Blitzkrieg Babies

Adoption update

A couple weeks ago we finally got the news that the results of our girls’ birthmother’s appeal of the termination of her parental rights was nigh. Rather than just getting a letter telling us the result, we got a letter telling us to come to court to hear the result. We aren’t required to come to court, but I almost always do just because I can’t bear to wait any longer to hear news.

Going to court was its usual bizarre experience. As usual, there’s not a specific time for our case, just a day, so you have to show up at 8:30 am and hope your case is early on the day’s docket. Pretty soon after I signed in with the bailiff, the girls’ (new) attorney came out to meet me and told me that there was a problem, that they hadn’t received the result of the appeal from the appellate court, but that she was going to call them and see what she could find out. (I’m not sure why she couldn’t have done that in the weeks leading up to the court date…)

After another hour or so of waiting in the crowded lobby, I got called in and the judge told me a bunch of legalese that I didn’t exactly understand, but I got the impression that it was good news. The judge asked me how they girls were and said I was excused. Afterwards, the girls’ attorney broke it down for me. The appellate court ruled back in December, upholding the lower court’s decision to terminate parental rights. But the paperwork never made it from the appellate court to children’s court, so that’s why the case got stuck in limbo for several months. Good thing I’d started to pester our social workers to find out why it was taking so long!

Anyhow, good news! We are now free to adopt the girls. The next step is to file to adopt them, which will happen next week, and then we hire an attorney to facilitate the adoption, which will be finalized in another 2-3 months. 

The Day of the Jackal

I’ve written before about Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication (NVC) and how I struggle with it. 

One of the big themes of this work is the jackal/giraffe dichotomy. The jackal represents the violent, non-compassionate side of us that attempts to control and dominate others to get what we want. The giraffe is the “nice” side of us that attempts to understand other people and help meet their needs. (The giraffe was chosen by Rosenberg because it has the biggest heart of any animal.)

Our continuing education for foster care has encouraged us to try to be giraffes when we interact with our children. This sounds like a good idea, but it is hard not to become the jackal when faced with defiant toddlers.

Today I decided to take the girls to the library for their weekly story time and to pick up some new books and videos. We rode our family bike there, rather than walk, because story time was over at noon and I didn’t want to try walking home with the girls when it was lunch time. Story time was cancelled for today, but that was no big deal. The girls really like going to the library, but it is hard to keep them in the same part of the library at once, and to make sure they don’t do anything they shouldn’t. For example, one of their favorite things are the tiny pencils all over the place so people can write down a call number of a book. The girls main focus when we first get into the library is to get a handful of those tiny pencils and a scrap of paper to draw on. They also like to go into the kids’ video room and look at the video boxes. If they are both in the video room at the same time, they get into a fight about who gets to climb on the stool in the room, and if they aren’t in the room at the same time, I have to zip back and forth between the  book area and the video area so that neither of them do bad things, like switch from drawing on a scrap of paper to drawing in a library book or, like I found V doing today, dropping DVDs behind the DVD shelf. 

Then I noticed that V needed a diaper change, which somehow I’d never had happen in the library before. I gathered both girls up and got into the bathroom in the kids’ area, only to discover that it isn’t a family-type bathroom, only a bathroom for kids who can use the bathroom on their own. Sigh. The other bathroom was in the lobby of the library, so I’d have to check out our library materials and gather up all our stuff just to get the diaper changed. Also, the main library bathroom tends to be frequently occupied by violently ill homeless people, or at least smell and look like it has been frequently occupied by violently ill homeless people. 

It’s also a little crazy going to the library because I have extra stuff to deal with. I always have my backpack with diapers and snacks and spare clothes and so on, but when we bike to the library, I also have to carry our (3) bike helmets in with us. And then when it is time to go, I have to carry our stack of books and videos to check out, along with the backpack, bike helmets, and sometimes (like today) I have to also carry 2 crying toddlers who wouldn’t be persuaded to leave on their own feet. 

