What is that about?  I can hike this very quickly and calmly by myself or with a friend.  The danger isn’t as real or evident.  But put me with my children and family and my anxiety level skyrockets.  I know I have a fear of heights.   Am I really afraid of heights or am I a fraid exposed heights, I feel safe in an airplane but if it had a see through floor, I think I would just be beside myself, what has ever given me reason to believe I will fall from a height?  I have never had an experience where my life was threatened by being in high places so is my perception a trained condition or an experienced response?  I am exploring that answer every day…

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Having adopted children really makes this evident to us.  We are already at a disadvantage right out of the gate.  We have limited time to make up for the previous years they did without.  We, specifically my wife, strongly desire to home educate.   Our field trips are family vacations, our camping trips become a combination of home-ec, PE, and history.  Time is the greatest benefit we have in home education.  Even though space is at a premium and the tables transform into desks, floors into science experiments, and family walks to the park act as PE, the family is together, learning together, living together, serving and giving together.

Now, we have no problem with the school system, in fact we live next to a very nice elementary school.  My wife has taught in public and private schools, I substitute teach, and am a high school coach and since my calling is to work with teens, you will find me in public schools on a weekly basis.   We don’t want to shelter our children from the world but we want to provide the basis for their experience of the world so that they are properly equipped to be God fearing productive members of our society, less focused on survival but on thriving!  Home education provides that for us.  We enjoy this freedom.

Hang in there…we’re in this together.

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I, along with my best friend; Jon, built rock cities, foraged the neighborhood park for trees to climb, girls to heckle and things we could jump off of.  We were full of adventure and daring.  When we met our children for the first time, we had to encourage their creative abilities.  At first it was a great chore.  Although our children were hurting, it seemed like they knew too much about “Spongebob.”  Yes they watched all sorts of TV before they met us, in fact I think that is all they did.  So in order to help stimulate and develop play for them we had to teach them how to play.  Their lack of early stimulation and love fueled their inability to develop proper motor skills and creative habits, so with adoption of older children we had to teach and instruct and show them how to play, just like you have to with an infant, it didn’t come as second nature.

We taught them to ride a bike, they ALL started with training wheels, now they ride without hands sometimes.  We even all rode a real life BMX track together.  The oldest 2 have mountain biked with me, and loved it.  Their motor skills were weak, their creative muscles lacked stimulation.   We had to give ideas to them at first.  If you want your children to have great fun playing, you have to teach them and then send them out to “BE” until they get bored then encourage them with an idea send them back outside to “BE” some more, until they  learn that boredom is relative and not an option.   Silence is not the same as boredom, boredom stems from a lack of creativity.  Boredom is not an action, it is a state of your mind.  Idle hands make waste.  (good ole mom sayings)

It was hard not just wanting to turn the TV on (my wife and I agreed early on that TV would not be the focus of our kids creative lives but a very rare release for them), so it quickly became a non-option for their day.  They know this and thus have adjusted and would now rather; read, go outside and catch bugs, ride their bikes, climb a tree, move dirt with their dump trucks, design castles and have tea parties than think about watching TV, although they enjoy an occasional family movie.

Playing is an Artform…but a learned artform!

Play is not as natural a thing for us, take a look at infants for example. We teach and expect parents to teach their babies how to play and why should we expect anything different for adoptive parents of older children, it just seems natural.

Play is a learned behavior, even though most of us would say it’s second nature, because that’s the idea.  We teach something so that it will one day become second nature.

We’re in this together….I’m pulling for you!

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-2 Challenges of multiple child adoption!-

To compound the challenges of older children, adopting more than 1 child presents it’s own set of challenges and benefits.  Being school age and able to realize the pain but not fully understand it, presents unique obstacles  Here are a couple of the challenges.

1. Having energy to console multiple children who hurt deeply at the same time, when you are outnumbered!

When we were initially brought together as a family, it was very difficult to listen to the gut wrenching whaling that they all endured as a result of saying goodbye to their foster families.

