Trauma SUCKS!

Anyone who has ever experiences any kind of trauma will tell you that it SUCKS! There is no nice way to put it!

Trauma happens from so many things both  intentionally and unintentionally, but no matter what caused the trauma it is very much real and scary to the person it is affecting! The doctors, social workers, therapists, and counselors tell us that trauma can happen at any time and can include anything from a fire, to a car accident, to intentional abuse children.  Although trauma caused by accidents or life events, such as a car accident, cannot always be avoided, trauma from child abuse, sex abuse, and domestic violence CAN be avoided! 

Children should NEVER have to suffer avoidable trauma! There are lots of services in this world for those who do not know how to handle their children, do not want their children, or do not know what to do when a child acts out! There are places for battered men and women to go to escape. There are people who are willing and very much so able to help. My plead to the parents of this world is PLEASE do not subject your children to traumatic events that could be avoided if you asked for help, picked up the phone and made a call, or just walked away. Children should not have to suffer because of our lack of time, laziness, or down right meanness!

Life has been crazy here the past few weeks. 

We have been dealing with tantrums, doctors visits, daycare meltdowns, tantrums, nocturnal enuresis (potty training regression for those of us who are NOT in the medical field) high heel crisis, tantrums, and of course a little "foster" sibling rivalry/jealousy! Oh and did I mention TANTRUMS?!?

Well as you can tell lots have happened since I last posted.

One Thursday, July 18th, we received yet another call that would change our lives forever. YAP (our foster parent placement agency) called to ask if we would be considered for a 1 day old baby. We of course said yes, and then I had a minor panic attack about who would watch the baby while I was a work. 

Well, that ended up being null and void as we were NOT chosen to take the baby. 

We were however called minutes (30 to be exact) later and asked if we would consider placement for a 14 year old, who is pregnant. After asking all (i thought all) the right questions; when is she due, why is she being moved, does she want the baby, how is her attitude, is she doing prenatal care, I said we would think about this. 

I called my hubby and of course got the typically "I mean I'm fine with it babe, its really up to you, IDK how we will do with a teenager, but i don't want her in a group home" response. I said a little prayer, dealt with a tantrum. And packed up Little Miss to go to her appointment. The whole drive I kept thinking about being 14 and pregnant, away from my parents, and possibly in a group home. I had conversations in my head over and over again with God and it was as if he kept telling me, JUST DO IT, STOP ARGUING WITH ME AND SAY YES. Needless to say I had this strong sense that God really wanted us to say yes. I called YAP and said I would try it but that we would need all the info.

Well Ms. A has been in our home for a week and 2 days now and things are going great. She is a typically 14 year old, only pregnant. She is extremely mature and already loves her baby very much. We are still getting to know her but things are going great and we are again so thankful that we said yes to God's calling to not only step but to jump out of our comfort zone. 

Little Miss is S-L-O-W-L-Y adjusting to not being the only child. There has definitely been some rivalry in that me and A cannot be alone together, she either has to be with us or A has to be with her. 

The tantrums have been spiraling out of control (not because of A) but we are dealing with them one at a time and Little Miss is slowly learning that she may be stubborn but I an down right bull headed and I DO NOT give in. We are not sure why the tantrums are intensifying but feel it is due to more then one thing. My hubby had to go back to seconds, so Little Miss' nightly routine was changed, A joined our family so it is no longer solely all about Little Miss, and we has a scare where we thought Little Miss was going to be moved out of our home with little to no notice which she was told about (NOT BY US) and this played a large factor in her emotions. 

The one thing I have learned about Little Miss and her tantrums is that you MUST be persistent and consistent because she does not give up and she does not forget ANYTHING you say. I will admit, I've tried the whole, tell them one thing to get what you want then change the story. That absolutely does not work because she never forgets anything. With Little Miss you MUST say what you mean, mean what you say, and STICK TO IT. 

It has been a rough couple weeks but we are making it and I am so thankful that we have the love and support behind us. 

I cannot tell you how excited I am about taking the girls to my parents house at the end of this week to hang out for the week and meet my family. I know we are going to have a great time!! 

Every Child Deserves a Home

Ok so after my rant I heard this song on my iTunes and so I found it on YouTube and thought I would share. it makes me cry every time I hear it but it also reaffirms why I do what I do, no matter how crazy things can get! 



