have nothing give to others that they perceive as being more needy than themselves, and to give with no thought of reward or recognition or compensations. It humbled me in a profound way. And it blessed me as well. To see the good of God in unexpected places is so the message of Christmas and to be able to be present before God's work was ... I am wordless.

Thanks be to God and may God hold the homeless in warm hands in the coming days.

Happy Pie Day

2008-11-27T20:06:00.004-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

At our house we celebrate pie day, every one has their own pie. We share but there is always at least one pie per person. The turkey and dressings are all extras as far as the limelight at our house. The spotlight is on the pumpkin, apple, pecan, mince and berry pies.

We have just finished the first round of pies. I expect to see them out again a little later. Then we all have pie for breakfast, a true tradition for our family.

Hope your days were as successful as ours. We had a mellow, calm, enjoyable time. It helped that we did not have two of the most volatile at home. While I missed all 3 of my missing kids it was so much more pleasant without 2 of them.

A countdown of the missing: James, 22 is in his senior year at college in California, so he went to a friend's parents' house to avoid the travel and airport madness.

Annie, 19 is in a Brain injury rehab center about 5 and a half hours away and not doing well so not invited home.

Douglass, 18 went to Texas to visit with his girlfriend and he won't be back for two weeks a nice little respite for all of us at home.

Well, now the clean up begins.

4th birthday reprise

2008-11-23T20:19:00.002-05:00

Just got back from the birthday party that Lani threw for Dancing Baby Girl. She did it up right and was so proud of herself. DBG was so thrilled, she kept saying this is my party? this for me? She handled the excitement well, only was mean once and that was to her Mom. i got to meet some of Lani's other family members and they all handled my presence very well. I think that is because Lani is so comfortable with our relationship.

I am proud of Lani, this was a huge step for her, the first birthday party she has thrown and it may have been the first one she has gone to like this. I get the feeling she didn't have a lot of the experiences that one would hope for for a child, like a recognition of your special day, etc.

Anyway, I am tired after a long and pretty emotional weekend for DBG. So I need to get some sleep, work again tomorrow whether I am ready or not.

4th Birthday

2008-11-22T08:20:00.005-05:00

(This was last year! when we weren't broke.)

Today is Dancing Baby Girl's 4th Birthday. But I do not know why it had to start before 6 AM. She keeps asking when her birthday is going to start. I think she is going to be a little disappointed as her party is not until tomorrow and is being organized by her Mom, Lani. In order to not overshadow that effort we are just doing a little family thing here with cake and presents.

Last year we had a bit of an extravaganza as it was both her birthday party and her good bye party with all her day care and other friends. So she may have unrealistic expectations.

We are baking her cake together and I think she will enjoy that.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

2008-11-21T21:40:00.005-05:00

Lani said she didn't mind if Imiki's face was visible and he has never been a foster kid so I am breaking no laws. So here it is The First Haircut!!!

Isn't he adorable!!

We got the haircuts last weekend so that they could go with Spidey and get a sibling picture made. Spidey's foster mom and I are giving that to Lani for Christmas. I have a lot of cute pics of DBG getting her haircut too, but all of them show her face. I also have some adorable shots of the 3 of them waiting to get their pics taken in their matching red and green Christmas pjs. But I can't post any of those, sorry, you will just have to use your imagination.

All 3 kids look remarkably alike, Imiki looks a lot like Spidey did when he was younger, except Spidey was always much skinnier. And DBG looks a lot like both her brothers but with feminine features. They are the most adorable kids around.

Specialists, specialists, specialists

2008-11-21T21:29:00.002-05:00

Well, we keep trying to figure out Kendra's health woes. She has fainted at school several times now on top of everything else. We went to the rhuematologist yesterday and it looks like they are going to diagnose her with POTS postural orthostatic tykardia syndrome. Don't know if I got the spellings anywhere right. What that means is that her autonomic nervous system is not functioning well and is not sending the right messages to her body. Her circulatory system is thus dysregulated. They have tied in alot of her symptoms to this including her stomach pain which has otherwise been elusive to diagnosis.

There are a few more tests they want to run, pulmonary functioning, EKG, lab work, stress tests and probably some more that they will dream up. We see the cardiologist next week. From what I can discern if she does have POTS there is a good chance that she can rehab from it and learn to live with the disease. It is a better diagnosis than some of the scary ones they were tossing around like Lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.

We still have the neurologist and endocrinologist to see later. In the midst of this my insurance decides to be a pain. Even though I have been on the plan since the end of July and we transferred from another plan, they are now trying to pull the pre-existing condition crap. I hate dealing with insurance messes.

The one bright piece of news is that Kendra will finally get her braces off after almost 2 years. She can't wait.

Rain, rain go away

2008-11-15T15:25:00.003-05:00

It is a rainy Saturday with an energetic almost 4 year old driving me crazy. I love having Dancing Baby Girl around but I think we have set unrealistic expectations for entertainment. Usually when she is with me it is go, go, go, to the zoo, the playground, walking and biking, hiking and exploring. But between the rain and my bronchitis it is not a good go, go, go weekend. So DBG is restless and being overly active inside.

We did go grocery shopping. Then we "napped", (Yeah right, screamed and fussed for 45 minutes is more like it) and then we played dress up, cooked cookies, cut with scissors and now we are painting. And it is only 3:30! Not sure what we are going to do for the next five hours. If it weren't hovering just above freezing we would go for a walk in the rain any way, but I don't need pneumonia on top of my bronchitis.

Life has a way of being real just when a little fantasy would be nice.

Last night I had the joy of attending the adoption party of my last foster child. (pictured above) I only had her for a long weekend before she transitioned to her foster to adopt home but I have remained the mentor for her parents even after I closed my home. It was a joyous celebration and a good time was had by all. Hers was one of several adoptions that our agency had yesterday on National Adoption Day.

She was a fun placement even though she came to me in the midst of her own inner turmoil from a disrupted pre adoptive placement that included abuse and severe neglect. I saw something in her that really drew me in and if she hadn't had a placement all ready I would have wanted to hang on to her. As I told her parents "She's a keeper." and it has turned out well, not without quite a bit of adjustment on both hers and the parents parts and none of us are naive enough to think that it will all be easy sailing from now on. But it was great to see her, so relaxed, so well looking (compared to the malnourished, anxious child she was) and so secure.

So I had a brief respite from 4 year old demands but now that the paint water has spilled on the floor and I have discovered that she has painted a few things besides her paper, I guess I had better go.

Its bronchitis, again and DBG news

2008-11-12T07:56:00.003-05:00

Well, I have been struggling with a bout of bronchitis, seem to get this every Fall and early Winter. I am bummed, had great hopes that with the weight loss and the exercise regimen that I might be able to get through the season without the bronchitis. It is so exhausting to cough constantly. And I hate my inhalers. Whine, whine...I know.

Other than that let's see what has been happening.

Halloween pics will arrive soon, as Torina says, promptly next Spring:-) Had Lani and Imiki and Dancing Baby Girl come down for Halloween and Lani and Imiki also stayed over (DBG always stays over every other weekend). It was fun to see how excited Lani was to do Halloween with her kids, I think she is getting some experiences that she never had as a child. Lani's sister lives here in the city not too far from me so we met up with her and DBG's little cousin Kiera. Then later that evening after the kids were asleep Lani asked me if it was okay to leave the kids with me and go out dancing with her sister.

It didn't take me a minute to say yes. Lani has had to be all to the kids for a long time without much support. For her birthday recently all the recognition that she got was that DBG sang Happy birthday to her and Imiki clapped. (this brought tears to her eyes, and she said it was the best present she had had in awhile) But she is still a young adult and her responsibilities sit heavily on her young shoulders. I told her to go, have fun, rest assured the kids were safe for the moment and meet her own needs for fun for an evening. She and her sister had a great time and Lani was so thankful to us for not being judgemental, etc. Heck why should I be judgemental, I was just jealous :-) I haven't been dancing in ages.

The next day we got haircuts for both kids, Imiki's first one! and then we met Spidey and his foster mom and did sibling portraits in Christmas pajamas. Lani hadn't seen Spidey in about a year and even though she didn't interact with him, and we hope he didn't see her, she was able to sneak a peek. She has really come to good place with her decision to TPR on him, she knows that she would not have been able to meet his needs and if she had tried she would have lost all three kids.

Then Lani and Imiki went on home and DBG and I finished our weekend together by going to the zoo on Sunday.

On Monday Lain and Imiki came back into town and I went with her for Imiki's heart surgeon appointment. Poor little guy is going to have to have heart surgery and Lani really wanted someone there for support and as an extra set of ears. Came to find out that he has three things wrong with his heart and they are only going to be able to fix one with the catheterizing. They will watch the other two valve issues and we will all pray that he doesn't have to have open heart surgery. Lani was really shocked by the news that things were worse than they thought and she had quite a breakdown on the way back to my house. That's a whole lot to deal with as a very young single parent who is barely holding her family together on the income from a McDonald's job. DBG was not happy about going back with Lani and pitched one of her fits, yealling at the "Judge" who says she has to only visit our house etc. Lani absorbed DBG's anger pretty well and we talked about how DBG was out of her routine and napless. When Lani called that evening she said things were fine from the point of leaving my house, so I was glad she didn't have to put up with DBG in a foul mood on top of the bad news she was still processing about Imiki.

So that is my catch up post.

I was thrilled about the election results and then by Thursday I started with the bronchitis.

Pride Filled Me

2008-11-04T07:24:00.005-05:00

Went to vote this AM, got up early to avoid the lines, (wasn't successful, isn't that totally the best problem to have in a democracy) and I got to introduce my 18 yo to voting. It made me so proud to see him step up and do his civic duty. I don't care who he votes for, so long as he votes. My other sons first voted at college and so I didn't get to witness them. My older girls have challenges so don't vote. So it was pretty neat to have him by my side in line and this year get to step up and have his voice heard. (I always take my kids to vote with me even before they can do it themselves).

Then walking back from the polling place he was telling me about his new job. His boss likes him so much already that he has increased his hours this first week! Douglass told me his boss likes his work because he is "precise and methodical", those were the exact quoted words. This from one of my children who has struggled mightily with impulse control his whole life. I just swelled with pride to hear that. The years of redirection, therapy, homeschooling, supportive church family partners and life teaching seem to be paying off! 4-6 years ago this was one I was afraid was not going to make it in the adult world outside of a very structured environment. 3 years ago I thought that environment was going to be jail because of his explosive temper and violent ways of expressing himself. 1 year ago I had despaired of him ever having ambition, goals and a desire for a better life. Today he is a fine young man, caring and empathetic, able to problem solve before exploding, and with definite dreams about his future. He is maturing well. Thank you God.

Will catch up Later, Just VOTE!!!

2008-11-04T05:51:00.000-05:00

VOTE, please, everyone vote so that your voice can be heard.

Imagine my surprise

2008-10-30T22:16:00.002-04:00

Well!!! imagine my surprise when the guy I have been having unpleasant and unproductive phone calls and e-mails with turns out to be a really good guy in person. Not only had he read my son's file he complimented me on hanging in there with my kids. He had a plan of action to address the subsidy issue, he escorted me from the 8th floor to the 2nd floor to talk with the people who actually handle the billing, etc. He reassured me that Douglass was still eligible and we reinstated his medicaid this morning.

When I got back to work he had forwarded me an email that he sent over his supervisor's and her supervisor's signatures that okayed the billing people to cut me a check for the back amount and we should get it as early as next Friday. And he is following up down the paper trail to assure that everything is in order so that the checks come monthly like they are supposed to.

As well he gave me the name and number of a direct contact at SSI so that I might be able to get some traction on that fiasco.

All in all a productive morning and here I was all worried and having anxiety flashes.

It is so nice to actually have a real person to deal with and one who obviously knows his job. Why I wasn't getting anywhere on the phone or over e-mail I don't know, but perhaps he did not believe me about the home school and only when he saw my son's file did he get the message. Why he didn't look at the file earlier I don't know.

Fighting with the adoption subsidy worker

2008-10-29T17:04:00.003-04:00

This is the tree upon which I am banging my head bloody, at least metaphorically. My adopted kids had an adoption subsidy, a nice amount of money which paid for some good camps in the summer and tutoring and stuff like that. More importantly the subsidy insured that they were covered by Medicaid. There were a number of years in there when we not have needed the subsidy, it was nice, it gave us flexibility to meet some of their unique needs and wants, but it wasn't the food on the table.

Well, now it is the food on the table for my son, ever since my husband's business tanked along with the economy, we have been scraping by. So now, for the last two months they haven't sent us the subsidy check and my son is no longer on medicaid. The medicine costs alone for his seizure meds are close to $600.00 a month and add in his mood stabilizer and his ADHD meds and we are not able to afford this.

So I have been fighting with the subsidy folks. He is supposed to receive the subsidy until his 19th birthday or his high school graduation whichever comes first. His 19th birthday is not until late next Spring (2009) and he isn't scheduled to graduate until then either. The problem, I am homeschooling him so they don't consider him still in school. Now I have home schooled him since 4th grade and the public school system had no problem recognizing us as a legitimate home school. So I am not sure why the subsidy folks are having so much trouble with this concept.

Tomorrow I get to go have a face to face meeting with our subsidy worker, fun, fun. I will have to go into the big city and sit around in the waiting room with other interesting clients of the social services system until I get called to his domain and we can hash this out. I am not terribly optimistic but i have to fight for his rights. We cannot discontinue the seizure meds because then he will have a seizure and those hospital bills would not be covered, Yikes! not to mention the damage to him that the seizures cause.

I am not a terribly confrontational person and in situations like this I always assume that the problem must be the result of some mistake I have made. This does not make for a good bargaining position. So I am going to try to buck up and be strong. We need the medical card, we need the money.

Wish me luck.

Catching Up

2008-10-27T19:07:00.003-04:00

Of course our pumpkins would be ballet dancers!

Lots of catching up, it has been busy, busy!

First the good stuff, we had a Dancing Baby Girl Weekend and had a good mellow time of it. hoped to meet up with Spidey but he had a strep throat. Couldn't have done the full sibling picture we wanted to anyway as Imiki was home with bacterial pneumonia. Lani can't wait for his heart surgery as she hopes his overall health will improve.

My banner got finished, or at least finished enough to hang in the sanctuary for the baptism on Sunday. I will get a picture of it up here soon. So that is a load of responsibility off my shoulders.

Now for the stressful stuff.

Kendra: She has been feeling very exhausted, looking very pale and complaining of dizziness, so I took her to the peds on Friday and we wound up with an emergency cardiology consult. She is experiencing vasoconstriction to a severe enough degree that they were concerned about seizures!! Anyway they sent her home to bed and started her on some meds to alleviate the vein constriction and collapse. She couldn't dance in her school Dance program's semester dance on Friday night (don't know how she is going to get a grade now) and she couldn't go to the Homecoming Dance on Saturday night.