This issue isn’t unique to multiple children being adopted but it is magnified, cause for the first 2 weeks, every night one of them would start talking in their native language, ours happened to be Spanish, and then they would all say, “SI!” and then start crying, then bawling, then whaling for about an hour or so.  Finally, they would fall asleep out of exhaustion, and we would curl up in our bed and cry ourselves to sleep.  How do you console 2, 3 or 4 little people who need to grieve and who you only have 2 arms to wrap around 1 or maybe 2 at a time.  Those were tough days.  Adoption isn’t easy.

2.  Helping them bond with you, when they already have a common bond with each other.

I didn’t realize this until we began talking with our friends about the joys of adopting multiple children at once.  It is difficult to create the reasons for them to bond with you when they can so easily relate and support each other, which isn’t a bad thing by itself, but can quickly become their only coping mechanism, and you are left out of the “inner circle.”   After all, they don’t know if this is the last place they are going to end up.  They form a mob mentality that becomes almost self sufficient; heck, they have “survived” this long without you already.  You must stress your love and define how they “NEED” you, because that isn’t always that clear, at least to them.

It took a long time but 2-1/2 years after bringing them home, we finally began to see success in this area.  We had to remind our little daughter, for a long time that her brothers have a mother and that she wasn’t “it!”  Define your roles early, it will help them understand their roles as your children.
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Hang in there…we’re in this together…more tomorrow on “Teaching them to play…”

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We have seen that it takes more and more time to shape, bend, guide and reshape.  Because their little bodies, hearts and minds have more to overcome because of their prior circumstances.  They get dried faster than the well adjusted and loved child that had time to bond with their mother and challenge their father.  As the baby weens from the mother there is a bond that is formed with the father.

This process is all disrupted and institutionalization begins.  The clay begins to dry, no more water is added and the shape of the little people are dangerously incomplete.  Sometimes when the potter steps away for too long and when the wheel stops spinning, the shape is left in a crude mess.  We see this in the difference between our eldest son who was 5 -1/2 years old when he was removed from his home and our daughter who was 2-1/2.

We love all our children dearly, but speaking with honest reflection, we notice how hard it has been and how dry our eldest son’s “clay” was when we brought him home, relative to his younger sister and especially relative to his younger brother (4-1/2 years yonger).  We have just now, almost 3 years later, added the proper amount of water to get the clay workable again and begin to mold and teach.

Prior to this, we have been in survive and keep alive mode, just add enough to bring the clay back to life… we saw some of this rejuvenation last night in honest emotion that is rare but he showed as we walked in discipline with our son; it’s tough, but it’s worth it…hang in there if you can relate, we are in this together! (continued Tomorrow)

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Moldable:
There are several analogies to us as “clay” in the potters hand. When I was about 12 or 13 my mother took this pottery making class that she made me and my 2 little brothers go to. So as she was sitting in class in this old building in the middle of town, we would work on our homework in the hallway, or wander through the building trying not to break anything. I remember watching my mom and the class throw the clay on the wheel, once they did that, it’s like the clay just went splat, then they would take their wet hands and begin to push, pull, stretch and guide the lump of wet clay into a shape. Seemed easy enough, so when I was allowed to try with a small residual lump, I made a little cup. I think I broke that mug…hmmmm. There was one thing I remember very clearly was the amount of water you had to keep applying to the clay as you worked it, it would eventually be very difficult to continue to form without water. In fact the drier the clay got the harder it was to work, duh!

As I relate this idea to our adoption. Being that we adopted older children, this idea is worth exploring. I believe that children are mold-able. I know not many people will argue with that idea but I also believe that adults are mold-able as well. So somewhere on the spectrum between childhood and adulthood we become more set for the kiln.  Death is the Kiln in this instance, because we are not in our final state until then.  (eternity and all)   So taking this idea that kids are moldable apply it to adoption and you begin to understand what time does to the process.  Time is the enemy when you adopt older children as gravity is the enemy to flight.  (continued Tomorrow)

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This young father’s voice became my heavenly father’s voice proclaiming, No matter what happens with your current situation, I will always be your father, and I want to cherish every day we have left together, even if it may be 99 days.  Let’s live every day to the fullest, together.  I am God and I LOVE you, enjoy!

