Happy Halloween

This is the first Halloween in 5 years that Darwin hasn't been here to Trick or Treat with TheDaughter. Still no word on when he'll get to come home.

Wednesday right after I arrived at TheDaughter's school to volunteer, she began to cry and when I went to console her I could feel she was warm to the touch. A trip to the school nurse revealed a temp of 100.9, swollen glands, and a red throat. Yet again another trip to the pediatrician and she has Strep this time. More antibiotics (she just completed taking them two days before this round of sickness) and more missed school days but now she is back today (although still snotty nosed but no fever). I'm on my way to the school to volunteer again. Paprika's mom and I are supposed to take the kids around the school Trick Or Treating while the teacher serves the other teachers caramel apples. Yesterday it felt like my head was in a vice and my stomach was riding a roller coaster, but I feel better today. Just in time for Trick or Treating tonight.

Wordless Wednesday

Nervous about TPR

As the court date for TPR gets closer, I get more nervous. BabyBoy's social worker called yesterday from her home phone and left a message. I wasn't able to return her call until 8:30 last night and we talked for 30 minutes about what to expect at court and other general things. She has a case that is unusual and upsetting and she shares it with me (maybe everyone, I don't know, but I'm going to pretend I'm special and she only talks to me about it LOL). Not all social workers will give out their home phone number, heck some won't even give out their cell #, much less call you on their day off. Yet one more reason why I appreciate BabyBoy's worker. She cares.

Most likely we won't be in court more than an hour or two. If the Bio Parents show up and ask for a court appointed lawyer, then we will be rescheduled for another date about 6 weeks from now. If they show up with a lawyer, we still may not have the hearing due to multiple TPRs going on that day and time may run out. If they don't show up but haven't been located in order to be served, then we will reschedule another court date about 6 weeks from now. If they don't show up but were served in-person, then it will be published in the local newspaper for x amount of weeks and then we will schedule another court date. And finally when we get to have the hearing, we won't get the judge's ruling that day, we have to wait. Some judges take up to 3 months to rule on a TPR case, others rule the next day. Then we wait 15 more days for potential appeals.

Some people may think "How awful that a baby is being TPR'd on so early in his life - give the parents a chance!" I too felt this way in the beginning. I couldn't understand why they took him straight from the hospital without giving the bio parents a chance to parent him. But then bio dad wasn't clean at the 1st court date, or the 2nd, or the 3rd and they didn't have the money for parenting/anger management/mental health/color code classes and they didn't have transportation and they didn't have jobs and now they don't have a home either, so I know they couldn't provide for him. I also think about the past 7 (SEVEN!) years that they've had the open case with their other 4 kids and how they haven't completed the most basic of requirements in order to get those kids back so their history indicates that they may not ever get their shit together. That doesn't mean my heart doesn't ache for them. I can not imagine creating a child, wanting to keep the child, and having it taken away ... multiplied by 5 times (technically 3 separate pick-ups).

And then there is my cousin who is also unemployed, without transportation, without a home, and not able to provide for her baby. Both her and her husband are on color code, both have failed or came back diluted on multiple occasions, yet their baby doesn't get taken from them. CPS is involved only so far as ordering random drug testing, no home visits or parenting classes though. I don't understand the reasoning behind letting one keep their kid and the other not, when both are the same.

Adoption is at least 6 months in the future, but I've already started asking other foster/adoptive parents for recommendations on lawyers. We need to start budgeting for it as well since lawyers aren't exactly cheap. I was hoping BabyBoy could be adopted before he was old enough to realize that he was in foster care but it appears that he will be around age 2 before the adoption is finalized. Since we've had him since he was two days old, it seems like it is taking forever and dragging on impossibly slow, but it also feels fast in that I can't believe we are actually getting to adopt him! I didn't get attached to him for a long time. I didn't want to get hurt and we expected him to either go with his siblings or with a relative. Even after it appeared that he would be staying here forever, he just didn't feel like ours and I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I worried that I couldn't attach to a baby that I didn't birth, even though we have taken care of him since shortly after he was born. Finally as the TPR gets near, it feels more real - he feels more like our baby - and soon he will be. Though I still wish we could go back and love him as our own from the beginning & attach under the assumption we were keeping him (taking care of someone else's baby/kid who may at any day/time go permanently live with someone else, someone who isn't you, someone who is the "real mom" - such is the reality of fostering). No doubt, I am forever attached to our little BabyBoy.

