How we found our kids

You've seen the pictures, but you haven't heard the story of how we ended up adopting children older than our oldest child (that unwritten rule that was made for a reason), how we ended up adopting from another state (Nebraska) instead of our own (Texas), and how we ended up adopting children who's de-identified information scared off the first family chosen and almost scared me off as well.

To start with, I've pretty much ALWAYS planned to adopt. Especially after having a focus on child abuse and neglect with my psychology degree in college - I did adoption research on open adoptions as well. Hubby was really more interested in adopting his niece and nephew (abusive, drug addicted, neglectful mother, who slept around - actually very similar to Kitty and Bear's biomom in a lot of ways.) We were convinced that this was going to happen for many years. Eventually my BIL actually got his act together, married a nice girl - mentally deficient, but nice, and got custody of our niece and nephew (and guardianship of their half sister). A year or so later he took off and abandoned the family. The kids ended up going back to biomom! Our nephew moved in with my MIL. It was all so not what we wanted for them, but at least my nephew is out of the situation.

Meanwhile, we started looking at adopting from foster care. We went to the state when Bob was almost 4 and Ponito was one. We took the Pride adoption classes and thought we were ready. I knew I could handle special needs kids because Bob had been a total handful and we managed to get through her terrible twos (which started at 17 months and ended at 4!!). Our references even mentioned how well we'd dealt with her spirited behavior. (Which reminds me of my FAVORITE book - Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka - I highly recommend this book).

The state decided for us that our daughter needed to be assessed, so we took her to a therapist. After a few sessions of no break through, I went to visit Bob's daycare without the baby one day, and stayed long enough that the kids stopped paying attention to me. The 3 year olds were watching the movie "Iron Giant" - Yes, that's a PG movie! Yes, I pitched a huge fit! One child would accidentally bump another, that child would turn and shove, someone else would hit, and the teachers did NADA! I found out later this school had tons of issues with boundaries. We pulled Bob immediately. The therapist saw her two more times and declared her perfectly normal. We took this information to the state caseworker, but she had already made up her mind. We were told to come back when Bob was 6.

That may have been God watching out for us, because I was interested mostly in a sibling group of 2 or 3 and didn't know about the "No child older than your oldest child" rule at the time. That would have been 5 kids 5 and under. Maybe not the best choice!

Hubby lost his job when the hi-tech industry crashed and was unemployed off and on for years. Then he decided to go back and get his MBA. In October of 2005, my sister and her two children moved in with us, and my husband lost his job again. I felt a calling to look at the adoption websites - crazy I know! I saw these two children (among others of course) and they really appealed to me, the girl was a year younger than Bob, the boy a year younger than Ponito. The boy, Z, and Ponito looked a lot alike, and the girl, D, (despite her obvious racial difference) looked a lot like Bob. They'd been on the Texas website since June. Still, the the timing was all wrong.

In February, I felt the calling to look again, and these two were still there. I mentioned this to Hubby, convinced he would tell me I was insane since my sister was just getting ready to move out and he was still unemployed, but he surprised me and said we could look into it!!

So I signed up for classes with an agency that I had actually briefly written foster care homestudies for when Bob was an infant. They had just started doing adoptions as well. The orientation was on my birthday in April. It seemed God was telling us this was right. Hubby was still unemployed, but we decided that we would go ahead and take the Pride classes and just not get on the lists until he had a job. Coincidentally, Hubby's first day at work was our first day of class in May. I started pushing to get us a homestudy ASAP, because we were still very interested in D and Z.

We got our license in the beginning of July. I found out that D and Z had been pulled from the website only 3 days before. I assumed they had found a home, but that still meant I needed to start looking for new kids.

To be continued!

Mary

Side note - I got another urge to look at the website a few months ago. http://www.dfps.state.tx.us/Adoption_and_Foster_Care/Child_Search/default.asp D and Z are back on the Texas website, but they are now listed to be adopted separately. So sad. I guess they had major issues that keeps them from being adopted together. Again, God was probably watching out for us.

Edited 4/21/15: D has officially aged out of the system, but Z is still on the website. They haven't updated his photo in many years (although it is more recent than this one).


The rest of the story:
How We Found Our Kids Part 2
Getting Our Kids Home. How We Got Our Kids Part 3

Bad Mommy - Warning! Vent - might want to skip!

I look at all the work my friend Lisa does as a working single parent with a RAD daughter. Even when I'm single parenting it on the weekends when Hubby is teaching scuba diving, I'm still not alone, Grandma, the saint, takes all 4 kids almost EVERY Saturday night. I don't know how my friend Lisa does it. She's my idol!