On the short ride home at lunch time, they were both hungry, so I scrounged up a few pretzel goldfish crackers (their current obsession) for each of them and pedaled furiously home. A few blocks from the library, S decided she needed more crackers and tried to steal them from V. V wasn’t eating hers, but screamed bloodly murder when S tried to pry her crackers from her hand. That’s when the jackal came out and yelled at the girls to make them stop crying. (That doesn’t actually often work; the jackal tends to be scary and make crying more intense.)

When we got home, things just continued in the same vein. S refused to go upstairs when we got home, so I had to carry her up kicking and screaming. I’d held off changing V’s diaper until we got home because of the craziness, and then when we got home she tried to refuse to let me change her diaper. MORE JACKAL.

Lunch went reasonably well given the circumstances, and then we watched a bit of a video before naptime. When I got the girls up to their room for naps, they didn’t want to sit on their potties. JACKAL. After reading a couple books while they sat on the potty with no results, I gave up and put their diapers back on and put them in bed and read a book. A perfect time for V to poop! I didn’t catch her in time, and while rushing to try to get her on the potty, some poop feel out of the diaper onto the bathroom floor next to the toilet. I somehow didn’t notice when I STEPPED ON IT WITH MY BARE FOOT and then tracked it onto their bedroom carpet! Happily, I was a strong enough parent at that moment not to blame the girls or let the jackal out of its cage. Still, inside I was all JACKAL. 

Now the darling angels are napping and I’m venting to you, dear readers.

So this is the real challenge of trying to be a NVC parent. I want and need to be an authority and to get my children to do things when they need to be done. I don’t expect them to do everything I ask at every moment, but I wish I could make them understand when there is room to wiggle and delay and when they need to just do what I’m asking them to do. I haven’t figured out how to be a giraffe and sweetly persuade them to hold my hands and come out of the library with them. The giraffe seems unable to get anything done on any sort of time table. But the giraffe knows that it has to get the girls home before they get too hungry and too tired because once we cross those thresholds, the normal defiant toddlers turn into unpleasable monsters. So when something has to get done NOW, I end up becoming the jackal to get it done.

I don’t want my kids to be scared of me or fear that I’m going to hurt them. While we were eating lunch, we talked about what had happened that morning and how I got angry because they weren’t doing what I wanted. I told them that I loved them even when I was angry at them. I told them I love them no matter what. I love them when they are quiet and I love them when they are loud. I love them when I’m yelling at them, and I love them when I am kissing them. 

I know I need to keep working on learning to do things done the giraffe way and when that fails, to try not to be angry with the girls even when I am making them do what I need them to do. I can’t keep the jackal totally out of the picture, but I hope they can understand that even my jackal has a heart as big as a giraffe. Hopefully I can eventually push the jackal away and replace him with a stern giraffe.

Separation anxiety

When we started preschool at the beginning of February, I was really worried that S would freak out when I left them there. So I spent the first 3 days of school with them, though I left the room quite a bit. And it was no big deal at all!

Then V got sick and everything changed. All of a sudden, my tough-as-nails, independent girl got separation anxiety and became painfully clingy. S, on the other hand, loves preschool and doesn’t mind at all when I leave. V cries hysterically and tries to keep me from leaving. A few minutes after I’m gone the teachers get her to calm down and then she’s good for the rest of the morning. When we come pick them up at noon, S runs up to me and says, “I miss you!” and gives me a hug. V cries some more and says, “Daddio gone.” I have to carry her out to the car, which is complicated by S wanting to stay and play some more. Sometimes she tells me, “I busy!” when I tell her it is time to go. 

This continues at home in a variety of weird ways. Our usual bedtime routine has been pretty easy. We start doing bedtime related things at about 7 pm, with a bottle of milk (that I SWEAR will soon be a cup of milk!) and a little TV (Caillou is their favorite TV for drinking milk). Then we go to their room to read books, get into PJs, brush teeth, etc. We aim to have the lights off at 8, which happens pretty frequently. Mike kisses them goodnight and I stay in the room with them for a little while in the dark, singing songs and further calming them down. Usually I can leave after about 10 or 15 minutes, and then they go to sleep on their own. Sometimes I have to go back in and put them in their beds or put a stop to shenanigans, but mostly they go to sleep pretty easily. But ever since V’s separation anxiety has set in, she gets hysterical if I leave the room before she falls asleep. Sometimes I try just repeatedly putting her back in her bed, but if the crying is really hysterical there is just no point. So after reading some advice books about this stage, I’ve started to stay in their and read books on my phone until she falls asleep. Hopefully this won’t last terribly long!

