Foster Further

It's Easter morning but it sure doesn't feel like it. Hard to feel the wonder or mystery without the hymns and words and signs of celebration that being in a full church brings. Hard to make homegrown celebrations when my husband is of another religious practice that is still deep in the darkest days of fasting and waiting and he won't celebrate the great resurrection for another week. I've decided to hold off on baskets and eggs until Pascha so we just do one celebration all together since family unity is more important than a date on a calendar...but still. It's hard. And a reminder that he left my religious practice knowing I could not follow and that decision he made is still the most difficult thing in our marriage and home. I make the choice not to fight it because I understood that I lost that battle the moment he made a decision that was about his needs, not ours, and that decision was made years before I even knew it and it was not going to ever be undone...

This blog has had a very narrow focus--mainly issues with Jane, birth family, and social workers--and so I thought I'd take a moment to write a bit about the other two in our Three Little Musketeers trio. First, Kate is almost three. Her birthday is next month. She is teaching me why the term " threenager " was coined. Oh my, is she ever. All my boys had more difficult threes than twos (I don't know where Terrible Twos came from) but it's about stubbornness and big-opinion-but-deficient-vocabulary scenarios. Kate, on the other hand, has as much attitude and emotional fluctuation as my actual teenagers. I mean, thank god all this attitude is in a body that only comes to my waist, and also that she has the attention span of a toddler so she genuinely forgets why she was being pissy, because, wow, that girl can bring it. And I keep having this moment where I realize that Jane came to us just two months into her three year old year. Poor thing. If she was dealing ...

Both girls have been talking lots lately about how old they are, who is bigger, what age they will be next, what their names are now and are going to be, etc. I feel like we're close enough to the finalization of the adoption that it's safe to answer with definitives. Interestingly, Jane had this whole conversation with me where she asked what her name was when she was born and what it'll be when she's a grown up. Like she wondered if maybe it changed every few years. She was kind of worried throughout our conversation--wondering if she was losing her identity? She felt reassured when I told her that her first name had always been the same and always would be. I'm very glad we didn't change their first names for just this reason. Then, tonight, Kate had an interesting conversation with me. At only 2 years, 9 months she can't have very in depth conversations but I know she's got bigger thoughts than her vocabulary is able to express. She's a very ...

Jane does not stutter when she is angry.  I am so flummoxed by this I can't even process. Background: yesterday was a bad day. Just nonstop big and little things that ended in a return to time out almost as soon as she got out and an hour long phone call from me to her therapist. We rarely have days like this. Once every three months or so. Today she came awake still angry. Normally she bounces out of bed happy. This morning it was all dirty looks. She stayed angry all day. This was very new. Maybe the first time we've seen this and both Theo and I felt it was healthy as it was a normal reaction we'd expect after the consequences she received yesterday. I was mentally noting what it looks like when she's angry because I've never seen her stay angry more than a few minutes. And that's when it hit me---she had not stuttered once all day! Her stuttering had gotten really bad last week. Bad enough that I was considering asking for a re-eval by the speech...

Since Jane and Kate came to us I've been annoyed by how Jane talks. She was 3 yrs, 2 months old but advanced for her age in her language skills. I felt she spoke as clearly and had nearly as big of a vocabulary as many 4 year olds. What annoyed me was something I have a hard time defining. I guess "whiny" and "passive aggressive" come close. For example, if she wanted some crackers she would look at the box and say, "Those are crackers!" and then, a few moments later, "I very like crackers!" (she has this cute speech pattern of using 'very' to mean 'really' and I wanted to capture it here before I forgot) I began using the phrase, "You are a strong, smart girl!" with a big smile followed by an explicit instruction on how I wanted her to behave. So, I'd say, "Jane, I know that you are a strong, smart girl and you can tell me just what you want. You can say, 'Can I have some crackers, please?'  a...