And of course because you can never look at just one YouTube Video, I found this one...

STOP telling kids they are BAD! They ARE NOT BAD!!

So tonight I just have to vent a little because this issue has bugged me for a really long time! 

For those of you who know me, you know that I LOVE kids and not only am I a foster parent but I am also a social worker. I have held a few different "social work"/kid friendly jobs over my years. I have been a baby sitter, nanny, family support specialist, treatment worker, and currently I am an investigator of child abuse and neglect.

Throughout my years of working with kids (even in high school)  I have noticed a trend. Often times parents, caregivers, grandparents, teachers, foster parents, daycare workers, and even complete strangers have referred to kids as BAD or as being bad. 

I have never really understood who started this but it truly ticks me off!

 Why? 

Because kids are NOT BAD! They may break rules, disrupt your plans, and fail to listen at times, they are KIDS! that is what they are supposed to do. They are learning, every single day, and what we teach and say to them has lasting impressions on their lives and their personalities. This is why it truly makes me angry when I hear someone telling a child they are "bad"! 

What are we saying to our kids when we continually tell them that they are bad? 

Think about the message we are sending...

What do we do with things that are bad? 99% of the time, we throw them AWAY!

When fruit goes bad, we throw it away.

When the sound in a TV goes bad, we throw it away.

When milk goes bad, we throw it away. 

See the trend???

We wonder why kids act out, feel unloved, and have such a hard time adjusting. Perhaps it is because for most of their lives they have been told their bad. It may seem like a little thing but in their mind, ESPECIALLY with FOSTER KIDS, they are constantly wondering, "if I am bad, will they throw me away" (aka kick me out). 

Unfortunately this is what happens a lot. 

Think about it, would you want to stay in a place where you were constantly told you were bad, having to constantly worry about whether or not you would be there the next day. No, you'd leave before you had the chance to get thrown out.!

Do children act out and misbehave? ABSOLUTELY! But they are kids, we as adults have bad day, we have "Cranky" moods, we get stressed out, we get frustrated. SO DO KIDS! The difference is we have learned over the years how to cope with these issues and how to calm ourselves down. Some kids DON'T.

Children will never learn how to do these things unless we teach them and any good teacher will tell you that part of the teaching process is repeat, repeat, repeat and LISTEN. 

Kids value their time with you, they want to know that you love them and care about them enough to spend time with them and listen to them. 

Lots of kids act out to get your attention whether positive or negative! You may be yelling at them or holding them in their room to get them to calm down, but to them, you're with them which is what they wanted to begin with and just couldn't tell you. What message are we sending them if every time they act out we tell them they are bad and punish them instead of teaching them something! 

Here is a basic example:

Today Little Miss got in trouble at daycare. She started to talk to me about it, however when my husband came in the room she stopped and immediately started acting up. We struggled with this for well over 30 minutes. She refused to talk about it and proceeded to suck her finger and talk like a baby telling me no. Finally we went to her room and her and I talked alone. It was then that i LISTENED and learned that she was scared to tell Keenan because he was a man and she didn't want him to get mad at her. This is a child that was punished severely by men in her life for "Being Bad". Her fears made perfect sense, she didn't know how he would respond, and after we talked about the fact that Keenan may be disappointed with her behavior but would NEVER get mad at her or hurt her she said she knew this because he was so nice and she went out and told him. Her fears were real! It happened before. She doesn't make the connection that 1 he would not do this, and 2 he is not allowed as a foster parent to do this. All she knew was that he was a man.  She didn't know what would happen. She certainly knows now, and after our talk she went out and talked to Keenan about it. But had we not taken the time to listen to her we would have never known this.

Yes this is a little thing but we have to remember that all little things add up and to a child something that is so small to us could be consuming their every thought! 

Please just think about this when you see a child "acting out". Please stop telling children they are bad!
A CHILD IS NOT BAD, THEY DO NOT GO BAD!  They CANNOT be throw away! They simply need love, patience, routine, and someone to care. 

The next time you see a child acting out, PLEASE remember, You don't know what that child has been through or how the they are feeling. Maybe they just need an encouraging word, someone to acknowledge them. Little things like this can mean SO much! 