She spent most of the weekend asleep or lying on the couch but pushed herself to study for a big AP test today and insisted on going to school to take it. The meds do seem to be helping, she no longer looks like a Cullen (vampire for you non-Twilight fans). And she made it through the school day. So I am hopeful. We still have a gazillion specialist appointments to go to. I am glad it wasn't an emergency or anything as the earliest possible appointments with the neurologist and endocrinologist are not until January.

Kendra's biggest fear is that the doctors are going to tell her she can't dance any more. That would be a hard, hard test for her as dancing is her life right now.

Annie: Well the saga continues. the reconsideration letter has been sent to the Medicaid people, a long term waiver has been sought and we are still in limbo. Then tonight Annie calls and she has spoken with her case manager and she is going to go live with this guy that she has talked to a lot on the phone, see he is a really good friend of hers (they have never met face to face), because she has to leave the rehab program because of no funding. Anyway we were pissed that the case manager talked with her about all that and dismayed with the end result that Annie has cooked up. She really didn't follow most of what the case manager was telling her, all she heard is that she has to leave and so she is going to go live with this guy. I swear she is packing her bags as we speak, I know how Annie's mind works.

I am praying that she does not go all impulsive on us and sign herself out of the program. If she can just wait a little bit we think it will all get straightened out and she will be able to move to a post-acute facility here in our city. But Annie is not one for waiting once she has gotten a bee in her bonnet.

DH's work: or lack thereof. The prospects remain dim, he is actively searching for a job, has sent in his resume, etc. but the word is that folks aren't hiring even for previously posted jobs. I saw that happen at my job, one day there were four job postings on the board, the next day they were all gone and an announcement of a hiring freeze was made. It is a scary time. All I want to do is to be able to pay for the house and buy some food. Survival mode is grim but it may not be enough. I try to avoid thinking of the what ifs.

Anyway DH is going out to California this next week and he will have two "interviews" which are not really interviews but at least discussions with those people who might possibly hire him if they are hiring anybody. He has gone back to school and gotten himself certified in two other systems so that he can solicit work on those computer platforms as well. He is trying hard, the economy is just not cooperating.

So now you are caught up. I have to go pick Kendra up from her teaching, ballet of course, I hope she has enough energy left to do her homework or she will get even further behind. On that happy note....

No real changes

2008-10-22T19:48:00.002-04:00

Nothing much has changed in our situation. We are working with the state level politicos to try to get some traction on the Medicaid people. But mostly today has been spent with no news, no call backs, no progress.

I am feeling a little better, I made it through work today, got some chores done and even had enough energy to make scalloped potatoes for dinner. So hopefully tonight will be better. I am actually afraid of the 3 AM wake up (involuntary but habitual) but I am hoping I can tamp the anxiety down enough to make it through.

I still feel like we are running around in the maze with no exit and no cheese reward either! But the shock has worn off enough that I am not quaking.

Thank you everyone for your wonderful and sincere responses. One of the only thing that helps is knowing that there are people out there who understand and who are not judging me or my parenting. Thanks for the support, I am sure not getting any from the real live helping professions people who are all about making her mental illness my fault. Even though she came to my home at 19 months, she was already a victim of Shaken Baby (thus the Acquired Brain Injury), a victim of maternal alcohol and drug abuse while in utero, a genetic carrier of bi-polar, ADD and schizophrenia, and one of the most severely abused children the state had seen in a long time. We tried hard, but that damage can not be loved away no matter how hard we tried. And yet my parenting is the only cause of her issues as far as the SWs, psychiatrists, therapists, crisis interventionists, and residential treatment center staff are concerned. They only reinforce Annie's view that none of this is her responsibility and justify her extreme targeted anger at me.

Trapped in Post Traumatic Stress Hell

2008-10-22T06:03:00.002-04:00

The very thought of having Annie come home, even for a short time, has triggered all sorts of post traumatic stress issues for me. I spent last night in hell, reliving the last few years that she was in the home, beating myself up for "allowing" all the things to happen that did, second guessing myself, playing the evil "what if" game.

I am exhausted, I have a migraine and I am scared as hell.

There are no services out there for her. Can we really turn our backs and make a homeless shelter her only option? The program she is now in has announced that since Medicaid stopped paying for her on the 8th of October that we are now responsible for the thousands of dollars of her care. Of course the fact that they didn't tell us until the 20th that there was any kind of problem is irrelevant.

My stress levels are through the roof. They have been extremely high before this because the financial bottom dropped out of our lives when the contracts my husband's business was planning on all dried up in the space of a week 2 weeks ago.

All the memories keep haunting me, the fact that the younger children were hurt by her in so many ways and I didn't, couldn't stop it. The number of times we were really convinced that she had turned a corner only to be completely blindsided by another out break of completely harmful and inappropriate behaviors. I cannot go back to that crazy making environment. It has been almost two years and I am only now starting to trust my own judgement and experiences again.

Depression has zoomed back to overwhelm me. All I want to do is curl up and cry. I don't even have the energy to rant and rave about the unfairness of the world.

For Linda B.

2008-10-20T17:27:00.003-04:00

So here it is, easy and fun. The girl in pink is her friend who was a rock star, I think. The thing was, i was so busy helping everyone else get ready that Kendra thought up this costume and constructed it without any input from parental units and we were so pleasantly surprised at her creativity.

one of the calls we have been dreading

2008-10-20T16:00:00.002-04:00

Well, today is the day, Annie's funding for her placement in the brain injury rehabilitation program has been denied and she needs to go somewhere else. Her case manager helpfully suggested our house. That is not an option at all, those bridges were burned long ago. Now if her behavior had in any way changed while she was in rehab, maybe we might consider it, but she is still doing all the things that we cannot tolerate in our home. The main one being verbally and physically aggressive to peers and staff. We will not put the younger kids at risk again, been there done that, not going there again.

I know some of my readers might not be able to relate to that harsh a stance, but I also know that there are a number of adoptive parents with mentally ill young adults who completely understand the bind we are being put in. Everyone would just like to assume that of course she could come live at home again, but she is 19, she knows she is an adult and in her clouded thinking she knows that she does not have to follow any rules or be responsible or respectful to anyone at all. Some of our young adults have moved home for awhile or stayed a little longer after high school, but always with the agreement that they would follow house rules and we did not have to worry about #1, #2 or #5 being a physical danger to anyone in the house.

So what options are there besides a homeless shelter? I don't know if she would consider Job Corps or even if they would consider her. I don't know of a lower level of care that would also include residential treatment. Basically Medicaid is saying she is capable of living on her own, but she has no job, no skills to find one, no way to manage her money, no sense of how normal people live (by normal I mean the act of paying bills on time, not buying what you can't afford, not trashing the apartment or house you are living in, not letting others come to live with you who are not on the lease, not having continual wild parties to which the police are called, etc, not having days' long highs so that you don't remember to go to work or anything else, not physically assaulting people that you think have dissed you, not verbally threatening anyone who tries to redirect or help you including police officers)

I love my daughter, I especially love my memories of my daughter when she was younger, I worry about her, I try to smooth her path when I am able by researching services, helping her apply for SSI, etc. But right now I really can't stand to be around her because she is either druggged up or boozed out, sober but manipulative as hell, or angrily blaming me for her life to the point of physically assaulting me.

We haven't given up hope, there is a Brain Injury program in our city that might take her. It would mean she was a lot closer to us (not good from the safety side, but good from the point of view of trying to develop some sort of adult relationship with her) but also a lot closer to the places she used to run away to where she knows how to get the drugs and alcohol. Would she stay in the ABI program since it is not a locked facility? your guess is as good as mine. We could try. We just keep on trying, hoping that maybe something or someone will reach Annie and help her find a balance where she can live without endangering herself and others.

Boy has this ratcheted up the all ready tense level of stress in our home.

Church Retreat

2008-10-20T09:40:00.003-04:00

A Beautiful Fall weekend for our church retreat. A nip in the air, the leaves turning and falling, lost of frisbee, time at the campfire and general spiritually uplifting activities. This was our meeting room and here the teenage girls were involved in some sort of craft activity.

It was a great weekend, just not long enough. Going "away" to a place separate from your normal routine really helps. We had plenty of time to chat with one another, play board games and outside games, meet in small groups and discuss mission, and hang around the campfire long after the s'mores were history.

I brought a banner activity. I had been stalled out in getting the banner for the new children's wing finished, so I brought it and invited everyone to help make flowers and leaves for the tree. It is splendid, its is fantastical, and it is done. Hooray, we will dedicate it this Sunday. (one more obligation done that was weighing me down)

probably the most enjoyable time was just spent hanging out and chatting. We are very multi generational in our church, the youth and children are comfortable with the adults and vice versa. At meals only the youngest of children are sitting with their parents, all others have found a seat with other adults and youth and are busy chatting away. For some of our newer members they can't get over this aspect of our church. Often newcomers have a hard time figuring out which child goes with which parent as the kids and youth sit with various adults in worship and hang out with many other different folk throughout the church events.

DH and I realized this weekend that we are now"old", we were some of the folks who were the repository of church history and told the tales about the folks who have gone on ahead. It is a weird feeling. I often don't feel my age, and then something will come along to remind me just how many years I have actually traveled on this earth.

So now we are home, I have wash and errands to do that didn't get done over the weekend. And I am still saucing the tomatoes. I have just a few more to harvest, waiting till the last possible minute, but that minute is coming soon, it was only 38* this morning.

Saucy

2008-10-17T17:21:00.002-04:00

I am saucing and pureeing, straining, canning and some freezing. Hurry, hurry, hurry, the hard freeze is coming, they tell us the first one may be Thursday of next week.

Wish I had a whole weekend to put up the produce, but it is church retreat weekend and we are spending our time with our wonderful church friends out at a gorgeous retreat center. Best of all ... I do not have to cook anything all weekend. How I love NMK (not my kitchen) food, actually the part I love is the not cleaning up.

So I have tomatoes, and tomatoes, and then some more tomatoes to cook up. I am cutting up and blanching the pumpkin and the butternut squash. I need to dry some herbs, we have a wild riot of mint, thyme, rosemary and sage, and maybe something else. I am sad to report that the onions did not do what they were supposed to, that is grow. I am confused about how to grow onions I think. My daughter Kendra is very sad as I had specifically planted those onions for her.

I am actually looking forward to putting the garden to bed, digging in some compost that has been fermenting all summer and covering the lot with wood chips, just waiting again for Spring. I have great hopes of basically doubling my garden and being able to plant some potatoes, strawberries, and beans.

Time to get ready forth great retreat. Hope to return on Sunday refreshed, recharged and re-created.

28 years

2008-10-15T18:55:00.002-04:00

This is my friend Diane and one of her grandchildren and one of her foster children. Diane is one of those amazing people who are the backbone of the foster care system. She has been fostering for 28 years. She specializes in medically fragile children but will also take large siblings groups when she has room. She is also the go to person when emergency respite is needed.

The range of behaviors she has dealt with, the children she has touched and helped heal, none of those statistics can adequately describe the incredible person that she is. She has adopted also over the years, and now is grandmother to two fine grandchildren and another on the way.

She is just one of these wonderful people who care so deeply about the welfare of children.

One of her concerns was that when children come into care they often do not have the basics in clothing, toys, school supplies, etc. So she and 2 other foster parents go together and started a foster parent resource room which is stocked with donated supplies to help a child from age infancy to 18.

A tireless worker, one who will always try to say yes to the children's needs, a wonderful foster parent and a great friend. Wish we had more foster parents just like her.

Outreach and connecting

2008-10-13T21:27:00.005-04:00

This is one of the members of the second cast "Disco of the Dead", dancing with one of the spectators who is autistic and mentally retarded, but who is the sweetest, gentlest person you ever met. She absolutely loved being asked to come up and dance with the group.

Here Kendra is helping another young spectator make a "potion". They invite some of the small children up at various points in their show to help with things like this.

One of the great things about these performances is that the girls get to do a lot of outreach. They were performing at the local children's shelter house and were a delight interacting with the kids. They also sometimes dance at senior centers (more around the Christmas holidays) and spend time after the show talking with the seniors. I love the outreach part of this performance group. Most of the time they are performing for free at these functions. A wonderful service to the community.

This particular evening was also a chance to connect. We saw several of the families we know who are involved in foster care and spent time with them and the kids. At one point I don't know how it happened but I became responsible for the two hyperactive 6 year old boys of the group and they were literally pulling me in different directions. We finally settled on playing at the bubble truck. Then we had to race over to the inflatables, then race here, then there. In 5 minutes I was a wreck :-)

We got to see Spidey as he was there with his foster family. Can't show you the cute pic I got of Kendra and Spidey though, sorry. First thing Spidey asked me was where was Dancing Baby Girl, he really misses her and the social worker won't let them visit. (DBG was with her mother this past weekend as I had a festival obligation all day Saturday)

Anyway a pleasant evening of connections.

Witchy women?

2008-10-13T21:03:00.005-04:00

This is one of the things I spend my life doing, carting Kendra around to her shows and her rehearsals and her lessons and her teaching. Here she is with some of her cast mates right before their Witchcraft show, Kendra is the witch in purple. They do a wonderful song and dance routine that is thoroughly family friendly and very fun.

But they do this routine all over the city during the month of October. Here they were performing at the local children's shelter as part of a larger Halloween extravaganza. They also perform every weekend at the Six Flags amusement park here in town and do miscellaneous festivals and shows. They just got asked this year to perform at the hot night spot downtown, but during the day at the family festival.

Anyway sometimes it just feels like all I do is run her around to things, but for these performances I really don't mind. It is a joy to watch these girls perform, they enjoy their work so much.

I love that Kendra has an incredible confidence, can get up on stage and sing and dance (even in heels!!), and just a wonderful comfort with her body. It is nice to feel like you might have done something right as a parent.

Survival

2008-10-12T21:03:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted much about our financial problems, there is too much of that depressing news in the papers and on the telly. But we are in big financial doodoo.

I know a lot of people are also here. For us it was not extravagant spending, we don't have fancy cars or expensive nick-knacks, but a series of job losses over a number of years that depleted all our reserves. So now that my DH is facing further job erosion we have nothing left to fall back on.

Survival mode is in full swing, but I am scared it will not be enough. The whole world economy is scary. Just in time for Halloween, only I am afraid it will not go away come Nov. 1!!

Funky Day

2008-10-08T18:03:00.003-04:00

This is a picture of DBG and her pinata, and me of course. DBG got it into her head to make a pinata after seeing it on a video (Preschool Power). So we did and she did a marvelous job of stepping through all the tasks and staying focused. She even waited for it to get dry before she decorated it.

This picture has nothing to do with this post.

I have had a difficult day, not a bad one and so many others have been far worse, but I am in a grumbling complaining mood so I'll tell you all.

It was all about work. Today is the only day this week that I get to spend at my desk because I only work 25 hours a week. The rest of my time, this week, is filled by 4 hours of training foster/adoptive parents, 4 hours of supervising a volunteer work crew that is helping to set up the new room for our Foster Parent Resource Room, and 11 hours out at a community festival promoting our program through an information booth. I like the diversity of my job and I am not one to enjoy sitting endlessly at my desk. BUT... I cannot do my job and meet performance expectations if I only have 6 hours at my desk and half of that is taken up by staff meetings and supervision.