Then 4lbs 11oz @ full term


Now 20 lbs @ 8 months

She Devil

TheDaughter wore The Shirt to school on Friday and they took her picture. That's a good thing, right? Or maybe it was for proof of my evilness. Muwahaha

Survivor

TheDaughter, like her dad, is a big fan of Survivor. She will hurry through dinner, homework, and bathtime in order to be ready at 7pm when it comes on TV. During commercial breaks she will call her dad on the phone and they will discuss the game. It's cute. This Thursday she came running down the hall saying "I'm ready for Survivor!" She had on a princess necklace "My immunity necklace" and dress up shoes "They came with my food basket award", and proclaimed "The yellow team will win" and sure enough they did.

Survivor - The Complete First Season
Survivor - The Australian Outback: The Complete Second Season
Survivor Palau - The Complete Season
Survivor All-Stars - The Complete Season
Survivor Pearl Islands - The Complete Seventh Season
Survivor - Africa
Survivor Vanuatu - The Complete Season

My Sister's Keeper

I was going to write this on Monday, but this lady and this lady's struggles with their children's mental issues inspired me to go ahead and write it now. I am sorry it's so long, if I knew how to truncate it, I would.

Monday is my sister's 29th birthday. We're having her b'day party here at the house. I'm making both her requests: vanilla cupcakes with strawberry icing and carrot cake with cream cheese icing and fall decorations. Our parents are bringing pizza & presents. Sounds normal, right? Except that my sister appears to be about to relapse. She is talking nonstop, giggling and spacing out, distancing herself from the family and being secretive about her whereabouts. It's not the proverbial falling off the wagon, but it's a fall nonetheless. My sister is not a druggie, she's schizophrenic.

She takes her medication faithfully, but even with it she isn't "normal". She lives independently, which is a huge accomplishment for her. Dad put her trailer just a short walk down my driveway so that I could "keep her". See when she was first diagnosed, our parents weren't helping at all, so I was her sole full time caretaker. I was at court to get her committed to a mental institution, I visited her several times per week while working 12 hours shifts, and I was the one who signed her out of the institution. I became her temporary legal guardian. It was temporary because of her transition from being a ward of the state to being independent. Our father was in denial and our mother was scared. My sister had tried to kill mother, ironically that's what saved my sister's life.

For as long as I can remember, my sister talked to herself. Everyone said she just had a childhood imaginary friend and nothing was thought of it. Her hygiene left a lot to be desired (she stored her urine in jars in her room because she was paranoid that she had some disease or wasn’t getting proper nutrients or something). That was attributed to being our father's daughter. She was a total space cadet, that was blamed on her blonde hair. She almost failed kindergarten, not because she wasn't smart but because she was more interested in doing her friend's work. She always had tons of friends, very social and fun. Later on she became a party going person, this around age 13, and her substance abuse only increased as she reached legal driving age. The family assumed it was just a growing-up phase. My sister was the baby of the family and was definitely babied. She stole my car and wrecked it, constantly took things from my room and lost them, flunked out of school, and totaled her own car. If you knew our family, you would understand why all of that wasn't viewed as abnormal.