The morning routine has a new flavor, too. Usually Mike goes to sleep before I do, while I stay up playing Xbox. So he gets up with the girls (around 7 am) and I get to sleep in a little more, maybe until 8 am. But with separation anxiety, he can barely keep V away from me for a half hour before she gets crazy and comes upstairs and bangs her head on our bedroom door. She tells Mike, “See him!” When one of us lets her in to our bedroom, she pesters me until I get up, saying, “Wake up Daddio!”

Last night I decided I really needed to get 8 hours of sleep, so I skipped my Xbox routine, getting in bed at 10:30 and reading a book until 11:30, when I turned off the light. Then V woke up with a nightmare, and I spent the next hour getting her back to sleep. Just in time for S to have a nightmare! So I spent the next hour trying to get her back to sleep, eventually taking her to sleep with me in the guest bedroom (at her request… sigh). In the morning I found out that V had woken back up soon after S and I got back to sleep, and poor Mike ended up sleeping with her in our bed at 4 am. Sigh. So my planned 8 hours of sleep turned into less than 6! Luckily, this is unusual. They almost always sleep right through the night, from 8:30 pm to 7 am.

Bonus grandmother

My great-aunt Rosy died last week. 

She married my grandmother’s brother but was also my grandfather’s sister, so she always felt like a bonus grandmother to me growing up. She and I shared a birthday, which made her even more special to me.

Her life would seem unremarkable to most, but she was amazing. She experienced more than her share of tragedy in her life, but she always seemed to be smiling.

I have a great extended family, full of cousins and aunts and uncles and I had fantastic grandparents that I owe so much. But Aunt Rosy was the first relative of mine to be my friend, and she did so when I was still just a child. Lots of my relatives are now also my friends, but even when I was little, I knew she was my friend. And I think she was that way with lots of people!

She lived in Florida while I grew up in Ohio, so we didn’t see each other very often, and this was of course in the days before unlimited long distance telephoning or video chats. It was always special to see her, either us driving down to Florida on vacation, or her coming north to visit the bunch of our family that lived in Ohio. Her house was very fun for kids. She had a pool(!) and her husband, my uncle Stan, had carved tiki totems that popped up in the lush gardens. Uncle Stan died when I was pretty little, but I remember him fondly, too. He made my brother and I toy wood rifles that shot thick black rubber bands. They were pretty much the coolest gift I ever got. 

She had an electric organ that I got to play, too. I play piano, so the organ was somewhat familiar, but it had different effects and voices and weird pedals on the floor to play with. Back in the days before computers, that organ was the height of technology in my mind. 

Aunt Rosy gave me my first grown-up novel to read, Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. It was nothing especially profound or amazing in and of itself, but she and her grandson had both read and enjoyed it, and she thought I’d like it, too. There was nothing really “adult” in its content, but it was long, first of a five book series, actually. I’d previously never really considered reading anything beyond the young adult section of my library or bookstore. Those books led me on to a whole new section of the library and expanded my love of books.

Aunt Rosy was my favorite Scrabble partner. I’m pretty sure I learned to play the game from my parents and brother, but she played it often and more seriously. She had the official Scrabble dictionary, and didn’t mind if I used the dictionary to find words to play against her. She really loved words. I remember her talking about a new word she’d learned from reading The Silence of the Lambs: “futon.” She demonstrated that words and books were important, but she also knew and shared with everyone that they were also fun.