See I am whiny today. I just feel overwhelmed and like I am falling behind and I hate to play catch up, it really stresses me out. I feel unprepared for training, I haven't gotten back to about 7 information requests and did not have time to follow up with a foster mom who was requesting school uniforms for her new kiddo.

Hopefully next week will be less chaotic and I can get back on top of things again.

Some pics of our DBG and Imiki weekend

2008-10-07T10:19:00.007-04:00

This was DBG as Snow White at the Halloween Party at the zoo, Imiki by this time had taken off his costume and his shoes but he still wanted to dance.

Can you guess where we went? Yup the pumpkin farm. Imiki had to try to pick up every pumpkin he saw and DBG could not decide at all which one she wanted, so had to try out about 27.

Dancing Baby Girl and her little brother Imiki came to stay for the weekend while their mother, Lani moved out of her place and back home with her father. Papaw has a four bedroom trailer so they will be able to squeeze in but it is a real hurtful pride thing for Lani to have to move home to her old room that she grew up in. She had to sell and give away some of her hard earned possessions because there would be nowhere to store the couch, the coffee table, the big chair, etc.

Meanwhile back at our house we were having a blast. Friday evening, right after dinner we went for a walk and stopped at our favorites neighbor's house because they have a swing set. They invited us to stay for their son's 4 year old birthday celebration. So we spent all evening with them and had cake and ice cream to boot.

On Saturday I planned with my good friend Diane that we would go to the pumpkin farm. She has a placement of three foster brothers, 9 months, 2 years and 6 years, then also had a 10 year old in respite and her severely MR 20 year old daughter. Thank goodness my son Douglas agreed to come along and help us herd the crowd. It was a delightful day, sunny but not too hot. We did the petting zoo and the barnyard fun things, then we went out to the pumpkin patch on the hay trailer. After that we had ice cream and came home. My two were zonked and had an early bed.

After church on Sunday we had a quick nap then went off to the zoo where they have a Halloween Party for kids 11 and under every weekend evening. The kids had a ball. I wish I could show you the pic of DBG all dressed up in her Snow White costume standing next to the "real" Snow White. DBG was so happy to be Snow White and just thrilled that there were several other Snow whites too. We walked around, went through the pumpkin maze, rode the train and the carousel and then came home.

After dinner we had to take the kids back and so we met Lani half way and she showed us the way to Papaw's house and the new daycare. DBG was somewhat reassured to know that we knew where she was now living and going to school but the move has still upset her quite a bit. She was clingy and whiny during the weekend, playing her little power and control games that we hadn't seen in awhile. She had a meltdown when it was time to go and was screaming that she just wanted to come live with us again, but by the time we met Lani she was all excited to see her and gave her a big hug and was happy again.

There are lots of issues, I just hope Lani can keep it together. She seems to be doing all the right things and trying her best. I am supporting her as much as I can by phone since we live two hours away. (Yeah that makes a lot of driving in a weekend) Lani is so scared that CPS will take her kids again. I am hoping that she can calm down a little and really make this new arrangement work. In the meantime there are lots of issues with getting Dad out of the picture at least until he is clean and sober. She needs to have safeguards in place to keep him away from the kids as he gets aggressive and violent while on drugs. She is also starting a new job at McDonalds in hopes of being able to save some money to get back out on her own sometime in the future.

We had a great weekend with the kids, Lani had a productive weekend moving. And now we will see what comes next.

Lots of change for Dancing Baby Girl

2008-10-01T22:32:00.003-04:00

I have been on the phone almost daily and nightly with DBG's Mom as she goes through quite a trial. I don't know how much I have posted about their situation, but she was a very young mother with no family support who got involved in drugs and had her oldest two children taken into care. We had Spidey and Dancing Baby Girl for awhile, then Spidey had to move because he was such a violent danger to DBG, and we kept DBG for almost 3 years before she was reunited.

To her credit DBG's Mom has been sober ever since they took her kids with a stable job and stable housing. The same could not be said for DBG's Dad, he continued to be in and out of jail on drugs charges, domestic violence and general threatening and aggression. He wound up going straight for about 6 months and the family was together, DBG, her baby brother who I will name Imiki (which is actually his Hawaiian name but not what he goes by), and Mom and Dad (they lost rights to Spidey along the way.

Things seemed to be going well for awhile and with two incomes their little household was making some progress. Unfortunately Dad fell off the straight and narrow and life exploded for Mom and the kids.

Mom is terrified that CPS will take the kids again (their still being an open protection case on DBG) and she is having to face the fact that Dad was actually lying to her and not paying bills, etc. So she is in financial doo doo, is having to leave her home and move back in with DBG's grandpa, Papaw. DBG will have to change daycares and Mom is in danger of losing her job as she has missed so much work and is basically an emotional basket case and not worth much when she does make it to work.

So I have been trying to lead her through the maze of getting more help and the legal issues of protecting the kids from the dad who gets abusive when he is drunk or high. It has not been a good time.

A Balloon Weekend

2008-09-28T07:22:00.002-04:00

I have had the pleasure of spending the entire weekend out at our local small plane airfield doing a recruitment booth at the Balloon Festival. My recruitment booth is to interest folks in becoming foster or adoptive parents.

The Balloon Festival has been awesome, over 100 balloons participating in races, take-offs and arrivals and evening glows. I will try to get some pictures up but I don't know why my picture stuff on my computer is not working right now.

I do these festivals (not all balloon, mostly community) from Spring through Fall to get information out in the community about the desperate need for families for children. This one has been particularly pleasant as the weather has been delightful, not hot, not cold, no rain.

I always enjoy getting to know my exhibiting neighbors, it is such a diverse group of folks that are vendors at these festivals. This weekend one of my neighbors is a great family that does of all things temporary airbrush tattoos. Not my thing, but the kids/teens all love it.

Last night at the festival a group of kids who reside at our children's home came to the festival and they were so excited to see my booth representing their home. several of them commented on the pictures I have displayed of successful adoptions and mentioned that soon I would have their picture there, that about broke my heart since I know that most of these kids are the very hardest of the hard to place in families. But we do keep trying.

So I had been talking with my tattoo neighbors all weekend about what I do and they had been very interested. When the kids all came by they offered to do tattoos for all of them for a very reduced price and I just covered it as most of the kids had no money. You should have seen the joy on the kids faces as they got to have whatever temporary tattoo they wanted. Some of them had a hard time picking out just one, but all of them were thankful to the tattoo artists and just having a grand time. One of the boys is an elective mute but talks a lot with his eyes and he even let the tattoo guy touch his skin, which is highly unusual. Then after he got the tattoo he would catch your eye and point to his tattoo and smile with his eyes in such a wonderful way. I was a great thing to be able to help happen for the kids.

So one more little part of the festival this afternoon, then I can break things down and come on home and be exhausted. Of course all my weekend stuff hasn't gotten done, the food shopping, the wash, talking to my husband, the bill paying, you know the usual. I don't even have Monday off, but I am taking a bit of time in the middle of the week. Busy, busy time of year.

P.S. I need to write a very serious note about DBG and her family situation but I need more info before I proceed. Just please pray for DBG and her parents, especially her Dad. Things are going downhill fast and I don't know where the bottom of the slide is.

A New Diagnosis

2008-09-25T09:20:00.002-04:00

Finally we are making some progress on Kendra's diagnosis for her abdominal issues. Thanks to our wonderful pediatrician who listens and really problem solves. Although we may still have to go to some new specialists, our pediatrician has been really proactive in her own detective work and has discovered some of the factors in Kendra's continuing ill health.

We now know she has a low thyroid, this was detected by the Dr. insisting that the insurance company pay for the more in depth thyroid blood work, the most common thyroid check had come back normal. So she is on thyroid meds. We have known forever that Kendra is mildly anemic but now the DR. wants to aggressively treat it, thinking that her fatigue, etc may be linked to the anemia that many of the specialist have just blown off because it wasn't super serious. Our Dr. commented that all the base lines are just averages and what looks just a little low to the base line, may for that one person be more serious.

Most importantly of all, the Dr. has diagnosed her stomach pain and we are really thinking this is the right one this time. Anyone ever heard of abdominal migraines? Well that is possibly what Kendra is having. It all fits, we have a strong maternal link to migraines all through the women in my family (myself, included) and the type of pain and the associated symptoms all fit. So hopefully we will try out some migraine meds and see if we can't get a handle on this.

It would be such a relief for all of us to get a diagnosis and a treatment plan so she can get back to living a more typical teen life. After all of the specialists have been pooh poohing her abdominal pain Kendra has started to think that there is something wrong with her brain as in she must be making it up or something. I hated to see her second guessing herself. And we were beginning to see a lot of depression as her life has gotten more and more constrained and many folks (teachers, etc.) were saying that she was faking it.

So I really hope this is the right diagnosis and that we can get a treatment plan in place and working. to have this burden lifted would be great.

It just keeps getting better

2008-09-24T17:06:00.002-04:00

It was my birthday on Sunday, one shy of the big 5 0. Sunday wasn't so hot, not much in the way of birthday excitement from the kids or hubby. Pretty much as anticipated. I have learned not to expect too much. (a lot of you can relate I know from reading your posts about your birthdays)

We went out for an extremely pleasant family dinner, the best in forever, everyone was on their game and we had a delightful round of conversations and witty rejoinders without anyone getting an attitude or offended. From that point on my birthday just kept getting better.

With a lot of coaching my DH was able to get me a present that I really wanted (instead of the generator he thought I needed, no really, one year he got me an electric chainsaw, luckily it was disassembled in the box or he just might have been disassembled himself!!) Of course, he procrastinated about the purchase so it didn't come until Monday but it came.

He got me a Wii Fit and I am in heaven. We have all really enjoyed it but me most of all, which is how it should be don't you think? I now have an exercise something I can do in the early AM as I am rousting the kids and yet still be near if I am needed. I am so happy that he got what I WANTED and not what he thought I needed.

So that came on Monday and on Monday I actually got a birthday card in the mail. Can you believe it my very own birthday card, it came as a form card from my state representative, but hey I am not picky, I proudly displayed my card for all to see and talked about the joy I experienced in opening it as the supper table so everyone could share in that joy.

Then on Tuesday my mother called to wish me Happy Birthday! Yup on Tuesday. But I had so many endorphins from my glorious exercising on my Wii Fit that I had a great conversation with her all the same.

Then today I actually had a luncheon thrown for me at work, complete with cards, some nice gifts and a cookie cake. I am now really enjoying this birthday thing. I am wondering what will happen tomorrow. Can it get any better than this? I hope not or I will have way too many expectations for next year :-)

So sarcasm aside it really has been a good birthday or birthweek or something. Far more than usual and with none of the typical acting out that usually happens with the kids if I want a little me time or recognition. Maybe we are all growing up, who knows! I really, really liked having a birthday lunch at work. For me, one of the absolute best perks at work is co-workers, I really enjoy having other adults to interact with.

So I hope any one else can have a birthday like mine, free of annoying outbursts and full of some much needed affirmation (even if the only card you get is from your state representative!)

It's been a long week

2008-09-21T14:41:00.003-04:00

Well the insurance adjuster is here, one week after the big wind storm. The electric company has been able to restore power to all but about 90,000 homes. At the height of the outage it was over 350,000 homes and businesses. We never lost power, we had some big surges that fried some of the emergency back up power supplies that we have our electronics plugged into and the TV fried (sort of). Our overhead garage door on our detached garage blew in, it was hit by some flying debris and so our garage has been open to the world.

But we have been incredibly lucky. The weather has held except for one brief flurry of rain, so our missing shingles were not a huge problem and the garage was covered in a tarp but was certainly not burglar proof, but no one touched anything. All in all we got off Scot free. We were especially blessed to have power as mu husband runs his business from a home office and all of his work is done on computers and servers sited right here. If we were one of the 90,000, things would not be looking very good from a financial perspective.

Right now the adjuster and my husband are walking all over the roof above my head, trying to get access to the upper roof. Of course, the shingles could not have blown off the easily accessible roof!! No, they blew off the roof that is 3 stories off the ground and steeply pitched.

I have spent the week helping folks with refrigerator clean out and accessing resources to replace food. We have also been pitching in as a neighborhood to help each homeowner clear their yard of debris. The city finally came and took the two huge trees out of the street, but the lower half of the block still does not have power.

My laundry machines have been running non-stop helping others keep ahead of their wash. And we have had several multi family dinners trying to use up food before it spoiled or just to feed those who lost all of their food.

Its been a tough week, but one full of grace and the spirit of togetherness. I just hope things get back to normal soon. They are threatening to open all the schools tomorrow which is not the best news for the kiddos, but my high schooler is ready to go back. I have been back at work since Tuesday so that part is not a big deal.

My tomatoes have enjoyed this long dry warm spell and have just been producing like crazy. I give them away and give them away, I make sauce and can them and they still keep coming. I think I wont plant as many actual plants next year, although I only planted 6. The pumpkins are orange and the stems are drying. Soon it will be time to put in the bulbs for the Spring in the front garden and put my vegetable garden to rest.

A few loose shingles later!

2008-09-16T06:47:00.004-04:00

Well at least we didn't have a tree down on our roof or our car or our yard. We are not one of the more than quarter of a million people still without power in our region. We survived the incredible wind storm unscathed. We had hurricane force winds (80-84 mph) for about 6 hours on Sunday afternoon, only we live about 14 hours by car from the nearest coast. Not quite sure what that was all about. All I have to say is thank you to God that we didn't have hurricane force rain or we would be just a little soggy in our shingle less home!

It was pretty tremendous to experience the wind storm. It began in earnest as we left church, but no one really understood how bad it would get. Even the hyperventilating weather folk on TV did not call this one. At home I quickly realized that I should secure my backyard as my picnic table umbrella was attempting to impale itself in the neighbors deck. As I was gathering chairs and small plastic detritus (sand box toys, balls, dolls, etc) DBG insisted that she needed to come out to help me. The noise of the wind in the trees scared her a little but she ran around screaming as the wind blew the leaves and dirt into our eyes. After a minute I realized that the tenor of her screaming had changed and I looked over to find her pushed against the picket fence by the wind, unable to break free. Her little 39 pound body could not withstand the force of the wind, so for the next few minutes she clung to my back like a little monkey as I tried to finish securing things. Just as I thought I was done the wind picked up one end of the rubber mats that we have under the climbing structure and began blowing them around the yard. There were 36 of those buggers, but I was only able to find and put away 33. 3 of them have sailed into oblivion because I scoured the neighborhood later and there was no sign of them. We made it inside and then there was a tremendous crash and the lights flickered. Two large trees had fallen across the road further down from us.

I couldn't take DBG home on Sunday as there was a state of emergency declared and all non-essential vehicles were prohibited from the roadways. Not sure we would have made it the 1.5 hours down to her house anyway as the major expressways were closed or reduced to one lane and many, many roads were obstructed. Her folks were okay, shaken a bit in their trailer on the hill, but thankfully the wind was not as fierce for them and the trailer didn't blow away.

