Foster Further

 Last week - 80s. Today 60s with a low in the 40s overnight.  I just came inside from tucking the animals in for the night. The goats are usually outside all summer with just a run-in shelter for cover from the rain. Given that it'll be cold with heavy rain overnight, I decided to open back up their winter pen. One of the goats had apparently decided to eat her way to warmth and she was so unbelievably fat that it took her three heaves to wedge herself through the doorway. I refrained from laughing at her. Because even goats know when they're being laughed at. It was a half hour event in chicken wrangling to get the mama hen and her tiny chicks back into their shelter. I had to move the crate and then prop up her little house on something waterproof and add fresh bedding so they'd stay dry through the night even when it rained. All of this action invited the teenage brood to come investigate and once they saw the free food they wouldn't leave. Wrangling the mama hen and...

 On Friday I speak with our therapist via Zoom. He is part of a group that specializes in adoption. We've met about 4 times now and it occurs to me that I should be writing down some ideas and suggestions he has for me. And then recording how it goes when I try to follow through.  Last week we discussed Jane's habit of baby talking. It irritates the hell out of me and nothing I've tried has worked to extinguish the behavior. After listening to all my strategies that have failed he said something along the lines of, "meet the need while ignoring the behavior". Meaning--she's baby talking as an expression of a desire for mothering/care/attention so meet that need without reinforcing that she has to baby talk in order to get it. Rather, ignore the speech altogether.  This sounds like an excellent idea. It is also almost impossible to do in practice. I'm pretty much failing utterly. Can't think of a single successful example.  All I can say is that I am su...

 While reading a blog by an adoptee I ran across this quote: "I love my adoptive parents and I hate that I was adopted."  I don't know why the harsh simplicity of that statement spoke to me so strongly but it literally stopped my eyes on the page. I reread and reread it. There it is. All the complexity of adoption in one simple sentence. All the beauty and pain; love and fear; the lived journey and missing holes; simply, the truth. After clicking on this author's bio I read an entire post about Adoption Loyalty. It spoke about how the adoptee fears loss to such an extent that he/she will fake being okay about his/her adoption in order to avoid displeasing the adoptive parents. When adoptive parents pretend all is okay then the adoptee must also pretend or fear being rejected again. So well written and powerful. I've read a lot about adoptees rejecting their parents but never before have I seen a lengthy essay about this painful form of loyalty.  Thing to mull over...

 My nephew and his wife, both in their 30s and with two young daughters, just announced on Facebook that they have begun the adoption process. They specifically want a boy. The post came with a family picture of the girls holding a chalkboard stating they were "waiting for our brother". The post, written by the wife, focused on the fact that while they considered foster care and foreign adoption and interviewed many different domestic adoption agencies, they finally chose one agency several states away from where they live specifically because this was the only agency that would allow them to choose the gender of the baby to be adopted.  So, so much to unpack here.  a) You can specify gender when going into foster care. The state wants placements to be successful so they require you to specify a host of factors: age, gender, race, numbers and ages of children, types of disability you can/cannot cope with, etc.  In reality, she rejected foster care for other reasons...