I couldn't leave home fast enough. Once I was away from there, I didn't care to visit much. I only lived 10 or so miles away in a house formerly owned by a cousin, surrounded by land owned by my dad and his family, and worked at the same place of employment as dad so I didn't get too far away. I was struggling with my own demons. My sister overdosed on Tylenol, got a DUI, and went to jail for something or other, all of which I didn't find out until years later. The family is BIG on keeping secrets. Besides, at the time I had been ostracized from the family. Coming out of the closet is not something my family accepts. Drugs, domestic violence, stealing, lying, cheating, hiding illegal “adoptions”, marrying 5gazillion times (one of which was your cancer-dying best friend's wife and another being a woman you met on a church missionary trip while married to the cancer dude's exwife - he lived BTW and was pissed his woman and best friend were knocking boots), and killing a husband are all acceptable family behaviors. Being bisexual is not. Also, not having a criminal record is seen as suspect. I'm always the oddball out.

So mom called one day to tell me not to bail my sister out of jail. (I didn't but our Aunt did and my sister lived in a tent in the field between my house and our aunt's house until her court date - I fed her, washed her clothes, and let her take showers here. This is when she confided in me that she heard voices, lots of them, and that she was scared. I wrote down all her voices, their names, what they said, etc.) Mom said that her behaviors had gotten worse, much worse, and that she had tried to kill mom. Mother called the police, but since they live so far out in the country, a state trooper had to come and he was way in another part of the state. By the time the police arrived, my sister had beaten mother with a baseball bat, busted out all the windows on mom's truck, put sugar in the gas tank, busted the lights in the house, the cabinet tops, and basically anything else that was destructible got well, destructed (she had previously stolen and gotten rid of all their guns and bows for hunting plus any money and drugs she found). My sister thought our mother was out to get her, was planning to kill her, and the only way to live was to kill our mother first. So she tried. This was pre-cell phones and there were only three people living within two miles of my parent's house so mom had to run and run and run to find someone home to help her get away and call the police. The neighbors of course didn't believe a word of what she was saying. I told you our family is good at the keeping secrets thing. Grow & smoke pot, religiously beat your wife, party every weekend in your backyard with a motorcycle gang, wife swap, feed your babies beer in their bottle, etc and the neighbors still remain oblivious. But mom pressed charges and my sister was arrested and thankfully, the police could see that she was seriously disturbed and told us how we could get her committed on the state's dime.

I don't know what mom had to put up with from dad for going through with having her committed, but I know he was very unpleasant to me, and that's putting it mildly. My sister was put into a local crisis and stabilization unit and drugged into submission until her court date and transferal to a very large and very bad history state run mental institution. It has been featured in several movies, think movies about mental hospitals in the south. That's when mom ceased to be involved and I completely took over. I was about 22 years old. We were again lucky in that my sister's age placed her in the best wing of the hospital. She had an outstanding social worker, good doctors, and caring staff. I gave them all the pictures I had taken of her room and destruction, notes of her behavior over the years, and my opinion that she might be schizophrenic. They agreed. She was started on an anti-psychotic and within a week had leveled off enough that we could visit and have an actual comprehendible conversation.

She was there for 3 or 4 months and slowly worked her way to less restriction. We could only meet in a visitation room at first, then we were allowed to go outside for a small amount of time which increased with her continued stability, then I was able to bring her food and crafts, and finally we were able to leave campus to go out to eat and go shopping. I had bought her 7 complete outfits without drawstrings, buttons, zippers, or shoe laces and wrote her name in all of them with a laundry marker but they were constantly being either lost or stolen so we would go to the Goodwill & Salvation Army and buy her clothes. She was doing so well, and they were so full that my sister was moved into a different building which was essentially the waiting list for a group home. The only restriction was they had to be in their beds at a certain time at night. Someone killed someone else in the bathroom and that is when I asked to get my sister out. If I took her out, she lost her place in line for a group home, which meant she would live with me possibly forever. My girlfriend was not okay with that and I essentially had to choose between her and my sister. Our relationship had been deteriorating for years, so it was more like the straw that broke the camel's back. My sister lived with me for a few months while we got her set up with a therapist and a day program at the local mental health center.

Dad stepped up monetarily and bought her a used/repo'd trailer. He insisted on placing it near my residence so that I could take care of her. I wanted her over on her side of the 10 acres. That way I could take care of her, but not feel burdened. It still irritates me when I come home and can't get down the driveway because some visitor of hers has my driveway blocked. Embarrassed when she chases down people coming to visit us because she thinks they are either there to see her or lost. Once she chased down the UPS truck on the highway because she thought they might be looking for my house.