So we spent the latter part of the afternoon helping our neighbors clean up and get supplies. In this tornado prone part of the country it is amazing to me how few folks had the basic necessities, like flashlights, hand cranked radios, batteries, coolers for ice, extra drinking water, etc. Since we were one of about 10 houses in our whole neighborhood who didn't lose power we invited quite a few folks over for a big dinner. My DH absolutely loves the challenge of cooking for a large group.

For the over 250,000 folks who still do not have power they are saying it will be 10-14 days until they do get the power up. We have power and gas (right now) but the groceries are closed or empty and many, many folks are not prepared to survive for that length of time. Luckily we have pantries stocked with canned goods as I have not yet learned to shop for the few we have left and have still been shopping for 8-10 folks. I think we will make it, but I don't know about milk. The bread we can make from scratch if it comes down to it.

We are supplying many of our neighbors with recharging facilities, we have a set up on our front porch with a surge protector strip so that folks can plug in their cell phones for recharging and not even have to bother us. I had to laugh yesterday afternoon. we had 2 cell phones, a lap top and PSP all plugged in. I wish we could help more with our neighbors. We are keeping an eye on our elderly neighbor just one house down, at least she also has power. Many of our friends have lost the entire contents of their refrigerators and freezers. We took what we could of my friends frozen "canning" efforts that she has been putting up all summer but they still lost some of their precious work.

There is no school for the foreseeable future as less than one quarter of the schools in the county system have power and/or are accessible. My job is shuttered and we are all conducting what we can from home as the Children's Home has no power. The residential children are riding it out right now, but may have to moved to another facility if they cannot reestablish power today. They have a small emergency generator and have been able to feed them, etc. but they have no lights, no entertainment, and it is fast becoming untenable. Most of the foster families have no power but are pretty self-sufficient types so have not called for help from the agency. I have offered my home for showers, TV respites, etc. but getting around is still so difficult even though some families may want to take me up on my offer they can't really get here.

The good side of all this, we haven't had rain so the damage to the homes is not as severe as might be, we won't have rain through the weekend so we might be able to get a tarp up on our roof (it is of course the roof line that is over 3 stories from the ground!!). And the weather is absolutely pleasant so those who don't have power are not suffering from the cold or the heat. As my 73 year old neighbor so succinctly said, "Thank the Lord. It could always be worse."

back on track

2008-09-10T09:30:00.002-04:00

What a beautiful morning! Cool, crisp, I can feel Autumn right around the corner. Walked to work today, something I was doing regularly in the early Summer, but by July had had to stop because of excessive heat, humidity and bad air. I am hoping to get my schedule set so that I can do this most days. The barrier, besides weather, is that I have to pick up my daughter at school and so I have to walk home to get the car and then get her, so it is 20 minutes walking home and then 20 minutes by car downtown to the school. So it is a scheduling balancing act.

My tomatoes are getting red again which is nice. And the pumpkins are orange and getting plump.

Things could be worse. But still I am battling tiredness and a little depression.

Not a DBG weekend

2008-09-05T06:39:00.003-04:00

We are not going to have Dancing Baby Girl this weekend as previously planned and it is a good thing. I was talking with DBG's mom last night and i asked her if she wanted me to take her this weekend or next and she was very happy with next weekend. She said she felt like it hadn't been two weeks yet and that was the best news I have had in over a year. At the beginning of the summer mom was very much pushing for us to take DBG every weekend and was really expressing frustration and exhaustion in dealing with her.

The report about the luau they went to as an extended family last weekend was super positive. Mom reported that everyone was very impressed with DBG and I heard a lot of pride in mom's voice. They have been teaching her soccer and are looking for perhaps a soccer team for her, either this fall or in the spring. I am sooooo delighted to hear such good, positive stuff.

My weekend is shaping up to be pretty hectic and so I am relieved that I don't have DBG, she would not have gotten the attention that I like to give her and she wouldn't have been able to stay the whole weekend as I am teaching for work on Sunday.

So I am happy, a little wistful that maybe they all, DBG and mom and dad, are starting to out grow me. But it is a lot like letting a teen go into adulthood, a little wistfulness, a little fear, but lots of excitement and joy for the days ahead.

Adult Children

2008-09-02T09:41:00.003-04:00

One of the more pleasant parts of parenting I am discovering is talking with my adult children about their lives. Rather than me needing to direct them, etc. they can now come to me with questions on a more reciprocal level.

Last night I had a most pleasant and wide ranging conversation with my oldest son Bart who is now 24. We discussed his options with getting out of an oppressive cell phone contract, his upcoming surgery for a sports injury and all the pros and cons of when to schedule that. Then we had a long discussion about his passion Ultimate Frisbee and how he might be able to turn his passion into a job coaching and teaching.

I showed him how to blog (amazing that I might be more technologically proficient in something than that generation) and he was extremely appreciative as he wants to start a blog about....., you guessed it Ultimate.

It was so nice to talk comfortably without either of us having an agenda. And I knew that I would not be held responsible for his decisions even if he asked me my opinion!

It was kind of tough negotiating this relationship through his late high school and early college years, but we hung in there with sweet results.

Annie Called

2008-09-01T08:59:00.002-04:00

Annie called last night. Hadn't spoken to her in at least a week when she hung up on me because I refused to take responsibility for all her problems. Had a pleasant enough talk, although there is little or nothing to talk about, her life is at a standstill until she gets her act together to earn a higher level so that she can get community access fora job, school, etc. She is in a residential program for folks with Acquired Brain Injury and she keeps doing really dangerous stuff like AWOLing to party, etc.

It is hard to stay connected to her. I love her, she is my daughter, but I can't do anything for her or help her, cheer leading on my part only seems to sabotage any progress. She is 19 and needs to figure some of this out for herself. She still doesn't accept that she cannot come home but due to the dangers to others in the home we will not allow it.

We just go around in circles, have been doing it for years. I wish there was a magic pill, therapy, anything that could help my darling. For a number of years Annie was my favorite child to hang out with doing errands, cleaning the house etc. We had some fun times, even with all of her severe mental health issues, but the teen years brought a different and more dangerous Annie, an Annie who was a danger to herself and to the others in the house. She went from rages to focused aggression, to sneaky plots to destroy the family with false allegations, with inviting her friends over to steal our computers, etc. when we weren't home, to threatening and attempting to severely injure her younger sister. She developed a revolving door association with our local psychiatric hospital and eventually it just got too dangerous for all of us to have her at home. So for the past 2 years she has been in this treatment program for folks with ABI, not sure how much good it has done her, but it sure has done the remnant a lot of good.

So here we are two years later, Annie is not significantly healthier, and she doesn't have a plan. Actually that is not true, we helped her devise a plan to get to a lower level of supervised living closer to our city and her friends. But, she has done nothing to achieve the plan. Nonetheless it is all our fault that she is still there and has not moved to a less restrictive setting. No amount of going over the plan, (no AWOL, no aggression, compliance with therapy), has helped her see that she has the responsibility to make the plan happen. Nope, I am the bad person, I am the one who put her into treatment and I am the one who is standing in the way of her getting to live a normal life. I wish I truly had that much power over her life, cause than maybe i could change things!

Oh well, at least she still wants to talk to us occasionally. But my new stance is that I will not mince my words. When she tries to throw the responsibility ball back into my court, I will smash it back into hers with no holds barred. She doesn't like to hear her past behaviors but when they are relevant to the arguments, threats, screaming fits she is having I will go there.

Tough times with Annie, an ongoing theme for about 5 years now.

Banner project

2008-08-30T11:30:00.004-04:00

I am about to embark on a big banner project for church. We are dedicating a new space for the children's area called Grace Place. And I am going to make the banner which will hang in the stairwell that goes down to Grace Place. It is fun to get back into some creative endeavors. I love to sew and quilt but my creative juices have just not been there lately and so I have not done much.

But today it is off to the fabric store for fabric and ribbons and braid and sequins and all sorts of stuff. I have this long weekend to get this done so it will be intense.

Dancing Baby Girl is not with us this weekend, she was with us last weekend. She and her parents are going to a luau put on by some long time friends of the family. They will camp out, meet all sorts of cousins and extended family and there will be a roast pig, etc. DBG's mom was pretty excited telling me about it and I am thrilled that they are doing this. DBG's mom is really starting to step out of her victim role and live again. She had been so depressed that just slogging through the basic daily routine was hard, but she is starting to blossom a little and is finding things to do with the kids, the library, the park, etc. She has even met some neighbors and is socializing a little. It makes me feel more optimistic about her finally being able to claim DBG and them making it as a family.

College bound

2008-08-18T20:54:00.002-04:00

I went to a party tonight to celebrate one of the only 3% of 18 year olds in foster care who is going on to college this year. C is going to a 4 year state school and we are so proud of her. She is feeling a little apprehensive, nervous, scared, excited, happy and sad, all at once but she really enjoyed her party.

I was asked to give the speech where I lauded C's achievements, but I also underlined that even though she was technically no longer placed with our agency as of Wednesday, we were all there for her whenever she needs us.

Not only were her current foster parents there, but two of her respite placements, her therapist, foster care specialist, head of the foster department and myself were all there to celebrate her reaching her goals. It really illustrated the concept of shared parenting. And each adult there made sure to let C know that they were there for her, giving e-mail addresses, cell phone #s, etc.

We are all proud of C, not only is she the first member of her family in any generation to finish high school, she is the only one she knows, who is not a professional carer of her, who has ever gone to college.

Her fps will take her down to college and get her settled in, then they will drive back down in 2 weeks and pick her up for the Labor Day holiday, only that time they will no longer be being reimbursed. They don't care, 2 weeks later they are picking her up again for their son's birthday party that she wants to come to. So C is getting a real clue that maybe we care about her as a person not just as a foster kid!

Kendra's issues

2008-08-18T09:35:00.007-04:00

I am so frustrated!! It is not even the second full week of school and Kendra's stomach issues have come roaring back. The poor kid spent the whole night in bathroom puking and she is still so nauseated and exhausted that it looks like she won't make it to school today, even tardy.

We have had so many diagnostic tests to try to determine what is wrong and the last specialist told me "it's not logical" in response to why her symptoms are so severe and do not respond to medication. They can't find anything to explain her hyper sensitive stomach and its inability to digest proteins properly, although they all agree that she has this problem. It is the the WHY and the WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT? that no one has any answers to.

So we are going back to the peds and then I am having her looked at by a psychiatrist (our family psychiatrist, doesn't everyone have a family psychiatrist? we are such a triangle hole family:-)) because the gastroenterologist said that antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds might help. I am clutching at straws right now and will look into every possibility. It is very stressful to have your child sick and not have any answers, to make matters worse we have been struggling with this since she was in utero, and still no answers.

2nd trip to the Fair

2008-08-17T11:09:00.002-04:00

Just got back from our 2nd trip to the State Fair. This time it was just in and out for Kendra's performance. I still had to buy some German Roasted Nuts though, the one fair food I can't do without.

Well we are canning/freezing here, lots of tomatoes, at least a surprising amount form my little tiny garden. I only planted four plants and I must harvest 4-7 tomatoes a day and that has been going on for weeks now. I never have too many of the cherry tomatoes, again I only planted 4 plants, because even though there may be 50-70 to harvest, I eat most of them before I make it inside. So the kids are getting a little tired of tomato in everything, but I am not. I eat them like apples, warmed by the sun, yummm.

My onions seem to be doing okay, I have never planted onions before so I don't really know, but they look okay. The volunteer pumpkin plant has about 4 big pumpkins on the vine and several smaller ones. I am taking off new blooms now so that these ones can grow. And the herbs are also running riot and giving us lots of fresh taste for all the culinary creations that my DH loves to concoct.

I have all sorts of plans for a bigger garden next year, right now my plot is only 4 x 12, with actually 3x 10 of usable space, but I want to dig up more of the yard and put in potatoes and some strawberries next year. We will see how adventuresome I am feeling come Spring.

So many projects, so little time and energy.

Fianally a non-frantic Saturday

2008-08-16T09:51:00.003-04:00

Gosh it was nice to just sleep in this AM. Nowhere to rush off to, no children to carry to activities.

We didn't get in until late last night as we were at the State Fair, Kendra is performing there with her dance studio four times in the next 10 days. So we took the opportunity to go as a family and cruise the exhibits.

First we had to go see the bunnies, we have an incident that has gone down in family lore about bunnies at the State Fair, so each year we have to be nostalgic and go visit them.
When Kendra was about 7 or 8, really old enough to know better and behave better, we went to the State Fair and had a wonderful, but long and tiring day seeing all the exhibits, doing the midway, etc. One of the last places we went was to the small animal barn and there it happened.
Kendra decided that she had to have a bunny, she NEEDED a bunny and we had to buy one for her right then. It didn't help that the bunnies were actually for sale and some people were leaving with bunnies. No amount of rational explanation about not getting the bunny (allergies, homicidal to bunnies dog, etc) reached Kendra' s ears, instead she started to wind up and began screaming about getting a bunny. The end result of the whole thing was that DH had to hoist her on his shoulder and carry her back out through the fair screaming bloody murder. I kept waiting for the state police to intervene as she soon started yelling, "You're not my real Daddy, my real Daddy would get me a bunny" Of course what makes this all the more hilarious in retelling within the family is that Kendra is our birth daughter, she was just utilizing the lines of her adoptive sibs to try to get her way.

So, anyway, we had to go visit the bunnies and see every last one of them and retell our family story to ourselves. It made me wonder how weird that might really be that we remember with fond nostalgia the day Kendra had a screaming tantrum at the State Fair!?

We also got to see all the quilts, my personal favorite! I always get remotivated when I view the quilts. Maybe i will even clean my sewing room enough to do some work on my projects.

Had a pleasant time socializing while waiting for the dance performance and then we did the midway in the dark, the best time to do that as the lights and glitter are able to really disguise the kind of pathetic shabbiness of it all.

Now today I need to do little at home chores, some garden work, some canning, a little wash, you know the endless bu necessary tasks of family functioning.

Well...time flies, I guess

2008-08-14T10:21:00.002-04:00

I am having a difficult time balancing work, home responsibilities, and blogging. Sorry folks.

An update, the BIG lie I knew was out there, well it was that they used the new camera with out asking. I didn't know whether to laugh or not. My antennae is so tuned to these lies, but most of the ones from previous teens have included drugs, alcohol, inappropriate relations between the sexes, etc. And here my 15 year old is guilt racked because she borrowed her Dad's camera without permission and then put it back in the place she had found it, horrors!! We still had a talk about responsibility and truth telling but my heart wasn't into consequencing.

Had a Dancing Baby Girl Weekend last weekend and it was great. She was in tune with all of us, only had one or two typical kid meltdowns and we had no sneaky or malicious behavior.

But things are not so good on DBG's homefront, the parents are under a lot of financial stress and with Mom working extra shifts they have had to struggle for childcare for DBG. With some of her acting out behaviors that has been difficult. And so some of the parents' stress is being downshifted onto DBG and she is being characterized as "the problem". They are finding it hard to delight in her at all and that is only increasing her need to get attention anyway she can figure, usually the negative.