I have a weird fuzzy memory of visiting her when I was around 13 years old. I remember flying down in a plane by myself, her picking me up at the airport, and visiting her for about a week. But my parents and brother don’t remember this visit of mine, so maybe it didn’t happen. Memory is of course strange that way. I’m pretty sure it happened, but I do have my doubts. It is possible it is just something I wished could have happened, because it sure would have been fun! 

I definitely visited her in Florida couple times when I was in college or grad school, before her Parkinson’s disease got bad enough that she had to give up her home. She took me to eat shrimp at her favorite restaurant, and let me drive her car because she wasn’t comfortable driving at dusk. We talked about what I was studying and what I wanted to do after I got out of school. She told me she was still trying to figure out what she wanted to be when she grew up.

Too many of her last years were spent in a nursing home in Ohio as Parkinson’s disease took its toll on her. I was lucky to make time to visit her a few years ago. It was shocking how ravaged she was from the disease, but amazing how much of her spirit remained. I sat with her and read her a science fiction novel, Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, in which old people are recruited to go fight a war in space. They are given new (young, stronger) bodies in exchange for their service. I was conflicted about reading it to her because she was obviously so trapped in her aging body, which made it both appropriate but possibly disturbing to her. But I decided to do her the favor she’d done me as a kid and just share with her a book I thought she’d like. I needn’t have worried; she loved it.

She taught me many things, but most importantly she taught me that growing up did not mean you had to stop having fun. And I try to make relationships with kids that honor the way she treated kids: honestly and as individuals worthy of her time. I will miss her. 

Health care gripes redux

We started the girls at a preschool two mornings a week at the beginning of the month, and despite my certainty that S would freak out at being left alone, it has worked out wonderfully. S especially loves it, even telling us, “I busy” when we come pick her up. V likes it, too, but she’s happy to go home when we show up.

The down side is that, like a day cares and preschools, it is full of germs and viruses. They are good about encouraging handwashing and such, but please, the kids are 2 and most of them have runny noses. So the girls have had runny noses, too, pretty much since they started. S developed a wet cough about a week ago. And also both girls sprouted toddler molars, adding to the unpleasantness. S was drooling so bad for a couple days that it was fairly pointless to wipe her mouth. On Thursday last week things seemed to be calming down so I took the girls to preschool in the morning. V was sad to see me go, but I called to check on her a little while later and the teacher said she was fine but had fallen asleep on her during story time. Later that afternoon it became clear she was coming down with something (again) and was cranky, had a fever, and a runny nose. Coincidentally they already had an appointment with their pediatrician on Friday, so I didn’t even have to decide whether to try to make one!

I (tried to) cave in to Mike’s mom’s demands to get some cough medicine for S on Thursday, but then found out that cold medicines of all stripes are off limits for kids under 4. So I happily continued letting her cough (not that badly and not that often) and put Vicks Vap-o-rub (which is now only approved for kids over 2) on her chest as I’d been doing. It gave her a minor rash, but she has sensitive skin and I decided the rash wasn’t bad enough to stop applying the Vicks.

Thursday night V didn’t sleep well, but her fever never went over 102. She didn’t want to take any acetaminophen, which she usually gobbles down like candy, but since her fever wasn’t that high, we didn’t worry about it. (If left to my own devices I’d give the girls fever-reducing medicines a lot less than I do. I think fever is ok as long as it isn’t too high or causing other problems.) 

At the doctor appointment on Friday, the pediatrician saw S’s rash and said that it wasn’t a reaction to the Vicks but instead to the virus they have, Roseola, a common childhood virus that they almost certainly got at preschool.

She also found that V had an ear infection. The ear infection could be either viral or bacterial; if it was viral, then there’s no medication, but bacterial ear infections respond well to antibiotics. I’m against antibiotics except when there is clearly a bacterial infection, but the doctor did a good job of convincing me that this particular ear infection was probably bacterial (in her experience, from the way it looked). So she proscribed Amoxicillin, in liquid form, and V was to take it twice a day for 10 days. 