She started out spending one day alone in her place but sleeping at my house, then working her way up to spending the night alone, and a couple nights, then a week, and finally she was living independently. I went up twice per day to watch her take her meds; make sure she swallowed them instead of hiding them under her tongue. I also filled her med box and took her grocery shopping and to all of her appointments, except for day therapy which their bus picked her up for. At first she tried to work to support herself but couldn't hold a job. Her illness gets worse when she is stressed and around people, also when she is touching things that other people's cooties could potentially be on, and without a high school diploma, she can't get much more than fast food or cleaning jobs. So I took her to get on disability and food stamps. She argued with me in front of the disability/SSI worker saying that she wasn't disabled. I thought for sure they wouldn't approve her, but they got all of her medical records and now she receives a monthly check of $600 which she budgets out wonderfully.

She allots money each month for purchasing presents for people's birthdays and Christmas. She pays her phone, electric, water, trash, and gas bill. She only gets $80 a month for groceries, so she uses her disability check to buy food, toiletries, cleaning supplies, and occasionally clothes. She bought furniture for her living room and paid payments on it until she had it paid in full. She saved up her money and paid off all her fines she owed from her earlier years, pre-diagnosis (from the DUI, her license's fee, court costs, etc). She saved her money and bought a storm shelter (one of those big bubbles that is buried under ground to keep you safe from tornadoes). She also tithes to her church and gives regularly to charity. Our parents are in charge of her account though, because she is gullible and will buy into every scam known and give every deadbeat family member every thing she can. If someone is selling something, she'll buy it ... Avon, Pampered Chef, Fake Jewelry, Ocean Front Property in Kansas … so mother limits those purchases to $10 or $20 a pop. This sometimes makes my sister mad, she resents not having complete control over her life including finances, but it is a necessary evil.

When Darwin and I got married and I subsequently moved off to another state, mother had to take over. She felt it was too much for her to come out twice a day and watch my sister take her medication, so she only came once per day, then once every other day, then once a week and that's what she does still even though we have moved back up here (she takes her meds unsupervised now and has for years). Well I guess technically mother comes twice per week, once to refill her med box and once to take her grocery shopping. Chores that would have remained mine had I not moved away for a while. I know that one day, not too far away, I'll be taking care of both of my parents plus my sister and my own family and that's why we won't take foster/adoptive kids who knowingly have an illness or disability that will prevent them from living independently (BabyBoy will most likely have issues, and The Daughter may as well because both have family history, but we try to be realistic about what we can handle. There are amazing families out there, exhausted and bewildered, but doing the best they can - keep your head up & stay strong!).

Years ago funding was cut and the CSU was shut down, the day therapy program was scaled back to only those in desperate need, and the lone psychiatrist now oversees two counties worth of mentally ill and substance addicted patients (yes, The Addicts go to the same therapy as The Crazy which shows how bad the funding really is). Thankfully our family and our community has stepped up and helped to more evenly distribute the responsibility. Once a week our Grandmother takes my sister out to eat and to exercise. Someone from a local church picks her up on Wednesdays and Sundays and any other day there is church related events. My sister even puts on puppet shows for the younger kids (it took her a while to find a church small enough that she didn't get stressed and regress). She has befriended several retired individuals that live within walking distance and she spends her days visiting with them. Dad has finally accepted (only partially, but it's progress) her illness and he takes her to the bank and out to eat once per week. It is rare that a day goes by that someone doesn't check in with her or invite her somewhere or in some way attempt to make her life feel more "normal".