On another front school has started again and at least for the first two days it has gone well. I know we will continue to struggle with waking up. Kendra is not the most pleasant person in the early AM.

I am hoping to be more faithful here.

Lies and Secrets

2008-08-01T11:10:00.003-04:00

You know that yucky feeling you get when you know you are being lied to, but you don't yet know what the lie actually is? Well throw in the fact that I was awakened at 3:20AM by my 15 yo daughter and friends as they came up out of the basement to go back upstairs to her room where I thought they were sleeping. Her explanation, they were taking pictures of each other.

Now, they love to do this when they get together, they take crazy pics and have a lot of fun. So at first I was like okay, just get to bed, its 3 AM dam*it! But the more i thought about it the less likely that scenario was. See our basement is currently the most, gross disgusting thing you have ever seen, we recently had water damage and everything is torn up, piled up and just nasty. There is no place down there where pics could be taken. So I am left to wonder, what exactly was going on.

I was so disturbed by the feeling of having been lied to that I actually got up off the couch (where I sleep when my reflux is bad, long story) and went downstairs, couldn't see any signs of illicit activity, couldn't smell anything illegal, maybe they were just taking pics. But I don't know, something doesn't feel right.

So I am going to ask to see the pictures when the sleeping beauties awaken.

I hate this yucky feeling, but I have learned to trust my mom "instincts" and last night my radar was really going off. It is weird though, this child and her friends are pretty high up there on the trust scale, but they are teenagers, so....

Blogging sequence

2008-07-31T08:08:00.002-04:00

I need to learn to write my blog each morning before I read every one else's. I love catching up and seeing how everyone is doing but by the time I am done reading I am overwhelmed, over stimulated and over thought filled about the life, times and tribulations of being a foster/adoptive family. So I really need to write first, read second.

That said, Annie's surgery went better than expected, they were able to do it lapascropically (sp?) so she will not have stitches to pull out! Although painful she seems to come out of it fine and was able to transition back to her residence. DH came home exhausted as he had to drive through intermittent torrential downpours for 5 hours, but Annie had apparently been very receptive to his being there and even seemed grateful that he was there to offer comfort and care.

I need to spend the day arguing with the adoption subsidy people over Douglas and Annie's medical cards. They are arguing that since they are not in high school any more they should not get the card. What they are refusing to recognize is that I am homeschooling them still, neither has a diploma or their GED and both are still working hard to achieve one or the other. But apparently homeschooling is not considered "real" school for the purposes of the medical card documentation. So I am off with my donkey and lance to fight the towering windmills, wish me luck.

Gallbladder Surgery

2008-07-29T08:11:00.002-04:00

My DH left at 4:30 this AM to drive down to Illinois to see Annie before she has gallbladder surgery. This came up rather unexpectedly and he was able to clear his calendar more easily than I was. So he got the short straw.

Annie seems to be okay with it all, telling me about what the nurse described as her surgical procedure, etc. But we know Annie, she will fight the doctors and the nurses, inflicting self harm if the pain is at all intense. So DH went down to do what little he can to help. See Annie is 19 and considered an adult, we have been trying to get guardianship of her because with the FASD and the Acquired Brain Injury, and all the other alphabet soup after her name, she does not make safe choices for herself. But we have been hampered by the fact that the disability courts look at her IQ which somehow tests out at 89. That seems to mean that she is not disabled enough so we are having to gather all sorts of documentation from all sorts of professionals to make our case. In the meantime she is considered a functional adult. (yikes)

Just to give you an example of our concern. Annie is highly allergic to fish, we have known this since she was allergy tested at age 3. Well at 16 Annie decided that she was not allergic to fish, that the doctors were wrong and she knew better. So she had some fish at her friends' house. She started feeling ill almost immediately and came home where she promptly started to vomit multiple times. She was so agitated though that she was walking all over the house and must have projectile vomited in about 6 different rooms, all the time screaming at me, "my head hurts, I don't feel well" I of course did not know that she had eaten fish, so didn't know what was wrong. Then her face started to swell and her eyes started to swell shut, so I knew it was an allergic reaction and got her Epipen into her and called 911. She then started screaming at me, cursing me out the whole time, "I ate some fish, you stupid b***, I hate you".

She was wildly out of control, and despite our best efforts to calm her and put cooling cloths on her swollen eyes, she was rampaging. She gouged at her eyes, trying to make them stop hurting/itching, leaving huge open wounds on her face and eyelids. She began banging her head on the wall and door frame, hard. We called off the ambulance run as the Epipen had done its job, but I almost considered an ambulance run to the psych hospital.

Eventually the benadryl and the exertion slowed her down and she was able to settle for the night. But the wounds on her face and eyes were horrible, luckily they didn't get infected.

Now can you see my concerns for surgery. In a worst case scenario I envision her trying to rip out her stitches, IV, etc as she comes out of the anesthesia. I certainly hope that she won't but we don't have such a good track record to go on. So I will be thinking about my DH and Annie all day hoping for the best.

Growing up

2008-07-28T09:46:00.003-04:00

I was reading Kari's post about folks with FASD being oblivious to the impact of their behaviors on others and I started to reflect on some of the recent behaviors I have noticed in my son Douglass.

Now Douglass used to be the totally oblivious type, totally unaware of even the physical presence of others, as in he would cannonball into the pool w/out looking to see if there were folks he might jump on top of (and I don't mean just once or twice he did this, this was repeated behavior even after being consequenced and reprimanded, he just didn't "think to look"), or he would pass you on the stairs or in the hall w/out waiting for you to clear the way and mash you into the walls. He talked over others, used verbally abusive language, was not tuned into any of the subtleties of personal interaction.

But lately I have noticed a pleasant improvement. He does seem to be aware of other's presence, he holds doors, steps aside to let others pass, and has even noticed and commented on others' who have not been as polite. But most surprising were two events this weekend.

We were all cleaning inside and out, it was a chore weekend as things had gotten out of hand. So we were cleaning, weeding, detrashing the backyard. Hubby and I were outside in the blistering heat doing a lot of physical work and Douglass had announced he needed to go in and rest (I guess his poor buff 18 year old body was tired!) But instead of staying inside resting, after a few minutes he came back outside and basically said that if we weren't going to quit he guessed he should keep working too. Amazing, he actually noticed that we were still working.

Then later, my DH was having an intense heart to heart with Kendra over her lack of work ethic and Douglass walked into the kitchen (where they were talking) and instead of interrupting, trying to get his agenda met, he stopped, picked up on the intensity of the conversation and excused himself to the other room, where he did not turn on loud music, etc. I was very impressed that he not only recognized that they were in a private discussion, but that he also controlled his tongue and did not try to join in, as he had expressed his own displeasure to me about Kendra's shirking. He also did not just ignore them and walk over to the TV and turn on a movie or the Wii, which would have been a typical thing not too long ago.

So I think he is growing up, maturing, realizing that he is not the only person in the world. He does truly seem to see others as people now and not just as objects to manipulate to get his needs or wants satisfied. He is much more pleasant to be around and parenting him has become easier as he now seems to comprehend some of the logic behind our house rules.

DBG's big brother

2008-07-27T19:22:00.004-04:00

We had the delight of seeing DBG's older brother Spiderman at our church this morning. he was in respite while his family was on vacation and his respite providers are members of our church. They had called to check and make sure that it would be okay for Spiderman to come to church and since it was not a DBG weekend we were able to say okay. (DBG and Spiderman are not supposed to see each other, although occasionally we all run into each other, but with Spidey's foster Mom out of town this would not have been a good time to rock the boat, so I was appreciative of them checking).

Spidey recognized all of us, Doug doug, Sissy (that is what he has always called Kendra) and Daddy Doug. He sat right next to me through the whole church service and worked on his coloring books and then played me in awesome tic tac toe for a long time. Spidey gave great hugs and was very appropriate. It was obvious he recognized some people from when he used to attend church with us, but it has been so long that he wasn't comfortable talking to any one.

When church was over he gave us all big hugs again and went quite calmly off with his respite mom. That parting was my one concern, given that he was on edge about missing his foster mom already. But it was great to see him and to know that he still cares about us. Apparently he was telling his respite mom all about going places with me, as they live only about a half mile from us so he was going to the same grocery and the same swimming pool and the same church as he had when he lived with us.

I can't remember how much I have written about Spidey, not much I think since I just named him today in this post. Spidey has the unique distinction of being the only foster child in 20+ years of fostering that we have ever asked to have removed from our home. He came to us at 3 years old straight out of a month in the psych hospital. He had been bounced from family member to family member, been through foster care two different times, each time placed in multiple homes and he came to me for his 12th official placement, (I was DBG's 4th Mom at 9 months of age.)

Spidey is very RAD, has ADHD out the wazoo, anxiety problems, aggression issues, ODD, and OCD. Anyway he is a handful.

We could not keep Spidey because he was an extreme danger to DBG. Spidey was a drug baby, the product of multi generational domestic violence, not only his parents but also his maternal grandparents with whom he was placed for 9 months. He attacked not only DBG but also our large loving black Lab. Every evening in the bath I would find new bite marks and new pinches and new scratches on DBG, even though I was watching and protecting her with all my might. Several times he attacked her in her own crib. As she was learning to walk, he would pounce on her from behind and hold her face down in the couch or the rug trying to "make her stop breathing" was what he would say. If his aggression had been an overt expression of his anger I could have dealt with it, but he was sneaky and would also attack out of the blue even when you thought he was happy. The last straw was when DBG, at about 15 months, would run screaming from him when he walked in the house and hide herself somewhere and shake and shake uncontrollably. Basically DBG was being abused in my home by her own brother.

So Spidey went to residential treatment for almost 9 months and then I got to be his 14th placement again, because they threatened to move DBG out of our house so they could be placed together once he was released from treatment. Well that lasted from the end of November through to early March when he became so self-harming that he had to be put in crisis stabilization for 10 days and at the end of that time it was decided to split the sibs for DBG's safety and Spidey went to live with his current foster mom.

Then the state did an about face on termination and decided to place DBG back with her birth parents just as her Mom was having baby #3 and Dad was in jail again on drug charges. But they encouraged, no forced, Mom and Dad to terminate on Spidey, so that they could get DBG back. So Spidey has been with his present foster home for about 16 months now. And he is doing really well for Spidey. (I don't disagree with the TPR as there is no way that these young folks could have handled Spidey and kept his two younger sibs safe, it is just ironic)

The state is now pressuring this foster home to adopt him and although they want to, they are wavering because the state is refusing to provide certain evaluations and services, as well as some other issues. (And we all know how easy it is to get those things post adoption.) So Spidey is still in limbo, with no web to call home.

But it was sure nice to spend some time with him today and to hear from his respite mom that he has fond memories of the time he was living with us.

July!?!?

2008-07-27T19:18:00.002-04:00

July, July, July....

I am not sure where it has gone. Combine a busy work schedule of recruiting activities, one trip to the dance nationals, adjusting to having one of my more difficult teens back in the house full time and throw in financial issues and well, poof there goes the time.

Rainy 4th

2008-07-04T11:51:00.005-04:00

We are having a rainy 4th today. Wish we could send you some rain Cindy. It looks like our annual softball game will be a washout. Bart's all ready to play with his hat and all, but I don't think the weather radar on the computer screen is showing good news. Well we will still go to our friends who have been having this annual event for two generations now. It is so wonderful to be part of their extended family and to be embraced with our many children and all.

Each year they put on a skit and the skits are hilarious, 1 year they even did a synchronized swimming skit. My DH is an integral part of these opening ceremonies, one year he was a cowardly lion, this year he is portraying Miss Hannigan from the movie "Annie". And then the patriarch (who is an ACLU lawyer) gives an impressive speech on patriotism or our country or something important like that. Then we play softball and then we have a big potluck fried chicken picnic.

So off for our traditional 4th of July and hoping that the weather clears for the fireworks later.

Financial Crap

2008-07-02T07:31:00.003-04:00

My DH and I have been struggling with some significant financial hardships relating to his business and the downturn in the economy. The future is pretty bleak right now, although it will eventually turn around. With the help of some professionals we have a new plan that provides some relief and promise but it has all been pretty emotionally exhausting. I find I am just plodding through life right now, trying to get through each day without more bad news.

So there is my excuse for not blogging more.

The New and Improved Douglass

2008-06-29T12:42:00.007-04:00

These pictures don't show adequately the transformation in Douglass, but its there. In the first picture that is how he looked all the time 6 months ago, either angry or depressed or totally shut down. Then at the Challenge Academy he got some of his spirit back and he started to engage the world again. He is a transformed guy. He would always do chores if I nagged him enough, now he does what he is asked and follows through completely, but even more gratifying is that he sees what needs to be done without being asked and does it. A huge change.

Douglass because of his prenatal drug exposure and the history of severe seizures has some real cognitive challenges. He particularly struggles when it comes to more abstract stuff like higher math. But he is bound and determined to get his GED and he knows he needs to conquer the math, so yesterday, on a Saturday, he pestered me into finding the home school math books and he began to study. He has committed to at least 4 sessions a week, he is also working so doesn't have a lot of free time, and i think he will follow through on this. He was very receptive to my teaching him yesterday, something he had gotten extremely resistant to in the last two years of home school before he just dropped out.

One of the things that cheers me and lets me know that this is not all some sort of show on his part is that he and his sister immediately settled back into their intense sibling rivalry. He has also been genuine with his expressions of frustration and anger since he has been home. What is different is that the edge is gone. I am not afraid that he will explode or blow up into aggression. He has used words and gone off by himself when overwhelmed. He really seems to have finally internalized some of the self- regulation that we have all been trying to teach him for years.

On a humorous note, one of the nice things that has changed is that he does not have a comeback for everything and need to argue about everything and/or have the last word. This makes interacting with him so much more pleasant. So I asked him about this and he said that at the Academy if you answered back or argued with the sergeants you had to do military style push ups, 10 for every time you argued. He allowed as how he had to do 80 one time because he wouldn't shut up and just do what he was told. This apparently made an impression and he has learned to curb his tongue. :-)

So next week we explore adult education/literacy so he can get working on his GED and we will enroll him at the community college in some non-degree classes. He is working right now for a friend of ours but I want him to get out and get a "real" job with a boss who is not a friend of the family. I think he needs that accountability in the long term. And I am going to insist that he work towards at least testing for his driver's license. Just from a self-esteem point of view he needs to conquer that fear.

Not sure how to handle this

2008-06-28T07:46:00.002-04:00

Got a frantic phone call from Annie's placement the other night. They wanted to know what they should do now that her sister had died. I was like What?!?!?! (which if you have read here before you will know is my usual response to Annie's antics)

She had convinced them for several days that her sister was in the hospital with severe seizures and then at 2:20 that afternoon she had gotten a call that her sister had died at the hospital. They wanted to know how to support Annie through this and what the funeral arrangements were going to be.

Well it took a little bit, but I set them straight and reassured them that no one in our family had died, at least that I was aware of and I assumed I would be one of the first to know. Also let them know that although Annie did have a sister Brooke who had some issues, none of them were life threatening and she was not in the hospital.