I feel like the world's worst mom (not to be confused with the world's meanest Mom - a title I am honored to accept as the inventor of the FAIR Club). Now that my kids are not falling apart 24/7, I focus on them a lot less. I don't do all the fun things I remember my Mom doing with me. I just sit and stare at the TV or my computer screen - occasionally making a dinner, holding Ponito on my lap, and even more rarely, "beating" (tickling) a child.

Now that I'm taking meds for depression and bipolar disorder (and Bear and Kitty are stabalized too), I don't even have the excuse that I'm too stressed out to cope with the children. The meds really take the edge off the anxiety that comes from walking the line daily with whether or not we're going to make it through this recession. I admit, I've given most of that anxiety away, not to God, as I should, but to Hubby. Hubby is going to take complete responsibility for it whether I worry about it or not. I married him because of his big broad shoulders, but I worry too that he's going to work/worry himself to death.

Sometimes I feel that when I take my daughter, Kitty, to therapy that that is the only time she and I spend together - she prefers to play with Bob, or walk around outside talking to herself. When Bear talks to me, I feel cornered and irritated, before he even opens his mouth. The only other time I talk to him is to tell him to quit intimidating or parenting the kids. He has a deep man voice and his irritation is always right out there in the open. If Hubby is not around, he denies sounding this way, or tells me that's just the way it is.

When we attend Bear's therapy (almost always both Hubby and I, unlike Kitty where it's just me), I always get the feeling that the therapist thinks we are always yelling at Bear and criticizing him (we would never do this). He sees us as tired and apathetic too (this I will admit happens often). He's constantly asking me if I'm working on spending less time on the computer and more time with Bear. He doesn't understand that the kids don't WANT to spend time with me (I'm a PARENT, of course they don't). I might as well be on the computer all the time. Bear would rather be outside demolishing, I mean fixing, things, throwing a ball with Ponito and the little neighborhood boys, or flirting with the neighborhood girls out walking their dogs (- is it his bad boy image that gets him the girls? I mean he's attractive, but not THAT great looking.)

Life is too stressful right now. Hubby hasn't drawn a paycheck from our company since January. I haven't drawn a paycheck since March. Debt collectors call constantly - even on Sunday mornings. We've always been super responsible people who's only real debt was our mortgage. We'd paid both cars off and if we didn't have the money, we didn't spend it. But when we bought the company, we made some big mistakes. We had one company default on paying us over $30K in December and that was followed by a big recession. Now we owe tons in credit card debts and have borrowed huge amounts from my parents. Every time I turn around we have to borrow more just to make it through the week. We have even skipped paychecks on some of our employees (not the employee who went postal!).

Hubby was offered a fantastic job by a company in the UK who want him to open a USA branch of their company and be CEO. He was told the job would pay $250K plus a $150K bonus if he met his goals. We had recently decided that the company was never intended to support both of us, and Hubby was going to start looking for another job. This seemed like the answer to our prayers. The job was supposed to start mid-March or maybe April 1st. Every time we talked to the President of the UK company, he said he had just one more thing to do (meet with the board, meet with investors, have the bank sign off on something, get his products licensed here and in the UK...) and that he would be ready for Hubby to start, and for our company to do some major work for him - in a week or two. He's been saying next week or mid month for, well months now!

Hubby can't seem to find anything but engineering jobs which he hates (that's why he went back and got his MBA - because he was tired of being an engineer). This job is his dream job. It's all soooo frustrating.

We've put off so much until money started coming in. The girls going to private school, allowances, trip to Nebraska to see ours and the kids family, surgery on my thyroid, new contacts for Bob, buying a car that will hold the whole family (my 5 passenger Mazda Proteges was not designed to hold my big children - and anytime we want to go somewhere as a family we have to take 2 cars - which isn't exactly great for fuel consumption). On the bright side, the kids are learning a lot about budgeting. We've found an amazing Salvation Army where one of the staff has taken pity on me and only charges me $1-3 for tons of clothes!

OK, I'm whining. Time to stop. Sorry about that, but this way I don't have to dump as much on the shoulders of my support group. I really appreciate your getting this far, and prayers would be greatly appreciated. If you know anyone that needs product development done... hey, that would help too.

Mary

Before and After

I'm still amazed at what my designers could do with some poor quality, scanned in photos I received from biomom. The first one was torn and looked like it had been chewed by an animal.

Bad puppy!! Bad!

What do you do with a drunken baby?!

What do you do with a drunken baby?!

