Foster Further

We were on vacation at the beach for a week. All the kids love this spot and the three littles played nonstop in the water and sand. Jane was swimming without her floatie by the second day. She went to the beach twice each day--morning and evening--and had to be lured out of the water during the heat of the day with promises of food and cartoons. The big boys love that she's fearless and were helping her jump waves and even tossing her about in the water. It was the most fun I've seen them have with her. By the sixth day she was exhausted. Sleeping 12-14 hours each night. She even told me she wanted to go home. Honestly, I could relate...that much fun IS exhausting. We get home and everyone takes a day or two to recover. Pretty much just laundry and laying around. By day 3 post-vacation everyone else is back to normal. Not Jane. Today is Day 4 and she's still all out of sorts. Yesterday she was non-stop naughty in that passive-aggressive, under-the-radar way she has. She ha...

We have returned home from an 8 day road trip to visit family over the Christmas break. We left about noon on the 26th and spent that night in a hotel. The 27th was spent visiting the girls' aunt, uncle and cousins who moved out of state last summer. They live in the mountains and it was a new experience for we flatlanders to visit this beautiful area. I climbed straight up the small hill that is their front yard five times in two hours to take three kids on five potty trips from where they were playing with the neighbor's toys. Theo, the big boys, and the cousins all hiked to the top of the little mountain behind their home. It was the steepest hill any of them had ever climbed and to get back they simply sat on their butts in the dried leaves and slid back home. (Only later thinking about snakes.) This aunt has been invaluable to me and I truly enjoy her. It was a great visit and makes me committed to keeping in touch with their family. I drove away with lots of thoughts ...

Quick Update: a few days ago Grandma's sister, Aunt H, called me to warn me that Grandma had snuck her son into a family event so he could see two of his children (he has five kids by three women; our girls are his youngest two). She'd begged us to allow her to take the girls, by herself, to this same event. So, she'd been actively trying to give her child-molesting son contact with our two young daughters. I need to remember this fact every time she asks for any contact with the girls. I was remembering this at the Christmas Eve service at the church last night. The girls were performers in the pageant (a sheep and a dog) and after I'd been given a program I realized that their names were probably in it. Grandma didn't have a program. I felt this cold chill and realized that if she took a program with her then she'd probably give it to her son, who lives with her, and then he'd see our last names in print. So, I hid my program and we went through the serv...

This December 25th I'm giving myself the gift of peace. Which means I will, as needed, step away and journal, blog, or read. I will not be present every moment. And that's just fine. I'm not nearly as indispensable as I think I am.  Case in point, Theo is already taking a nap on the couch in the midst of kids playing. If he can fall asleep surely I can step out of the room. And while I'm patting myself on the back. Here's the single smartest thing I've ever done. Two days ago I removed 3/4ths of their toys and stashed them in the garage where they'll rotate back into play in a few months. I then had empty tubs waiting for the new toys to go into today. As the kids tired of one toy and asked to open another gift I quietly removed the toy and put it into a tub. I felt calm and peaceful each time I cleaned up their space and there was room for them to enjoy a new toy. This may be the biggest mom-win of my entire life. Seriously. First Impressions: Now I kno...

After putting Jane to bed and writing most of the previous post, I got a call from the girl's aunt who has moved out of state. We'll be visiting her family on our way to FL. We're chatting when she suddenly changes the topic (I later realized someone walked out of the room so she could speak freely) and she tells me point blank to never, ever allow Grandma to take the girls out on her own. That Grandma absolutely will put them in contact with their father who is a convicted sexual predator of young children. That Grandma did that with his other kids by another mother over Thanksgiving. There are pictures on FB to prove it. And the girl was instructed, by Grandma, to lie to her parents about who had been at the Thanksgiving party. This is the same family party that Grandma BEGGED us to allow her to take the girls to. She tried every which way to get them there. And I felt super bad about denying her at the time but on an instinctual level it felt wrong for us to let them...