So, how do I handle this? I am not sure what Annie thought she was accomplishing by this, we haven't seen such obvious lying in awhile. This was something she set up over several days, laying the groundwork of being worried about her sister, than pretending to get more phone calls with even worse news until her sister "died". How did she think she was going to explain that to us? Her treatment team thinks that she was trying to set up a possible AWOL, but she has never had to be so clever in the past, she has just slipped out when no one was watching.

I have not called her and she has not called me. I can't just let something this big lay there untouched. So I will have to deal with it but I don't know what to say. Should I use humor, should I be angry, should I make it clear that we will catch these things and that she is not making life easier for herself with these lies? I don't know. And then part of me is worried that she has had a psychotic break again and that she really thought this was true, which would be a whole 'nother kettle of worms.

Not a G or PG post, a bit raw sorry

2008-06-24T18:01:00.003-04:00

I apologize ahead of time if this is a bit much reality, but it is what we are living with so here goes.

It's Annie, again, could you have guessed? She just called from her placement, first the good news, she made her level 3 which means she can be outside the house without staff, and I am supposed to feel good about this given her extensive history of really, really poor decision making, including repeatedly getting into cars with strangers who stop by and ask her if she wants to go party with them! Sorry, that was supposed to be the good news. And I am glad that she is working to gain more privileges, do I think she will choose well this time?, nooooooo..... But I am hoping and praying.

Then she tells me she got a job, had an interview and everything. Why isn't this the good news, you ask? Well, it is because she has a history of being inappropriate with younger children, not one who was charged with anything, because we intervened and got her sent to a specialized treatment program for young girls. I am beginning to think that we did not do anyone a favor by intervening so quickly and taking responsibility for our child so quickly as here she is an adult (well by the birth date anyway) without a record who is going to be working at the *&**( group care for elementary children). Now, she assures me she is not working directly with the children as she would have had to pass a drug screen and a criminal check for that, but is rather cleaning up. Still I worry because she will be where there are a lot of children and I do not trust that she will always act appropriately in relation to them, it is a huge temptation that she is putting in front of herself. I warned you it was raw!*

Third piece of "good" news, she doesn't have cancer. I was like what?!?!?! Apparently she had to be taken for a biopsy of her cervix as she had such bad genital warts and other STDS (again with the raw, sorry, sorry) that they were sure she had cancer. The blood tests indicated possibly cancerous conditions, but it was just a really bad bladder infection, and the biopsy was benign. Now I am glad that she doesn't have cancer, yes, I truly am, but I didn't even know about the biopsy so I am in such a state of shock I haven't gotten to the good news part of the story yet. I am still absorbing the STDs part.

Oh and to top it off, her last comment before her minutes ran out on her phone was that since she doesn't have cancer she doesn't have to worry about quitting smoking anymore. And I was speechless and left with a dead phone into which I mumbled, "but, but, but". It is so scary to deal with Annie and the way her mind works. I am sure that she thinks that since she doesn't have cancer she won't ever get it and so unprotected sex will not hurt her. ARGHH!!

*She had to go out and buy some work appropriate clothing since none of her tee shirts could be worn around little children given the slogans and impossibly low cleavage, etc. This is one of the areas that she is so inappropriate with, her clothes all have really graphically sexual messages or have booze and drug slogans, etc. I really worry that she will talk about this kind of stuff around children and that she will not clean up her language which is worse than a sailors'.

Pride or maybe just Dignity goeth before a Fall

2008-06-22T22:11:00.002-04:00

I had to laugh at Cindy's skinned knees, because I am nursing an abraded elbow and bruised hip from my graceless fall. I thought I was being cool playing with the teens' balance board until I lost concentration and my legs flew out from under me and I came down hard on my elbow, shoulder and hip. There is nothing broken, but I think I will be sore tomorrow. Very luckily there was no one in the TV room to see my spectacular splat, so I got to lay there and whimper quietly to myself for awhile until I felt well enough to struggle to my feet. (martyr, martyr, whine, whine)

Right now son, Douglas is trying to master Guitar Hero and not doing too bad a job. Everybody has better rhythm than I do, it isn't fair.

I had a very quiet day, almost boring. I don't do down time well but I guess I will have to get used to it. As the last kids get older and are so self sufficient I will have to discover a life of my own, (help). I am not sure I am up for that just yet.

Douglas graduated!!!

2008-06-21T22:09:00.005-04:00

This is a picture that a number of people would have thought to never see, Douglas graduating. At this time last year he had withdrawn so far inside of himself, refusing to do school, refusing to get a job, not a bad kid, just vacant and withdrawn, going nowhere.

He had a great therapist and psychiatrist working with him on the depression but none of us could get him off of square one, he seemed intent on sitting in the basement watching horror videos and paying personal shooter games on his various video platforms. When I had gradually consequenced him from all of those, he just stayed in his room, or went out back and shot arrows at targets for hours. Obviously we were very concerned for his mental health. Then at the state fair he ran into a National Guard booth and found out about this challenge academy that they run. He was intrigued and despite my pacifist reservations I was happy to see him interested in something. He was accepted into their 6 month Challenge Academy in January and graduated yesterday.

We have gotten back a much more mature focused young man. He has goals and thoughts about his future. He no longer seems scared or hesitant about how hard things are going to be, he seems to have an inner confidence that he CAN do it now. He still has to get his GED, which for someone with his incredible learning disabilities will be tough, but he is willing to work at it. Tonight as we were talking he said, "My life is filled with teachers all around me, I just need to learn the lessons". He is amazing these days.

We are very proud of him, but most importantly he is proud of himself.

Memories

2008-06-20T07:48:00.003-04:00

Using that picture in the last post brought back a flood of memories about one of our placements. It was a sibling group of 4 young Hispanic children who had been abandoned by their mother at the local shelter.

They were the most adorable children and we took them on an emergency placement the same weekend we were doing respite for 2 other little boys so we had a total of about 11 children all told in the home that weekend. When the supervisor came out to do the placement paperwork on Saturday, since I got them late Friday, she didn't stay long, she couldn't take the chaos. I was in my element having a great time.

The four kids were 2,3, 5 and 6 years old. Only the oldest girl had much English, the two babies had none. Luckily my husband is bilingual. They came in with bruises and marks that had to be photographed and before they even got a chance to have dinner they had to be interviewed by the cops and the SW. It was a difficult time for them. They should have been terrified of the whole process and of us, but they were actually happy to be somewhere where they would have beds and they were ecstatic over the toys. The 2 year old, that I had gotten the referral saying she was like a feral animal scratching and biting, throwing tantrums at the shelter, was a sweet, loving baby, wanting to be held and carried.

Of course they had lice and only came with the clothes on their back. I was able to arrange the sleeping rooms so that the three girls shared a room and the little 3 year old guy slept in an adjoining "nursery" so that he could be close to them. Every night they went to bed in separate beds, every morning they were like a pile of puppies snuggled together in the oldest sister's bed.

We had a blast that summer, went to the pool, to the zoo, clothes shopping, played in the backyard. They loved bubbles and catching fireflies and taking walks and riding bikes. We had some interesting "cultural" experiences. It never occurred to me that these kids had not eaten take out in a car before, I mean it should have because they were strangers to car seats and seat belts, but as middle class suburban family there are just some things you take for granted as universal experiences. (Live and learn, I guess) So we stopped at the drive through on the way to the soccer field from another person's activity and I ordered them all kids meals with milk. Well before you could say boo, there were french fries spilled and milk on the seats, etc. They didn't have a clue how to balance all that food in and around their laps. Now that is a skill most of mine developed before they were out of diapers, I regret to say as it reflects poorly on my feeding choices :-) It was just an interesting eye opener. And it was a skill they quickly learned as they had numerous opportunities to practice, again I regret to say.

Before we were able to settle into any kind of routine the system broke for these kids. Despite the fact that the grandmother had some neglect charges stemming from her own teenage daughter and that she had a 2 bedroom apartment with a disabled husband and said teenager already living there, the judge saw fit to return the children to the grandmother.

Now I am all for reunification and keeping families together. Our most joyous and proud work is mentoring parents and families into healing. But it was so sad in this case as the older girls expressed a great deal of fear about going to Grandma's. They asked the SW not to send them, they begged to stay with me. They spoke of the physical discipline Grandma used, the fact that the teen daughter always had lice and Grandma's house was smelly and dirty. They cried. But the judge saw fit to put them with the grandmother.

As I was transporting them all back to the SW's office for the last time, we got the call while we were at a bowling alley, I had a truly disturbing conversation with the oldest sister. She kept asking me what she was going to do, she was truly worried about the safety and health of her younger siblings. With tears in my eyes I coached her on how to call 911 if needed, how to tell a teacher or an another adult if needed, to keep telling until someone listened. But I don't think she had any faith in any of that, after all here she was going back into her dysfunctional family, sent by the very system I was telling her to contact. My heart broke on that trip.

So many times the foster care system puts these kids back, gives the parents and families way too many chances, and it is the kids who are destroyed. It isn't any specific post of Cindy's that I am remembering but some of her references to how her sibling groups lived and survived in their birth environments and how often an older sibling tried desperately to parent and protect the younger siblings. It is heartbreaking to realize the responsibilities these young children must assume. As a foster parent we often face such tough experiences through our kids and it is in situations such as these we experience most fully our true total powerlessness within the decision making part of the system.

I still love and pray for you L, Nando, C and S.

Got a cute call

2008-06-19T20:42:00.005-04:00

(This photo is not truly relevant, just a sweet picture of a surprised baby, expressing the emotions I had when I got the cute call)

I don't think I mentioned that last week when DBG was with me she cut her hair, hacked off a huge swath and we had to go get a very short bob that only minimally disguised the damage. (wish I could show you the photo). Well today I get a call from her mom, and she says "I picked DBG up at daycare today and you wouldn't believe it" Yup she had hacked that hair again. Apparently she has a bald spot on her left side now and looks very goofy. Ahhh gotta love those natural consequences.

After I talked to mom for a bit and we chuckled about it, DBG got on the phone and told me she was going to glue her hair back on. She knew she was in trouble because she was trying to talk all sweet to me, "I love you Mama," etc. So since I am not going to see DBG for almost 3 weeks I asked mom to take some pics. It will be almost grown back in by the time I see her again, or at least I hope so. Don't know if I want to be escorting a patchy haired child to the zoo and the swim club!?!

I do love that mom is feeling comfortable enough again to call and chat over something like that. Our trust had eroded badly over an incident that got blown out of proportion by the social workers, but we seem to be getting back onto more solid ground again.

I am hoping that by making myself unavailable (truthfully so with my work ,but we could have arranged something if we had to) for the next 3 weeks that they might do a little more work at family building. I have resolved that I am not really helping them by taking her every weekend, I was selfishly serving my own needs, and convincing myself that DBG needed me. So I am going to be firm and only do every other weekend or even only once a month. It is time for this family to get it together and I really think they can. I wouldn't be risking DBG if I didn't believe that mom had it in her to succeed at this. She just needs a big push, so here I go with a push.

A Down Day

2008-06-18T19:12:00.002-04:00

don't know why, but I am a little blue today. I got a lot of good work done at work today preparing for our upcoming training series which starts next week. It is my job to fill that class and I have at least 8 families pretty solid so it looks good. The photocopy machine and I were in sync today which is unusual and I got most of my materials copied. Did some research on the book we are thinking of assigning as outside reading to our prospective foster and adoptive parents. So I got a lot done, I am still feeling down and yucky.

I figure it is still getting over being ill, I don't know.

Our summer is looking kind of crummy, I mean nowhere near as crummy as the folks in the Iowa flooding, but we don't have the resources to do any traveling and so our big trip to New York and Washington DC will have to be put on hold. My mother who lives in Connecticut and who would have been part of the visit is feeling pretty bummed that we won't be up to see them. Don't have any money to fix things up around the house, and so I might actually be forced to clean and organize, yikes.

Right now I am trying to convince myself to cook some dinner for Kendra and myself as DH is out at his men's meeting. But I haven't gotten very close to the kitchen. Kendra is entertaining herself watching season 3 of Grey's Anatomy up in her room, so it is quiet and boring.

The good news is that Douglas graduates on Friday from his military academy. He will be home again and I have really missed him. He is one who can motivate me to organize and clean because he is always pretty cheerful about being the muscle for projects. I have wanted to defrost my freezer all Spring so that I could give it to a young couple in our church who have gotten into canning, etc. big time, but it has to be moved to the drain, or better yet outside. The dolly is right there next to the freezer, but it has not willfully leapt onto the dolly, so Douglas is needed. If I move the freezer I can organize my laundry room more ergonomically and I won't hate doing the wash as much. (yeah, yeah, let me live in my fantasy land okay). And if the wash room is organized then the laundry that currently spills into my sewing room will not need to migrate there and so I can organize my sewing room and maybe get back into some quilting again. So there, I am glad Douglas will be home soon.

Performer of the Year

2008-06-17T19:54:00.003-04:00

Last year Kendra had the honor of being awarded the prestigious title of Performer of the Year. At her studio this is the big recognition that you have arrived as a dancer/performer. In order to win Performer of the Year (POTY), you not only have to show excellence in dance, vocals, and acting, you also must have performed in community shows, and most importantly the teachers must think that you will be a good role model for the younger students. POTY does not just come to you if you have danced at the studio enough years, etc. it is truly a prestigious award that tells the student that the teachers think the student is awesome as a performer and a person.

Part of the joy of being awarded POTY is that you get to be an assistant teacher and join the ranks of the in group of teachers. If you do well at assistant teaching for 2 years you then might get asked to have your own students but that is not a given. Kendra has truly taken on the teaching mantle with joy and responsibility. She is very determined to do a good job as an assistant teacher, she understands the task of a teacher to encourage, challenge, and support her students. The younger students flock around her and they love when she comes into class to demonstrate for them because she is very patient in breaking down the steps into manageable teaching moments.

Anyway, her year as POTY ended at this year's recital as she helped to award the title to the next student. Part of the tradition is that the POTY writes a speech. She gave me permission to print it here.

Last night when I was writing this I was watching Dora with DBG and she said I should talk about rainbows and cookies but I'm pretty sure that's not quite the right subject. Now when I was DBG's age I used to freak out when Miss Sandra announced Performer of the Year, even though I was three and still mastering the good ol' shuffle step. When I was 7 and I was working on my single turns I would convince myself that it was my year. When I was 12 and practicing those fouettes I would actually break down in tears the night before recital, but I'm a cry baby so that is par for the course with me. Through the years and dance steps I have realized that earning POTY takes time. commitment, patience, talent and a lot of hard work.

Last year my nerves were going crazy. I had heard some whispers about me being POTY and I was more than nervous. As I remember it I jumped a good 3 feet into the air when I heard my name. I was so ecstatic that I even named my trophy "Pinky". I kept Pinky by my side for the next little while. I actually took it to Quodoba (a Mexican chain restaurant) with me the Monday after recital, that's 3 days later folks, but I didn't take it in because I thought we might see Emily(a former POTY) and her mother there, and who did we see but Emily and Siri!!