Still this time of year seems to be a trigger for her relapsing. I call it The Deer Season Relapse because it seems to happen when mom and dad are gone hunting. The first time was less than 6 months after getting out of the institution. I was at work and got a call to come get my sister. She was jumping from car hood to car hood in the parking lot of the local mental health center. She had been inside pacing and they kept trying to get her to stop and join the group. She was freaking out and asked to be put back into the institution. Only she got sent up north instead of down south and while the facility was newer, it sucked. The staff was inattentive, the doctors treated us as though we knew nothing and they would not listen to us when we told them which medication she got better on and which she didn't (they put her on the thing we said not to and then couldn't understand when she didn't get better) and their visitation was only for a few hours on a specific day which just so happened to fall during the time I had to work. Mom and dad visited more than I did and she was only there for a couple of months, but she spent her birthday there which was depressing.

Later we learned to take her to the ER, get her sedated, and then go see the psychiatrist the next day to get her back on a med that works for her and we keep her at home with us for a couple of weeks until she is back stable. We also learned that she can't tolerate caffeine now; it makes her relapse. She can take her med and drink soda and eat chocolate and it is as if she didn't take her med. Also her menstrual cycle being off will make her behavior erratic. Large stressful groups or events are triggers as are weather patterns (I know it sounds weird but we’ve been thru a bad tornado and so it may be related to PTSD of some sort). The low after the high of a holiday event is also a trigger, so we try to have her spend the day with someone after Christmas. Sometimes she just gets tired of the medication’s side effects and asks her therapist (which she sees only once or twice a year) to facilitate a change. The one she is on now causes excessive weight gain which in turn elevates her blood sugar which leads to diabetes later in life. One of them causes breast milk, and another causes her body to jerk uncontrollably (can’t think of the name of the condition right now). Sometimes a med will just stop working for her, for no obvious reason. Of course it can always be a combination of things. Right now she is still in that “I’m fine” stage, and maybe she is, but if she isn’t we will all be there for her.

I am no longer my sister’s keeper, the whole family pitches in.

To the Tune of Clementine

"I'm glad that I grew in your tummy and [that] you're my mom because you are beautiful."
by TheDaughter at age 4


to the tune of "Clementine"
found a booger
found a booger
found a booger in my nose
i like this here poetry
'cause i'm not that good at prose
by P age 37


I'm attempting to declutter (is that even a word?) the house and found these jewels written on scrap pieces of paper. The picture is of our pre-foster/adopt family and is drawn on the little notepad that we keep on the fridge for writing grocery lists.

Wordless Wednesday

The Great Pumpkin

Our Jack-O-Lanterns over the years ...

2008


2007


2006


2005


2004


2003


TheDaughter was born in 2003 so that's when we started the pumpkin thing. TheDaughter and Darwin typically carve them together, it's Father-Daughter Time, but this year I had to help her. Some years we use a pattern, others we let TheDaughter free hand a design. I figure you can tell which is which.

Wordless Wednesday

Maid of Honor is Made of Crap

Once again I got to have date night alone. I know, I should just shut up already. So I watched Made of Honor which sucked. Then I watched Baby Mama which was better but still flawed (Infertile woman finally gets pregnant when hooking up with the "right" man and "relaxing" *gag*). And that was followed up with 21 (Single-Disc Edition) which I had expected to be much better. Last weekend I watched Just My Luck which is a typical Lohan flick. I started to watch The Family Stone (Widescreen Edition) and then realized I had already watched it and hated it the first time around. I also got North Country (Full Screen Edition) from the library but it's due back tomorrow and I haven't had the time to watch it yet. If I had to recommend any of the movies it would be Baby Mama. Hey, it could potentially be milked for training hours!

The Politics of Parenting

I just finished reading a book that I found at the library, it's called Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting by Elizabeth Bartholet. She is a former civil rights lawyer and current Harvard law professor, yet she too had to deal with the bureaucratic bullshit of the adoption system. The book is about her journey and her analysis of the problems with some ideas for solutions.