At church last Sunday as all the pageant moms were shepherding their kids through the process of trying on costumes and rehearsing the songs, I commiserated with another mom that when my husband hears the command to prepare your heart during Advent he goes quiet and still and deep in liturgies and songs and prayers. (He's a lovely father during Advent. He uses his homemade box to reveal an activity each night. It's wonderful. I am glad he does this.) When I hear that command I begin making five page lists documenting every gift, recipe, craft project, cleaning project, packing-the-family-for-a-road-trip-to-Florida task that must be done. And then start cramming as many tasks as possible into every outing so that we are getting haircuts, mailing Christmas cards, going to the chiropractor, returning library books, shopping for groceries, picking up that weird gift that can only be found at that one store on the other side of town---- every single time we leave the house . Oh ...

The facts: due to Thanksgiving chaos, in the past three weeks Jane has faced a slew of obstacles. 1) We revisited birth family in a home she used to go to often for the first time in a year--lots of memories triggered by being in that space again. 2) We traveled out of state and were gone from home for 4 nights--a major disruption to her sleep and sense of security. 3) Something like 30+ people we rarely see were a part of those visits--this highly social girl is exhausted. 4) Due to the travel we missed two dance classes and two O.T. sessions--big factors in her physical well-being. 5) She's 4 years old and only one year into a safe environment and really, only a few months into feeling calm and safe every day. So, looking at it like that, of course I should expect negative consequences, right? Honestly, looking at those factors it's been much smoother than it could've been. I see that she's more hyper, less able to focus on toys, more prone to pestering the ...

Jane is struggling since we were at Ken's house for a pre-Thanksgiving meal a few days ago. She is clearly distracted and sad. She says to me that she wants to be alone, doesn't want Kate or James to bother her, that she just wants me to hold her all day and read books to her. During one of our holding sessions today she cried about a whole range of things. It started with Ken and the toys at his house and went to her cousin, Gabby. Then on to missing her birth mother and all the stuffed animals and her Minnie Mouse bed. Objects figure hugely into Jane's world. She is very much like her grandmother, who absolutely must bring gifts to every visit. No matter how raggedy or cheap it is she has a deep compulsion to give gifts to show her love (she once brought me an entire grocery bag of worn out teen-sized shoes reeking of smoke that she said her friend had 'pulled out of the back of the closet'. They went straight to the trash). And Jane is thrilled every time. Th...

We're home from an early Thanksgiving at Papa Ken's house. Safe and sound--except for the girls' emotional rollercoaster that will, I expect, play out over the next day or so. Reading all the scary stuff about the girls' pasts last night, as well as my FB stalking of maternal grandfather, Mike and his guns definitely freaked Theo out, too. This morning he was hunting through our paperwork to take with us legal documents proving we're their foster parents. I took a picture of the girls just before we left in case I needed to give it to the police. This is how we both think now and I am not okay with it. We got there around 11am. Ken's house is a run down 20 year old mobile home. He has never been married or had kids and he's been employed in good jobs his whole life--where does his money go? I was surprised to see how dumpy his property is. Except that maybe an old bachelor with a tendency to hoarding just doesn't care.  There were piles and piles of ...

Tomorrow we take our whole family to spend an early Thanksgiving dinner with Papa Ken*, who is a sorta grandfather figure because he was maternal grandma's boyfriend during Ava's early years. Ken and Laura (Leah's mother) had already broken up by the time we got the girls but somehow he was still getting the girls at his house, every weekend, for the year before they came to us. In addition to Jane and Kate going every weekend he also got Gabby, the girls' cousin (Leah's sister's daughter). He still sees Gabby fairly regularly. Gabby is about 7, I think. Gabby's mom, Nikki, is Leah's twin sister but luckily they don't look anything alike. Imagine if she did--would we let her see the girls for fear that they'd think it was their mother? Would I fear that it was Leah for real, pretending to be Nikki? Gah, thank god they barely even look like sisters, let alone twins. I truly could hardly believe they were related when looking at them side-by-si...