So that night we gave her her first dose, or at least we tried. Just like the acetaminophen, she refused to take it. We tried a variety of increasingly awful methods to get her to take it, culminating in the ultimate: squirting it down her throat and holding her nose to make her swallow. She threw it up. She of course also continued to refuse the acetaminophen. Her fever stayed below 102, but she slept poorly and we slept hardly at all.

Saturday morning, we called Mike’s parents to come over and help, so that we could sleep during the day. V continued to refuse medication, and her fever stayed under 102. I spent a while on the phone with our social worker and various associates and friends with medical/sick kid experience. Our pediatrician’s office is unavailable nights and weekends, which is a crappy situation that I’ve known about, but luckily never really needed until now. I also called the local urgent care facilities asking if they took our girls’ insurance, Medi-Cal (provided by the state because they are foster kids). None of them did. So when V’s fever rose to 104 on Saturday afternoon, we were left with the primary health care option available to poor sick people in the US: the emergency room.

It really frustrates me to no end. This was no emergency. She was not bleeding profusely or about to die. I needed help getting a toddler to take medicine that she was refusing, and I needed some medical supervision for her until her fever went down. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been dealt with more cheaply (for taxpayers who are going to be footing the bill) and less stressfully. These kids are wards of the state, and it is sad that they are required to see an (otherwise wonderful) pediatrician who isn’t available on nights or weekends. The system is designed for foster parents who need urgent but non-emergency medical care for their foster kids on nights or weekends to take them to the emergency room. SO STUPID. There’s not even a nurse on duty to answer questions and give advice about when to head to the emergency room and when to wait until Monday morning.

The ER at the hospital near our house is very nice and from what we hear, not usually too busy. Saturday night it was pretty busy, so I suppose we were pretty lucky that we were out of there within 3 hours. But they didn’t have room for us, so even after we saw the doctor, we spent almost the whole time in a hallway of the ER. 

The admitting nurse quickly gave up trying to get V to take acetaminophen orally (which made me feel good that I wasn’t just being lame about it) and gave her a suppository instead. I later found out that you can just buy suppositories of acetaminophen at the drugstore, which I wish I’d known a couple days earlier when she could have used some to help her sleep. The doctor we eventually saw confirmed the ear infection and prescribed her with an antibiotic given via shot, so we’d be able to give up on our failed attempts to get her to take the amoxicillin. 

Saturday night went better with the sleeping than Friday did (for us, more than for them). Sunday morning V was feeling better and we even went out for a brief shopping trip. She hasn’t had much appetite since Friday, but she drinks water and occasionally eats a meal reasonably well. The antibiotics are upsetting her stomach, so that’s not surprising. 

Sunday night she slept pretty well. She had a fever of just over 102, so we gave her another dose of the acetaminophen suppository (after giving her the choice of taking it orally). I was up with her for an hour around 1 am, and Mike got up with her around 6 am. No chance of preschool for her this morning, so I kept them both home. V has been clingy and had a bad runny nose all morning, but no fever so far today. She’s been napping as I’ve been writing this post, but I’ve had to stop twice to go put her back to sleep when she wakes herself up by snoring. 

We are leaving for a week in Hawaii on Wednesday. Mike has business to do, and the girls and I (and his mom and dad) are joining us to help me take care of the girls while he is working. It should be a fun trip as long as V can get through her Roseola/ear infection before we leave! I’m worried about her ear hurting from pressure changes during takeoff and landing, but we at least have non-stop flights and she’s never had that problem before. I’ll bring along drinks and snacks for her to chew and suck on to try to help during those periods. 

Even yet still more continuing education

Yesterday we attended another Continuing Education class at our fost/adopt agency, the 1st in a series of 5. (Last year we only managed to make it to the 1st and 5th, which put us in a deficit for last year’s credits, so we need to scramble and do a bunch of online courses.) I blogged about the 1st class last year, and Mike mentioned to the teacher that I blog about parenting here, so I figured I’d better do a post about the class so when she checks the blog (hi, Ruth!) she’ll see it.