Not far into the book, she says

"The process I went through to form this family affected my understanding of many issues that I had dealt with during my lawyering life. I had, for example, thought of the law largely in terms of its potential for advancing justice and social reform. In the adoption world, I experienced the law as something that functioned primarily to prevent good things from happening. You need only to step through the door of this world and look around to realize that there are vast numbers of children in desperate need of homes and vast numbers of adults anxious to become parents. It seems overwhelmingly clear that efforts to put these group of children and adults together would create a lot of human happiness. But the legal systems in this and other countries have erected a series of barriers that prevent people who want to parent from connecting with children who need homes."

and then she goes on to say

"Discrimination is thus the name of the game in adoptive parenting. Those who would adopt have no rights. They must beg for the privilege of parenting, and do so in a state-administered realm that denies them both the right to privacy and the 'civil rights' that we have come to think of as fundamental in the rest of our communal life. Differential treatment on the basis of age, race, religion, and disability has been outlawed in almost all areas of our lives. Increasingly, the law forbids discrimination on the basis of marital status and sexual orientation. It is only in the area of adoption that our system proudly proclaims not simply the right to discriminate but the importance of doing so."

That is when you know she truly gets it. She has been there and done that.

Even though this book is a tad outdated, I consider it a good read if for no other reason than to realize you are not alone. This process can suck for anyone, apparently.

Morning Routine of a Kindergartener, the snarky version

I pledge allegiance, even though I don't know what that means.
To a meaningless material object the flag, and a bunch of other words that I also don't understand because I'm only in kindergarten.
With liberty and justice for ALL - except for those we choose to exclude.

And now we'll observe a moment of silence that is 4 minutes long wasting valuable teaching time, you know since this is a public school and all.

Let's make sure to thank the dead white guy in the sky for raining out our pumpkin patch field trip yesterday. He blessed us with a disappointing day at a tiny ass museum where all 200 kids were forced into ADD mode encouraged to flit from one thing to another every few minutes while constantly being told to shut up, sit down, and not touch shit - just like a day at my Grandmother's house. Praise Jesus! And not the dark skinned version pronounced Hey Seuss. God is so good to us. He really opened up the doors of opportunity for us today at the last minute, we are blessed.

Amen!

*The principle said the less snarky version of this over the loud speaker yesterday morning and says a version of it every single morning in a public school. In the south, of course.

TPR Court Date

November 3rd

Holy Shit

No Pumpkins for Us

The pumpkin patch field trip was rained out today. Instead we went to a kid's museum and later, after it stopped raining, a playground. It was crazy having 200 kids crammed into that little museum. The kids appeared to have a decent time although some were understandably disappointed in not getting a pumpkin. I was hoping to get some good fall pictures, instead this is the closest I got.





It's a talking tree at the museum. I think we will go back some other time to actually explore and learn about the exhibits. Maybe I can talk my family into going with us to the pumpkin patch this weekend. If not, we'll buy a pumpkin or two at the grocery store.

Group Preparation and Selection (GPS)

I don't know if all GPS classes are the same, but in our county the Group Preparation and Selection program is thirty hours long. Each meeting is three hours duration and the worker follows a curriculum.

The following are the topics covered:

Meeting 1: Welcome to the Group Preparation and Selection Program
Meeting 2: A Foster Care and Adoption Experience - Where the MAPP leads
Meeting 3: Losses and Gains – The Need to be a Loss Expert
Meeting 4: Helping Children with Attachments
Meeting 5: Helping Children Learn to Manage Their Behaviors
Meeting 6: Helping Children with Birth Family connections
Meeting 7: Gains and Losses – Helping Children Leave Foster Care
Meeting 8: Understanding the Impact of Fostering or Adopting
Meeting 9: Perspectives in Adoptive Parenting and Foster Parenting
Meeting 10: Endings and Beginnings


Meeting 1 & Meeting 2
Introductions
Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting MAPP
The Group Preparation and Selection Program
Criteria for selection
Partnerships as a foundation for the foster care / adoption program
The strengths/needs approach
Information sharing
Discussion of Adoption and Foster care - Purpose of foster care, permanency planning, adoption
Feelings and Behaviors
The roles and responsibilities of foster and adoptive parenting
The importance of clear roles and responsibilities
Effective communication
A Partnerships in Parenting Experience (these were skits and stories told from different perspectives such as the birth parent perspective, the foster parent perspective, the child’s perspective, the social workers perspective, etc)
HOMEWORK – complete strengths and needs worksheet (at every. single. meeting. X 10 meetings it will drive you bonkers) AND complete a family profile