What do you do with a drunken baby early in the morning?!

Way! Hey! And up it rises -when you clone him another eye!

OK! OK! I'll stop singing!

And last but not least. My favorite photo. Notice the glowing booger in the original!! You probably can't see it, but someone scribbled all over it with a ball point pen too!

Aren't they absolutely adorable children?! I may have been furious that biomom got my e-mail address, but these pictures sure make it seem worth it. Kitty's lifebook came with only a few pictures, luckily one or two included Bear, because he didn't even have a lifebook. The youngest picture I had of him, he looked about 5 years old. For Mother's Day I sent these cleaned up pictures to biomom.

I got a few more, but they didn't clean up as well and were much more casual shots. Although there's one of Bear as an infant that is sooo cute, but it was taken practically in the dark and they couldn't fix it. *sigh*

Mary

Birthfamily contact

Because our kids are older, we've always had to deal with biofamily. Bear especially had phone numbers memorized and was used to contact with grandparents, biofather, aunts and uncles and of course Kitty and Bear's younger sisters. Fairly early on it occured to me to ask biofamily to be careful about the information they shared with my two, because it was extremely upsetting, especially for Kitty, to hear about biomom's most recent abusive relationships among other things. Sometimes the family members complied with my request, sometimes they didn't.

Early on we had given Bear access to the internet and e-mail because as far as we knew he'd always had access and it seemed an inexpensive way for him to keep in touch with family and friends in far away Nebraska. It took us a awhile to figure out that he was not responsible enough to have this kind of freedom. Ditto on the cell phone we gave him for Christmas (after 2 phone bills that were almost $500 each!).

At one point I began e-mailing the half-sister of one of the kid's half sisters. Although not related to biomom, Chrissy was living with her as her nanny. She had been communicating with Bear on MySpace before he lost his internet priviliges, and seemed willing to answer some questions. She gave me some insight into many of his lies. At one point though I used e-mail to send her some current pictures of the kids - and that's where it got sticky. Chrissy gave my e-mail address to biomom and included some of the questions I'd asked Chrissy (about gangs and drugs for Bear, why they were both behind a year in school, whether or not Bear had been in treament facilities...).

The great part about it was biomom answered some of the questions, and was willing to share some information about the biofathers. This was especially important for Kitty who's father left after only a week-long stint with biomom, I'm assuming because the carnival moved on - he never even knew she was pregnant as far as we know. Kitty had no pictures or information. Biomom also told me more about things like who they were named after, and how much Native American blood they had.

Then Bear heard that biomom was pregnant again. I confirmed it with her, and started thinking about how to share the information with Kitty. We finally did present it to Kitty in attachment therapy (only because she was about to have a phone visit with her younger sisters and I didn't want her to find out from them.

The weird thing is when we were coming home from therapy on Tuesday I mentioned that biomom was due this month and Kitty acted as though this was the first she'd heard of it! She didn't freak out or anything, but it reminded me of the time a few months ago when she commented that she hadn't seen our cat Lady in a few days. Lady had passed away the week before, and she knew that and had been very upset at the time. The day after she had made the strange comment about Lady, she appeared to remember that the cat had passed away. I don't know why there was a blip.

In the beginning I was talking to biomom every couple of weeks. She even sent me some baby pictures of the kids! They were in pretty bad shape, but my staff is amazing with Photoshop and were able to fix them up pretty well. It makes Bear crazy to know that I'm communicating with biomom and he has asked me not to tell her anything about him. I've respected his wishes, and as far as she knows their adoption was finalized long ago. I've told her that the kids are unable to handle communication with her, and asked that anytime their younger sisters are visiting grandparents or something to please let us know so that Bear and Kitty can talk to them on the phone without having to be concerned that biomom is present.

The photo at the top originally was scribbled on with ballpoint pen, had brown stains on it, and was scratched so badly it looked like Bear had a "glowing booger!" I can't believe what the guys can do in Photoshop!

In May, I sent biomom some pictures of the kids for Mother's day and asked how she was doing with the pregnancy. She told me she had just found out the baby was to be another girl, and she was a little disappointed because she "wanted to give 'Bear' a little brother." Many of the comments she had been making all along seemed as though she thought of me as a foster mom who was caring for her kids for a little while. This last comment was basically the final straw for me. So I told her that I had given Bear a little brother that worshipped him. I haven't heard from her since. I'm not sure if I should send pictures of Bear on his birthday, acknowledge the fact that the baby is supposed to be born this month, or be greatful that she appears to have bowed out of our life!