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In a matter of days many of you will be receiving a letter describing the last chapter in our journey at our current location.  Since writing the letter, we have some very encouraging news.  We hear God’s voice calling us and there is clarity in the direction we may be heading.  We are still coveting any prayers that you could spare regarding the sale of our home.  We have about 2 more months of hard work ahead of us, but we anticipate the light we can feel warming our spirits at the end of the tunnel.  Thank you for being such wonderful friends and faithful givers.

I am writing this post so that you can take the next few minutes to listen:  Listen to me read to you our recent newsletter.  For those of you that get the paper version, thank you.  For those that don’t have a clue what I’m writing about, I’m sorry, feel free to listen as well.

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But what made this day more exciting was waking up and not being able to speak clearly due to a rather coarse sandpaper feeling in my throat.   So when I got to the dentist and sat down to be cleaned, rather hacked at with metal toothpicks and fingernails on a chalkboard type instruments, I was rather unconversational with the dental hygenist.  One word answers flew out of my mouth as reluctant and nasaly as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs with a clothespin pinching it’s tail.  I know that makes no sense but hopefully it made you laugh! 

Now that in itself would all be a wonderful blog, but the main reason I write is something the real dentist said to me. You know how the dentist comes in to check the hygenists work and pokes you with the longer more painful metal toothpick searching for cavities by pressing the pointed metal tip in those sensitive areas on your teeth and waiting to see you flinch or squirm in pain.  Well lucky for me I was cavaty free, bummer for the dentist.  I don’t know how they stare at mouths all day, after just a minute looking at my teeth in the mirror, I begin to see why dentist are some of the most depressed MD’s in all of ‘doctordum.’

But my point.  As he was examining my teeth he noticed the gap I have in my upper 2 front teeth and he made this comment, "You’re son has the exact same gap in his teeth!"  Wow.  He doesn’t know our kids are adopted and I wasn’t about to correct his innocent comment, because I love to hear stuff like that, it makes me feel humbled and helps me remember that God does know what he is doing when he enlarges families through adoption.  I am a happy dad, with clean teeth today! 

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This weekend we had several soccer games with our three little ones.  They went well, we won 2 of 3 but no one was keeping score. Something that disturbs me about youth sports is the insane amount of stuff parents use to validate themselves or impress people.  What we end up with is a snack that is large enough to replace a meal.  Our 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son came home with more sugary snacks in gallon sized ziploc bags than they eat in 2 weeks.  The assortment included in one bag, yay; a banana, capri sun, cupcake, twinky, ring pop, fun dip, cheetos, fun straw you eat, and cracker jacks.   Did we miss the memo?  Is this what snacks are?  How do we keep up?  I didn’t know we had to go in debt to provide snacks for our kids recreational sports teams!?!?!

All this made Supermom and I recall a particular Everybody Loves Raymond episode, see video, where Raymond doesn’t pack an “Approved Snack” and the snack coordinator lets him know his disappointment.  We laughed as we headed to the car, but soon our laughter turned to this serious discussion of what is expected of us.  We don’t want our children eating all this crap all the time.  We don’t think a snack needs to have more than 2 items included, one of those being a drink like a juice box, capri sun, or gatorade.   The other being 1 piece of fruit OR bag of chips; banana, apple, orange, cheetos, or fritos.  That to me is a snack for a kid.

Plus, this got me thinking, if this is what kids parents pack for snacks to sporting events, what must they be packing for kids lunches on a daily basis?  Is this the reason many families grocery budget reaches the 4 digit category with 2 kids and 2 parents at home?  I say enough, of the craziness, ENOUGH.  Be a rebel, bring a snack that really is a snack.  See what the other parents say about your “SNACK!”  What has been your experience?

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