Meeting 3
Losses and gains
Mutual selection issues
The need to be a Loss Expert
Why loss is so powerful
Impact and examples of loss on our own lives – maturational and situational loss
Grieving process stages
Impact of loss on feelings and behavior
Impact of grieving process on children’s behaviors
How children’s feelings and behavior impact foster parents and adoptive parents feeling and behavior
Partnership in loss – turning losses into gains
How parents personal losses can help or hinder their ability to help children
The role of foster parents, adoptive parents and child welfare workers in turning losses into gains
The importance of partnership in turning losses into gains
HOMEWORK – handout “Indicators of Expected Child Development" and "Warning Signs of Abuse or Neglect”, complete strength and needs worksheet, fill out infertility worksheet, etc

Meeting 4
Helping children with Attachments
Meeting Needs – The foundation for building and maintaining trust and attachment
Definition of attachment
The importance of attachment
How attachment develops
Issues affecting attachment for children in foster care or adoption
The impact of physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and separation on attachment
Meeting the special needs of children
Attachment expectations of foster parents and adoptive parents
Developing positive attachments - The positive interaction cycle
HOMEWORK – handout “Helping the Premature Infant or Prenatally Drug Exposed Baby Attach and Develop”, handout “Bonding and Attachment”, complete strengths and needs worksheet

Meeting 5
The important role of foster parents and adoptive parents in helping children express feelings and manage behaviors
The importance of special parenting skills
How discipline helps children learn healthy behaviors that express their feelings and are nonharmful to self and others
The difference between discipline and punishment
Skills adoptive parents and foster parents can use to help children learn healthy behaviors
Examples of situations requiring special discipline skills
assessment tool for determining positive discipline methods that help children learn new behaviors
Assessing behaviors and helping children meet their needs
Relating feeling and behaviors
Determining discipline methods that meet the child’s needs
HOMEWORK – complete strength and needs worksheet, discipline methods assessment worksheet

Meeting 6
Define self concept and connections – five connections activity
Define identity and culture – identity demonstrations
Importance of birth family connections
Fantasies and complications
Importance of visits with birth families
Steps for successful visits & Causes for unsuccessful visits
Birth parents view of visits & Foster parent / adoptive parent role in visits
HOMEWORK – complete strengths/needs worksheet, read “The Life Book” handout, read “The Importance of Birth Parents to Children in Foster Care” handout, write a letter to the birth parent of a child who may be placed in your home

Meeting 7
Family reunification
Adoption
What disruption is and why it occurs
Stages of disruption
Preventing disruptions
Interventions
Meeting your own needs
HOMEWORK – complete strengths/needs assessment, read handouts

Meeting 8
Defining the family system
Parts of the family system affected by foster care and adoption (roles, rules, boundaries, decision making and communication)
Use the EcoMap to assess family strengths and needs for fostering or adopting
What the child brings
The first 24 hours
The effects of foster care
HOMEWORK – complete EcoMap, complete strength/needs worksheet, read and complete handouts

Meeting 9
Panel meeting which is made up of lawyers and social workers and they answer your questions if you are brave enough to be labeled as a trouble making question-asker
HOMEWORK – complete strengths/needs assessment, turn in all paperwork

Meeting 10
Play a game to facilitate bonding amongst the few people left in the GPS classes
Discussions and summaries
Graduating
Notification if chosen to be a foster/adoptive parent
Partnership Development Plan

Halloween Costumes

It's October already? Yikes!

Next week we're going to the Pumpkin Patch with a gazillion other Kindergarten kids (and their germs). TheDaughter is so excited. She keeps asking if it's time to go get a pumpkin yet. Umm, no. Next week! Do. Not. Ask. Again.

She also asks if it's time to go Trick-Or-Treating yet. Again, no.