A lot has changed for me in the last year, I started teaching which has been quite the experience. The girls have been great and they have taught me a lot too. I know that's cheesy, but cheesy is what we do here at Dancensation. I went to YPAS (the Youth Performing Arts School) which was a big change, I sprained my ankle in the Fall which set me back a little but all in all it has been a great year for me.

Right now when I have my minute with the mic I want to thank Sandra and Dancensation for everything they have given me which is a lot when you think about it. Dancensation has given me my best friends, my talent, and my second home. So here's to the new POTY whoever they may be. I hope they have a wonderful year.

Sick in the Summer, Bleah!!

2008-06-17T15:22:00.002-04:00

Well I got the strep throat too. I have been down and out since Sunday afternoon. I am finally feeling better but DH just went to bed feeling horrible. Luckily the DR gave me a prescription for his antibiotics just in case.

We have had the most gorgeous beautiful weather for the past three days, brilliant sunshine, blue sky with light puffy white clouds skidding by, and a Spring like temperature with no humidity. And guess what, I haven't felt like even sitting outside. What a waste. I hate being sick during the summer, February is a good time to get ill as all I want to do is cuddle in a blanket on the couch anyway, but June, no I should be gardening or swimming or hiking or camping or something, not laying on the couch moaning.

So today I am feeling a little better and I went outside to pull some weeds and stake up my tomato plants some more. I was only out there for maybe 30 minutes and I feel so drained I am going to have to take another nap.

But by tomorrow I am planning on being totally well, of course then I have to be at work all day, but I will swim when I get home.

Some more thoughts on dance

2008-06-15T12:00:00.003-04:00

13 years ago, I could never have foreseen myself sitting through two 3 hour long dance recitals, loving every minute of it! I was a tomboy myself, although my parents tried to civilize me with dance lessons and piano, etc. I always escaped to the football game with the boys, the rougher the better. I was initially blessed as a mother with 2 wonderful boys, who were all boy and we happily played in the mud and wrestled and climbed trees. We camped and hiked and were fascinated by spiders and snakes and I taught them how to throw and catch and all of it. I figured I had this mother thing down pretty pat and wasn't doing so bad on some of the more traditional father things either (DH is not much of one for the playing).

The we adopted and got 2 girls as part of the sibling group so I was introduced to dresses and such, but neither of my 2 girls were very girly. Given some of their early trauma, things like dance and frilly princess stuff just didn't come up.

And then Kendra was born, our joyful gift from God. Right from the get go she was a different person. She was not a rowdy baby, she was mostly happy and content. Then at 18 months old she started to insist on being who she was, A GIRLY GIRL. She refused to wear anything but dresses and had to have her hair up in curls and bows. Heck we didn't even own bows, I had to make some. She insisted on wearing dressy shoes, no practical sneakers for her. And at 18 months she announced she wanted to be a dancer. I was floored, I don't even know where she got the idea. We were never around girls who took dance class, but she was insistent. My mother got her a VCR tape of little girls doing a ballet class and that is all the child wanted to watch. She would watch and imitate and soon had the moves memorized.

But she wanted to go to a real class she kept insisting. We bought tutus and ballet shoes and when she was toilet trained I found a great little dance studio on the recommendation of a friend. Thus began Kendra's obsession with dance. When all the other 2 year olds clung to their mothers and cried about going out on stage, Kendra marched right out, found her mark and waited in opening pose. She has never looked back.

And how my life has changed. I learned to sew and design costumes (because dance is expensive!) I learned about makeup, something I had never used my whole life. I learned about competitions and auditions and shows. And every step of the way Kendra has blossomed and grown.

The studio where she dances is fabulous. I don't really know about the quality of dance but it must be good enough as each year several of the dancers are accepted to the Youth Performing Arts high school and they only take 20 dancers for each freshman class from across the whole city/county. The reason I say her studio is fabulous is because of everything she has learned there. The values of the director and her teaching staff are awesome. They do not push the girls just to get awards, they push them to be their best in every area of their life. The role models of sober, hardworking, family loving adults is one that is awesome.

Kendra considers the studio her second home and it is one that I feel comfortable leaving her at. The friends she has developed are the right kind of girls and boys. They are focused on dance and school and giving back to the community (a big part of this studio's philosophy). The parents are involved and know what their children are doing and with whom. There is a level of trust there that is pretty awesome.

Kendra has been able to explore who she is in a welcoming and accepting and forgiving environment. There is always plenty of drama, get 100 teens together anywhere and you will have drama, but the teachers keep a lid on it and model how to live life better.

Every so often my DH or I question the monetary commitment we have made to Kendra's dance but then something will come along to remind us of how lucky we are that our teenage daughter has a circle of peers and adults who are going the right way. Her path to adulthood has been smoothed in many ways by her participation in dance. She is never bored, she never has nothing to do, she has tremendous self-confidence, and she is developing great teaching skills as she is now an assistant teacher.

Solos have taught Kendra how to focus and improve herself, being part of a dance group has taught her loyalty and responsibility. Being a teacher has taught her empathy and patience.

Being a dance Mom has taught me to respect each of my children as unique individuals, and has taught me to a friend myself to the other dance moms.

I can't remember the last time I played touch football but just yesterday I was at dance and I'll be there tomorrow too.

Grand Recital Kendra

2008-06-15T11:48:00.006-04:00

Kendra absolutely loves to dance. In almost every single picture we have of her she is smiling and grinning. She dances everything with a big smile, whether it is ballet or just technique class. The girl loves to dance, it is her life.

Pictures from Recital DBG

2008-06-15T11:38:00.005-04:00

I make a lot of the costumes for my girls' dances. Here you see the monkey costume that DBG wore. They tapped to "We're going to the zoo"

The other picture is waiting in the audience, here she is between her little cousin (foreground) and her birth father.

Most of the other pictures I can't share since she is such a performer she is front and center, square on to the camera with a big smile on her face.

Dance Recital

2008-06-15T11:17:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was the grand recital for Kendra's and DBG's studio. It was a big deal for Kendra as she was relinquishing her title as Performer of the Year (POTY) and crowning the new POTY. DBG was also very excited as she was getting a TROPHY!!! I know I just shouted but that is what she has been doing all week. DBG also got the Tiniest tot Award II, she was the tiniest tot last year and this year, that is how young she was last year when she preformed! She is a natural performer and just loves being up on the stage. Not a lick of stage fright or concern. She even knew her dance!

Her parents came and brought her cousin and baby brother. We had a good time. The only down part was that recital spanned nap time and by the time it was all over and she had her trophy clenched in her hands it was time for a big meltdown. It was not pretty, but we managed and she is now back home with her parents and we won't see her (because of our busy schedules) for 3 weeks.

I hope to get Kendra's permission to publish her speech as Performer of the Year here, she did a fabulous job.

Sickies

2008-06-10T20:00:00.003-04:00

No we have not dropped off the face of the earth. I have several sickies. What is it with getting strep throat in the summer? I thought that was a winter thing. But both Kendra and Dancing Baby Girl have strep and DBG has an ear infection that is oozing goo out of her tubes. Yuck and yuck.

Oh, I know what you are thinking, it's Tuesday why am I blogging about DBG being here? Well she is here for the week. We had great plans to go swimming and to the park, etc. but mostly we have sat and watched Dora dvds until I want to run screaming for the padded room. But DBG has actually been a good little patient and seems to be on the getting better end of the ordeal.

Of course with two sick children I am now in paranoia mode, when will I get it? My DH is already convinced he must be sick although he has no fever or sore throat, but he still claims complaining rights apparently. I so hope he doesn't get sick, he is not such a good patient and lately every time he does get sick it seems to linger and he has a hard time recovering. So no strep for hubby please!

Brooke's home visit

2008-06-04T21:00:00.003-04:00

Brooke (in her prom dress and hairstyle) was home for several days this week. We had a good visit, we went grocery shopping, to the zoo and then picked up a few outfits for her. She learned how to use the Wii to bowl and got a huge kick out of me playing Guitar Hero. We had a good time all in all.

During the two days she also had several anxiety attacks, followed me around the house, even stood outside the door to my bathroom while I was using it, asked the same questions over and over and persevarated over food. That is life with Brooke.

Suffering from prenatal alcohol exposure, mental retardation, and a host of mental health issues ranging from anxiety to psychosis, Brooke has had a rough time of it. But with the support of many fine professionals and our constant presence in her life she really seems to be coming out the other side. She is calmer, more accepting of her life and far more willing to accept direction, love and care from those around her. There were many times that we thought her best result would be a locked psych facility if it wasn't jail. She was so violent in a crazy, crazed way, violent to herself and to others, indiscriminate in her violence and really quite scary that we were not sure she would survive. But she has and she is now blossoming.

Brooke is in a group home for young adults with mental handicaps, she is still in public school until next year when she turns 21 (hence the prom). And she is doing great. She has the structure she needs, the expectations she can live with and the wonderful care of some truly loving staff. Do I wish she could live with us? Yes. Is it possible right now? NO. Despite her major improvements she is still very volatile and we still have younger, smaller ones who need to be protected from her potential violence. Do I see a time when she might be able to live with us? Yes, but I also see a time when she will want to live independently in the community with minimal helps, and that is such a positive, wonderful goal that it makes me cry each time I think if how far we have come as a family with her.

You are in the wrong place so I don't know you

2008-06-04T20:20:00.003-04:00

I saw one of the little ones that I used to provide a lot of respite for. She apparently didn't recognize me. It has been about 2 months or maybe three since we last had some time together and since then she has transitioned to her adoptive placement. Still I would have thought a flicker of recognition since I had known her since she was 4 months old, provided respite a week or more at a time over the period of more than a year. But nothing, she didn't know me at all.

I was at the office when I saw her and dressed in my business clothes with a new haircut. I am actually thinking she didn't know me because I was in the wrong place with the wrong people. I am hoping that if I saw her in a more familiar setting with some of my kids around me she would remember me, we were pretty close.

But maybe that is how it should be. She is happily settled into her adoptive placement and she has a new Mommy and Daddy and a new sister. Her foster mother gave her a wonderful loving foundation and I did my part as a member of the village that supported her.

It is interesting how much of a blow to my ego it was though.

Garden dinner

2008-05-31T21:56:00.004-04:00

Tonight we had a substantial salad based on my garden offerings. Too bad the tomatoes are not in yet although they are coming right along. It is so great to be able to feed the family at least in part with what I have grown with my own two hands. I had not gardened in so long I had forgotten the true joy of growing and harvesting food.

I wish I had more space to grow things. Living in the city on a small lot with tall trees and houses all around I have only a small patch of my yard that gets enough sun. I plan on making as much use of that patch as I can.

Wish you all could have had a bite of my salad, fresh lettuce, spinach leaves, onions, sage, rosemary and mint all just picked five minutes before.

Texting but not Communicating

2008-05-27T06:58:00.004-04:00

Yup, it's Annie again, messing with my mind and driving me crazy. I just do not know how to communicate with her, every attempt descends into her misinterpreting some carefully crafted response (crafted in an attempt to be totally non-threatening, judgemental, etc) and her responding with anger spewed forth in hateful language.

Here is the text session from last night:

Annie: Mom we need to talk cos I don't think (the placement) is buying me another laptop. (Her laptop apparently got misplaced while staff was moving her into a lock down facility after her last AWOL and subsequent self-harm and aggressive episode, although there is a lot of speculation that Annie took it and sold it for drugs)

Me: I will talk with (case manager) in the morning during business hours about it. I know u r frustrated. Do u want 2 talk when u have free minutes? (about 10 mins. from this exchange?)

Annie: Thanks a lot! B%$#*

Me: Okay we r not communicating well, do u want me 2 call u?

Annie: This is why I hate u, why I never want to come home, I want to stay here where at least some one cares about me. (inappropriate language edited)

Me: I ll call u

She refuses to pick up the phone the rest of the evening.

This is my life with Annie. Every effort to meet her needs, to help her in any way even when she requests the help is rejected. She lives in a world where everyone is against her, where my non-threatening, non-judgemental responses are seen as negative. Rereading this I am not sure what happened. That is often how one feels when dealing with Annie.

The thing is the kid is smart, but she doesn't get really basic things. She can handle technology really well, she knows how to send pictures and exchange ring tones on her phone, but she doesn't seem to understand that these things cost extra on her prepaid plan and so she is constantly running out of minutes. And of course I am somehow to blame for this because I wouldn't sign her up for a contract phone. The fact that she has no job or money shouldn't stand in the way of her getting a contract phone now should it?

I spin in frustrated circles.

Reunificiation Blues

2008-05-26T20:31:00.004-04:00

Family for Dancing Baby Girl is such a hard thing to determine. Here she is with her baby brother with whom she now lives with her birth mother and birth father. But she misses her big brother who was TPRed and is in the process of being adopted. And she doesn't want to live with her birth parents. She wants to live with her former foster family, that's us. She considers herself the little sister to Kendra and Bart and Douglas and the others, and she is bound and determined that I am her mother and DH is her dad.

When she visitis us she announces "I home now, I stay here at home." She goes around and touches the furniture, her bedroom, etc and announces this is mine. She declares her love to us in words and hugs and cuddles.

And when it is time to go home to her parents at the end of the weekend she pitches a huge fit and screams that she doesn't want to go to Mommy >>>'s house, she doesn't like her, etc.

So am I doing DBG any good by having her to my house almost every weekend at the birth mother's request? I just don't know. I love having her with me, I try to establish boundaries and really tried to taper off the visits to at least every other weekend, but Birthmom always pleads no babysitter, except the grandpa who is not ideal.

We go to the zoo, go to the pool, take walks, play games, fingerpaint, dress up, go grocery shopping, read books at bedtime. For me it is great and in each short weekend it is great for DBG also. But in the long run is it good for her? If I thought I was keeping her from bonding time with her birth mother I would be very reluctant to take her, but birthmom works Sat. and doesn't appear to do much with the kid except park her in front of the TV at other times. So.....what am I to do?

I am not sure what the right thing is here.

Playing The Day (and night) Away

2008-05-21T19:50:00.006-04:00

Well I have found a new way to spend my time in relatively meaningless ways. I am now a Guitar Hero. That's not me, that's my far more photogenic and far better guitar playing daughter. We have been having the most fun rocking out to these songs and acting the goof as we do it. Instead of style points we are getting convulsive laughter points. I apparently hold that record, looking the silliest while playing. I have sent Kendra and her friends into paroxysms of laughter while I have rocked out trying to stay on beat and at least get to the end of the song.

Actually we have been having a blast and I love that it is interactive. Kendra and I had gotten into a dry spell where it was all about where I had to drive her next or what chore I was nagging her about now. So it has been refreshing to have something else to converse about and to share. Laughter goes a long way and I don't mind being the butt of the joke when I am deliberately acting the clown.