Last year I found myself pretty conflicted about the material, basically thinking that while it sounded like a good idea, I didn’t have much faith that it would really work in the “real world”. I also struggled with its applicability to our girls, who luckily weren’t exposed to some of the horrible, severe emotional trauma that so many kids in the foster care system are. But this year I stopped resisting and really found some great insights into myself and my kids. It also helped that the group of parents we had in the class this year were better (in the sense of being more open and contributing more positively) than they were last year.

Insight number one was that while our girls did and have experienced a lot less emotional trauma in their lives than the typical foster kid, we need to remember that they weren’t tabulae rasae when we got them at 5 days old. They had 9 months of gestation, when they were exposed to lots of stuff that we don’t know much about (and I wouldn’t share here if I did), but there was certainly a lot of negative stuff going on in their birth mother’s life, given that her kids were taken away from her when they were born. And of course being taken away from their birth mother was surely traumatic. 

The class also made me review our experience with birth mother visitations through this lens, and saw that those visits were definitely traumatic, especially for S, and I wish that I had understood that better and acted differently about them earlier. In the beginnning, I wasn’t confident enough about my role as the girls’ parent and of course worried about rocking the boat and having the girls taken away from us. So I acted kind of like a sheep and just went along with those visits without properly advocating for the girls’ needs. In retrospect, I would have insisted that I be in the room with them if they started crying, and I would have made suggestions for making the visits less traumatic, for example by asking their birth mother to start each visit more calmly and slowly, giving them time to warm up to her before picking them up and being so enthusiastic. I don’t say this to be critical of her; I can’t complain about how she behaved during the visits. But I think we all could have left those visits if we’d all be able to focus more on what was best for the girls and less on what the system was requiring of all of us. I can only imagine the emotions their birth mother went through before, during, and after her hour-long weekly visits with her babies; it would be very difficult to get beyond all of that to try to look at those visits from their points of view and find different and more effective ways of approaching the visits and interacting with them. I certainly regret getting stuck in my own POV about these visits. When they went poorly, I looked at the positive: it seemed more certain that we would get to adopt the girls. And of course, it could be possible that if I had worked to make those visits better for the girls, maybe we would have lost them. 

(I’m not beating myself up over this. I’ve learned that parents can’t get too worked up about being perfect. Sometimes we do things that aren’t optimal in every sense, and that’s because doing the optimal thing at every moment isn’t possible. And sometimes we do entirely the wrong thing, and we try to learn from mistakes and not do them again. Parents are human, after all!)

I planned to write a whole additional section here about additional insight, but I’m running out of time and have to stop. Hopefully I’ll get back to this topic again.

Happy Birthday!

S & V are two years old today!

We decided to have lots of little birthday gatherings rather than one big one this year. We are planning on having a BIG party to celebrate the finalization of our adoption, which will hopefully be within a few months, though we’re still in the limbo of waiting for the appeal from last April to be rejected.

The birthday celebration started over the weekend, with the family of Mike’s best friend. They brought the girls toys from Toy Story 2 for them, so they’ve spent the last two days zooming around with Buzz Lightyear, Jessie, and Bullseye. 

This morning we’d filled the hallway outside their bedroom with balloons (thanks M & J for the idea!), so when they came out they got to go crazy kicking and bumping the balloons all over the place. Then we came downstairs and gave them their presents: baby dolls! V had especially been obsessed with the baby dolls at their friends’ house, so we figured we’d better get her one of her own. S likes her doll, too, but right now she’s holding Jessie from Toy Story while V sits with both baby dolls. (They are watching WALL-E while I type this.)

At their last pediatrician’s appointment 3 months ago, we scheduled their 2-year appointment, which somehow ended up being today. Three months ago it seemed like a fine idea, that they’d be too little to even know it was their birthday, but today I’m a little sad that they are getting shots on their birthday. But we will make it up to them by going to Mike’s mom’s house for a birthday party afterward.

The next year should bring lots of changes to our lives. I’m starting to actively look for paid employment, which means preschool for the girls, and maybe even a move if I find some fantastic job in another city! Don’t worry, local friends, a job would have to be pretty freaking fantastic for us to move…