And while we're at it, is it time to go see Daddy yet? Umm, is the paper chain still long enough to drape across the entire dinning room area? Yes. Okay then, not time to go see Daddy.

At least she is feeling a tad better (still got a fever so home from school for the third day in a row). She can now sit up and color/draw. She ate 1/4th of a tuna salad sandwich. She took a couple of sips of caffeine free coke. She can walk to the potty by herself. And she can ask me over and over and OVER if today is the day we get to ... go get a pumpkin, go trick or treating, go see daddy ... and now she is asking when we can go back to Chuck E Cheese.

I made the mistake of asking her what she wanted to dress up as for Halloween. She replied: Batman. Definitely Batman. Or maybe a dinosaur. Or a flower. Or a fairy princess. Or Spiderman. No, I know! I know! WordGirl! Or a firefighter. Or a teacher. No, Batman.

I've got an idea. Why don't you dress up as a perpetually sick 5 year old who can't make up her mind.

What costumes are your kids wearing?

The reason we don't currently have foster teens

BabyBoy's homevisit went fine today. I started to cancel in order to keep the worker from taking sick germs home to her kids, but figured it would look like I was hiding something if I canceled, so didn't.

Sent our resource worker an email last week asking why we were only licensed for 2 kids and also why we received a letter stating we needed to get our 15 training hours. We were previously licensed for 3 kids and I have 19 hours while Darwin has 11. He has three months to get four training hours, so no worries. Both letters were from another worker, not our resource worker, and not the good resource worker. Our resource worker still hasn't emailed back, but she forwarded the email to the good resource worker and she replied. Only now I don't care to call her the good resource worker anymore.

She said the reason we haven't received any calls about teenagers is because she "knows" - not thinks or assumes or seems to recall, but "knows" that due to our previous experiences with teenagers that we no longer wanted to take teens. WTF? We've never said that. Never implied that. Never hinted at that. As a matter of fact, we've taken every single opportunity to remind them that we have the teen room open and ready and it has been empty now for almost 9 months. Parenting teens is one of our strengths.

She also said that we were only licensed for 2 kids because we had the babybed in our master bedroom and had the other room as a playroom. Again, WTF? The baby bed has never, ever been in our bedroom (tanning bed, yes - babybed, no). NEVER. But she remembers it being in there! She REMEMBERS. She's f'ing delusional.

We had a playroom but it's now BabyBoy's bedroom. Before we had the bunk beds and the babybed in one room, one room was a playroom, one room was the teen room, and then there was our room. That's how it was the last time the worker formerly known as the good resource worker was out here ... back in June 2007. But the other worker that came out for both our semi annual and our annual review saw the new bed arrangement and noted it. I gave her a floor plan sketch of the new bed arrangement. I gave her printed digital pictures of the new room arrangements. It seems that nobody f'ing looks at the GD file.

And the reason we haven't received a call for any other age group? Because they weren't sure what ages we were willing to accept. Bullshit. How many Desired Child forms have we filled out? Four. Each one saying the exact same thing. Look. In. Our. File. Or call us and ask for fucks sake.

What it boils down to is that we aren't religious. We aren't their preferred choice of foster parents. We will get a call for a teenager when the kid has been booted out of other foster homes. We get the kids that the religious foster parents reject. Usually because they are having sex. Like S - we were her 5th placement in less than 2 years (that's FIVE different homes, FIVE different families in something like 20 months). Why not just call us first? Save her all those disruptions? We are far more realistic about teenager behaviors than many or most of the local religious foster parents.

We got BabyBoy because they didn't expect him to stay in this county. They worked very hard to get him transfered to another county. He was only supposed to be here overnight, two days max. That and his bio dad has a history of harassing foster parents and since we live so far off the road it's unlikely he can find us.

Oh, but now that I'm complaining ... they have a sibling group of three that is sitting at DHR/CPS right now and needs placement ... can we take them? They are 12, 10, and 8 or something like that.

Again, read. our. paperwork.

Wordless Wednesday