I'd love to hear your opinion. Would you send her an e-mail?

Mary

20th High School Reunion

For the first time ever, I got an invitation to my high school reunion (Class of '88). I'm not sure I want to go though. I only went to the school my junior and senior year, and most of my friends were younger. Ironically I was invited by the senior class president. He is now one of Bear's teachers at his special school.

I've gained a few pounds since this picture last Christmas. Not sure I want to go to my reunion at this weight. This is the most I've ever weighed (when I wasn't pregnant). Still not bad for a mother of 4.

Definitely not back to modeling weight though. *sigh*

So how is your life compared to what you thought it would be when you were a senior in high school?

If I remember right, my plan was to meet a guy in college. He was going to be tall with light color eyes and be able to pick me up without grunting. We would get married right after we graduated. We would have 2 kids and a dog and a cat. I wanted to own and operate a horse ranch with a program for helping special needs kids.

I had to go on to graduate school and join a dating service, but I finally did meet my perfect guy. He was tall with blue/green eyes, and big shoulders. We got married not too long after graduation, but no horse ranch. I had several jobs after college. F0r almost a year I actually worked in a job using my degree (Social Work). Then I burned out. Then I worked as a professional seamstress for awhile (designed the world's trashiest wedding dress - not my best moment!).

Now I'm the president of a product development design firm http://www.id-one.net/. I have 4 kids, 3 dogs, and 2 cats (lost one recently). I use my degree daily.

Close enough!

Mary

PS. Tell me about your plans in high school. Are you doing what you thought you'd be doing? Is your life how you want it to be? I wanna know!

I'm DONE!!!!

Last night at midnight I finally finished reading all of the monthly archives on http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/. I absolutely love this extremely prolific blogger. Thanks Lisa for telling me about her - I promise not to tell Hubby it was you that got me addicted!



Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with all my "spare" time and the extra sleep! *grin*

Mary

Bear, then and now

Bear came to us in November 2006 (picture on left). He was a very angry kid who kept everything bottled up inside - until it exploded (almost monthly). When he was stuffing things inside, he showed no emotions at all (not happiness, fear, or anger). He was like a volcano though - you could see the emotions - turned to anger - seething underneath. He told everyone he loved them, but had no idea what that meant. Bear came to us with RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) and a list of other diagnoses - some of which we've discovered since were inaccurate. His symptoms overlapped so many possible diagnoses and he was a very damaged "little" boy. At 5'9" and 200+ lbs he was very scary and intimidating most of the time.

The picture on the right is Bear the day after his adoption on his 15th birthday.

After 8 months of hurting himself, attacking Hubby, and scaring/intimidating the whole family so much that most of us had symptoms of PTSD. In one last attack on Hubby, D was accidentally given a minor injury, causing an investigation of Hubby for child abuse. While they were investigating BOTH Bear and Kitty were removed from our home and put in respite care. I can't tell you how much this set back Kitty's attachment therapy - even though they were only out of our home for one week, because their amazing Nebraska caseworker threw everything she had at Texas. It was the fastest investigation anyone had ever seen! The kids were back in our home in less than one week.

We didn't know what to do with Bear though. We were not allowed to restrain him, even if he attacked us. We were not allowed to let him escalate at all, which since he needed to escalate to vent off the pressure of all that seething anger - was an almost impossible task. We ended up basically medicinally restraining him until an opening in a residential treatment center opened up. Bear began taking mega doses of Depakote - which basically turned him into a zombie. At one point we asked him if he wanted to have his medications reduced, and he said No. I think Bear was afraid of his anger too.

Bear went into a residential treatment center with a strong neurological component. They took him off several of the medications he was on (not the Depakote!), and changed his diagnoses from RAD, PTSD, Conduct Disorder and Mood Disorder to

Bipolar Disorder
PTSD
Cerebral Dysrythmia (which for him is brain damage that effects his memory and learning)
ADHD
and they left the RAD on there.

They almost released him while he was still on the Depakote, but we insisted it be removed before he was released. This let some more of his issues come out and he ended up staying another couple of months. When he finally did leave Meridell he was on so many medications that it was pretty overwhelming. He was even on some medications to deal with the side effects of other medications. However, he was a changed kid.

We were afraid to trust it right away, but the lava was gone. He still has tons of issues, is rough around the edges, and is a teenage boy with a horrible past, but he's no longer out of control. We waited another six months to be sure, but this was a boy who could be part of our home. We adopted him one day before his fifteenth birthday. He's now MY pink loving, Superman cape wearing, goober. Just as weird as all the rest of us.

Mary