Somethings I have learned, or perhaps relearned, from playing Guitar Hero:

I have no rhythm at all

I am tone deaf and unable to anticipate the notes

I get rattled easily and then I just start pushing buttons randomly

I should not sing along with the songs, it is painful to my audience

I really like playing the game and I have quite a competitive streak

So I now have a new vice to overcome, blog reading, eating snacks, procrastinating about the housework and now Guitar Hero.

College Days

2008-05-20T09:55:00.008-04:00

James was at the 2008 UPA College Ultimate Championships with his team from UC Santa Cruz, the Banana Slugs. Unfortunately James hurt his hamstring in the first half of the first game and had to sit out the first day. So their hopes of a championship were lost but they had a great time. As you can see from the picture above, the location was just amazing. And the weather pretty much cooperated. My DH had flown out for the event and had a grand time with James and his teammates.

Frisbee has been very important for James and his older brother Bart. They have played through high school and college and in city leagues every summer. Bart is the president of the local league. It seems to be a wonderful community of people, one that polices itself both on and off the field.

Now James has to buckle down for the next eight days and get through the end of the semester. He will be starting his Senior year in the Fall and I am hoping this year has been a good one for him. He really worked hard to get to UC Santa Cruz, it was his dream from his Jr. year in high school. But there was no way we could afford out of state tuition. Instead of shattering his dreams this news motivated him to take responsibility for making it happen himself. He moved out to Cali at the end of his high school time and lived on his own for 3 years establishing residency. He took courses at the Junior College and worked at restaurants and retail establishments. Then he got himself accepted at Santa Cruz as a transfer student for his Jr year. We re so proud of him for following through on his dreams. I think they will be that much more important to him since he has accomplished them on his own.

Go James, I hope your leg feels better.

Another Dancing Baby Girl Weekend

2008-05-17T21:33:00.004-04:00

Well I wasn't sure we were going to be able to see Dancing Baby girl this weekend. So far things have not imploded, I am still on good terms with Mom and we had a wonderful short weekend. I could tell that stuff was up though, because Mom had not left her overnight bag at the daycare for when I picked her up, but we survived without blankie for one night. And today Mom called to check twice that I was still meeting her at the pick up point at the designated time, kind of weird vibes.

Still, DBG was in a great mood and we had a wonderfully fun time. Since I had gotten her a little earlier than usual we stopped in at her old daycare to say hi and she played on the playground with her friends for about 1.5 hours. (Jessica we stopped in to see you, but your sign on your door said you were out). Then we went shopping for her little brother's birthday present.

Bedtime was great, a real snuggle fest and she went right to sleep. We had a great dance class in the AM and then she and I went to the park and hung out almost all afternoon. We played at the playground and then we went down to the creek and spent hours throwing rocks and sticks and leaves in the water and watching them flow downstream. It was a great relaxing time and it reminded me how seldom she gets a chance to be out in nature and just hang out.

When all of our other kids were young we went camping all the time and they really had a blast being out in the woods and around lakes, rivers, mountain climbing, etc. DBG has never really seen that side of us. So today was a pretty glorious day.

When I had to take her back this afternoon (so she could be home for brother's birthday tomorrow) she was a little unhappy but cheered up when her Mom reminded her that her cousin was coming over tomorrow. So we had a good weekend and even made plans for next weekend. Keep our fingers crossed that everything stays nice and calm and on an even keel.

Everybody is in flux

2008-05-14T20:48:00.005-04:00

Every last one of the kiddos is in the throes of change, angst, emotional upheaval of some kind, and desperately needing their parents at least to hate on them. DH and I are reeling from the demands.

Some of the change is good, and developmentally appropriate. Bart is moving into a house with a friend and he has needed advice, cleaning supplies and general moral support.

James is flying high as his Ultimate Frisbee team from UC Santa Cruz is going to the nationals this weekend in boulder Colorado. He is happy, excited and really wants some of his family to be there, so even though DH has just flown in this AM from Shreveport, LA and has to drive up to Lansing and Kalamazoo on Sunday evening, he is nonetheless flying out to Boulder tomorrow AM to see the Frisbee tournament. He flies back on Sun noon and leaves for Michigan Sunday at 5 or so. DH is physically exhausted, but James needs one of us there.

Brooke is not dealing well with the transition from school to summer break. She is having some issues in her Supported Community Living placement and as is her way as she becomes upset she is holding her bowels and they are talking about a hospitalization again. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it almost always goes all that way. At least she is kind of used to all the procedures now and she is less frightened of the whole experience. Nonetheless she is calling in tears or angry, demanding that we fix things, or change things or somehow make her life less hard than it is. It is very sad to deal with Brooke as she is just a 4 or 5 year old in a 21 year old body and there are so many things she doesn't understand or deal well with.

Annie has been calling and texting me until I want to scream as she is trying to convince me that she is somehow miraculously cured of all her issues, Traumatic Brain Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. See if she has turned her life around and now understands everything she has done wrong and has broken up with her old boyfriend we should know that she is ready to live out on her own and she is going to go live with this new man she met on MySpace because he understands her in every way, unlike us or her therapeutic team. My head just spins when I deal with her and most conversations end with her screaming curses, threats and everything else at me. Thank God she hasn't been able to pull the wool over her new therapist eyes and no one is ready to let her out of the lock down facility just yet. Too often I let her circular thinking get me all wound up and spend way to much of MY time thinking about how to reach her.

Douglass was home this weekend and it was great to see him but he only went back reluctantly to his military school despite the fact that he only has 5 more weeks left. I was feeling very guilty that I had encouraged him to go to this program as he lost the chance to do the one thing that truly makes him happy, be a camp counselor this summer. His military school doesn't end until 2-3 weeks after camp starts and the camp was not willing to keep a counselor slot open for him. He is feeling really bad and rejected. And I am feeling really bad too. He deserves a better deal after working so hard to overcome his issues and get his life in a forward moving direction. I just hope he wont let his anger explode and undo all he has worked so hard to accomplish. It is hard to see your baby hurting and disappointed even when he is a hulking young man who is half a foot taller than you.

Kendra is finishing her freshman year at the magnet school and is feeling all sorts of pressure to get ready for exams, etc. She has been pretty demanding of our time to help her, using homework as an excuse to not help around the house and snappy and emotional. I feel all I do is walk on eggshells around her right now and that all I do is drive her to dance stuff. Typical teenage stuff, nothing bad or unusual, I am just not at the top of my game and it is telling in my dealing with her.

Finally, Dancing Baby Girl is involved in a situation in which I have to sit back and let the professionals do their thing and I have no trust for these particular professionals and I am scared for her, her family and for my continued relationship with her and her family. There are so many ways this could not end well and so few ways to see it go right that I lie awake at night and just shake.

Sometimes I really feel like there is just not enough of me (or DH) to go around at all. I surely don't see how families that are bigger than ours get through the inevitable tough times when everyone is crashing down or just needing parents.

Douglass is 18!

2008-05-10T21:18:00.004-04:00

Douglass is 18 and seems to be sprouting some wings. He may be the only one of my adopted children able to leave the nest without disrupting relationships.

Anyway we love having him home this weekend from his military school. We gave him a Wii for his birthday and he and his friend just commented that this is the most fun they have had in a long time and they weren't trying to kill things on the little screen. We are having lots of good natured rivalry as they play tennis, golf and bowling. We are saving Guitar Hero for a little later. I love to hear all of the kids interacting with one another as they play together. It has been a good evening.

Douglass is preparing to take his GED in late May and he is finishing his first community college course. He has goals and plans (plans that are actually within the realm of possibility) and seems to be confident enough to push through when the goals are harder to achieve than he plans. I just love to see the maturity blossoming.

Happy birthday, big guy. I love you!

Things are not going to end well

2008-05-10T08:11:00.003-04:00

We are going to be in the middle of mess for the next little while. It involves Dancing Baby Girl and some things she has said. Enough for now, unfortunately. Pray for all of us, especially DBG. This has the potential to blow everything up and make her situation that much worse.

Who Are You? And What Have You done With My Son?

2008-05-06T19:12:00.005-04:00

This is my son Bart with his Wangu village family in South Africa. He is the tallest white dude. I love my son and I am so proud of him and all he has accomplished in his life. He is a good man and one that I am honored to know. He was my first birth child and really our tester child, he got all the bad parenting until we learned that method or this method didn't work. Sometimes I feel really bad about that. but he and we have survived.

Occasionally he really surprises me with the things that he does. Most of the time he is a very mellow, laid back kind of guy who puts a lot of time into his friendships and relationships and doesn't sweat some of the other aspects of life, like a "real" job, etc. I have had to really learn to bite my tongue as he goes about living his life in a different fashion than I lived mine. Remember he is the oldest and I am always having to relearn how to let go with him.

Anyway, a helper around the house he is not. Things being messy or needing to be straightened just don't get on his radar. He also doesn't tend to exert effort where it is not needed in his opinion. So if he can get a younger sib to do it, its all good for him.

So, on Sunday he was moving out again, its kind of musical rooms with him, in and out of apartments over the years, in between he comes back to his room here. He and his bud had found a great house to rent and they were moving all his stuff out. After they left I went into the kitchen to takeout the garbage and discovered that it had been taken out and the recycling bucket had also been placed at the curb. Apparently my reaction to this was quite surprised as my wonderfully sarcastic 15 year old said "What do you think? someone stole the garbage?"

Lo and behold, my son saw that the garbage and the recycling were about to over flow and dealt with it with no fanfare, etc. Well, okay one thing out of the ordinary that's okay. Then he comes home and asks if he can cut the lawn for me!! You could have knocked me over with a feather. That is not a task he has ever enjoyed and I had to browbeat him into it any other time. This time he says "I noticed the lawn was getting long and I only work a short shift on Tuesday so I'll be by to cut it if you want me to."

You realize by now I am beginning to suspect alien abduction, maybe strange mind reprogramming like The Stepford Sons, perhaps body snatchers?!? And then to top it off, just so I would know it wasn't really my son walking around in that skin, he told me that he and his bud had tilled half the backyard in their new house to put in a big vegetable garden. He was asking me for some pointers about what vegetables to plant. So I had to ask him "Who are you? and what have you done with my son?"

Of course this is mostly tongue in cheek, I think it is great that he is going to be doing some gardening. And I have noticed other signs of a maturity that hadn't been there before. I really like what I see.

Maybe I haven't made that many mistakes as a parent.

Support Group

2008-05-05T09:41:00.004-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I went to our monthly foster/Adoptive Parent Support Group and it was a good experience. It is wonderful to spend an hour and half with a group of folks who get it! There was no concerns about how the folks in the room were going to react, everyone got the sad humor that gets us through and keeps us going. It was nice not to have to preface everything with long explanations and the whole dysfunction of the system was not something that we had to dwell on. Instead we could share some constructive ways to handle pressing behaviors and had a good talk about boundaries within the home.

A number of families have recently experienced the sorrow of having a long term placement move on and it was a safe place to express that grief. Losing a child is a very isolating experience, but losing a foster child is doubly isolating. Very few people can relate to the heartrending that goes on as a child is transitioned into their new placement, whether it is reunification or adoption. How to explain to your foster child, how to explain to your own children, how to explain to yourself that for whatever reasons the child can no longer stay with you despite the love you have shared.

We also talked about the inevitable pulling away or shielding of our hearts that occurs as the transition takes place. And how that impacts our parenting in the last few weeks of placement. We decided we need a group session on grief and loss for just those FPs who are involved in reunification.

What's the point of trying?

2008-05-03T22:41:00.003-04:00

I am so frustrated and sad and hopeless and angry that I don't know whether to scream or cry. It's all about Annie, again, as usual. That's her in the red sweatshirt about 5 years ago at one of our church suppers. I like to find the older pictures of Annie because I prefer to remember her before I felt so frustrated...(see above).

It was Annie's 19th birthday at the end of April so Doug and I radically rearranged our schedules to both go down to her placement (5.5 hours away) to see her, spend some time with her and attend a staffing. As you may have read from some of my other posts Annie is not doing well in her placement and most of her staff and her attending therapeutic types all have compassion fatigue. Annie wears folks out.

However, our intention in going to see her was to make her birthday a positive event and try to give her a little boost. We went out to dinner the first night and had some good talks about the rest of the family and how everyone was doing, we were able to laugh and be a little lighthearted. Then we went shopping for her birthday presents and she really liked that. We actually got a smile or two out of her and a spontaneous hug.

The next morning we had her staffing and the first part was without her where the staff expressed a lot of their concerns and frustrations, then Annie joined us and it went downhill from there. We just went in circles until we were all dizzy and never did we move off of square one. Annie expressed that she really wanted to get enough independent living skills to move into a supervised apartment. So we went over what steps she needed to take. She needed to go to the job skills classes they had set up for her and work with her job coach, but Annie doesn't want to do that, she wants to get a job in the community right away. No amount of examples, explanations or stories from our own experiences could convince her that she needed in any way to change her attitudes, habits, and responses to redirection in order to succeed at a job. It was the most useless thing I have done in a long while. She can cognitively state what she needs to do in the abstract but resists putting even the most basic steps into practice in the real world.

But after that we regrouped as a family, had a good lunch together and she and I went shopping again for some of the things she needed that weren't birthday presents. After that we wanted to take a short hike in the beautiful state park they have but the weather had turned nasty and Annie was experiencing some bronchitis again (a chronic condition linked to her cigarette usage and her extreme obesity) so we didn't do that. When we took her back to her residence she seemed to be in a great space, was showing her peers her birthday presents and showed every evidence of being in good spirits.

However, looks can be deceiving, shortly after we left she up and AWOLed from the program. She was out more than 24 hours and they put out a missing persons alert on her. After about 36 hours she called a staff member and said she was lost and they picked her up. She has no reason she can express for going out and partying at the local crack houses, trading for her drugs and putting herself at such extreme risk.

I don't know, I don't see the point any more. We have poured so much effort into helping this kid, finding the best programs to help her address her needs, doing everything in our power to keep her safe, to teach her how to make better choices, and let her know that she is loved. We went to see her, gave her presents and the sum of it was she ran again. I told her she was teaching me that it was dangerous for me to go see her because she ran away when I did. I told her she was teaching me that maybe I should just send a card next time. Boy she didn't like hearing that.

So every since she came back she has been flooding us with phone calls all about how angry she is that the staff packed her stuff up without her being there (uh duh, she was still on the lam) and that they had not done a good job. And she doesn't like her new residence and especially doesn't like that the doors are locked (uh duh, you just went AWOL and engaged in dangerous behaviors while out). She also says her new room is smaller and she doesn't have enough dresser space. Not a word of contrition, not a word of reflection on her behavior, not a scrap of understanding or empathy for what she put us through again. And what makes me most angry is she doesn't care at all that some of her peers had to shift residences to accommodate her move. Her negative behavior gave someone else bad or at least not the best consequences and she doesn't care a stitch. Oh I want to shake her, no wait that is what her BM did when she was small and that's why we are on this merry go round, so skip the shaking, I want to make her see what she has done, but that's useless so what's the point?!?!

Despair is a dark and cold place to be, I think I liked denial better, at least we could pretend we were making progress and that things might get better in time. No despair is a pretty final place to be without hope, without goals, even without ideas, and that is where I am right now.