Ok, I think I'm done ranting now! LOL 

Fun Facts

Just thought I would share with you some "FUN FACTS" we have discovered about Little Miss in the brief 8 hours she has been in our home...

1. She is a Shopping Diva
2. She LOVES lipstick, and no it cannot be lip gloss, it MUST be lip stick (red)
3. She is FULL of Energy! (We are taking 50 kids hyped up on ice cream at a theme park bottled into one child, type of full)
4. She loves Dresses, tights, and high heels
5. The sparkly-er the better
6. She is very good at improvising... we forgot bubble bath so in the 10 seconds it took me to get a cup from the kitchen she had dumped 1/4 a bottle of shampoo in the tub to make bubbles! (I will give it to her, it made LOTS of bubbles)
7. She LOVES Bubbles!
8. She loves baths (45 minute baths)
9. She is attracted to ANY and ALL things SUGAR and her body turns every single gradual of that sugar into bouncing energy.
10. She LOVES to sing and talk (maybe even more then my mother, just in case you're wanting a comparison!) lol
11. She is extremely independent
and last but not least...
12. She smiles all the time (unless of course she is pouting over lip stick) and we have already fallen in love with her!

Our First Foster Child

Little Miss entered our home on the first Tuesday in July. It was bittersweet getting to meet her. She was so cute and very shy. She did not talk to me until after her CW left the house and then I learned that she LOVES TO TALK! I had planned on taking her clothes shopping but learned when she arrived that she was completely taken care of in that department. She had clothes for every season! The only thing she did not have she informed me was “dressed for church, high heels, and lip stick”! So we ventured off to the store. 

Old Navy was a complete excitement for her! She absolutely loved the manikins because they are “oh so cute” and we had to buy the exact outfits the manikins were wearing. Little Miss walked around the story as if she owned the place and she was not one bit afraid to tell me “Now I am the leader and you just have to follow me”, little did I know this would be a trend she hoped would stick, it has not.

After Old Navy we went to “the store that has everything”, yet good old Wal-Mart. We did learn however they do NOT have everything as Little Miss was very upset that they did not have high heels in her size!

It was in the Lipstick isle that I learned Little Miss does NOT like being given choices, in fact they seem to throw her into overload. Me, in my social work, let them be independent, everyone get a choices, be your own person mindset, I gave Little Miss the choice of this lip stick or that one you pick. 15 minutes later I learned this was obviously not a good decision. This caused a 7 year old to sob and produce crocodile tears as she stated “I can’t pick one, I want them both!” Well this fight was sort lived but we left with the lip stick she happened to have in her hand. You would think that this would have taught me a lesson, but it didn’t! I walked her to the sunglass isle and did the same thing all over again, still not sure what I was thinking! LOL But we made it out of Wal-Mart alive, even though we did NOT have high heels.

The rest of the night was rather uneventful. We went home, she met Keenan, we ate dinner, watched The Lorax, and I put her to bed.

That night in bed I remember thinking to myself, “this is easy, sure I’m gonna be a little tired because she is a little hyper, but I don’t see any issues, she just needed a chance, she just needed us”.

What I was however not thinking about was how long the “honeymoon” period would last. 

Our Story

I have basically known my entire life that I was going to be a foster parent. This was not something that was optional in my eyes. I am not sure where this sureness came from or when it even started. It could have been when my sister was adopted, all the baby sitting I did, my passion for children… It could have been all those commercials on TV about children in other countries needing to be “saved”, or maybe it was all the LMN and Lifetime shows I watched while everyone else was watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. But I always knew God wanted me to be a foster parent and there was to be NO conversation about it. It is funny to think back to the “dating years” because I recall actually telling my now husband, “I love kids! Do you love kids? I WILL be a foster parent one day so you might as well accept that or move on!”

Well the journey took a LOT longer than I would have liked, especially since it seems like everyone from my small town has kids and is married by the age of 22. Plus the fact that I (we) are foster parents in a completely different state then we grew up in still baffles me, but I knew that no matter when or how it happened, it would happen because I was so sure God had this planned for me, period.

So after our big, completely unexpected, move out of state we began the conversations of foster care again. We talked about this over and over again, basically saying what a great idea it was but not really knowing where to begin.

After the move I ended up with possibly the best job ever (the jury is still out) and have gotten to meet some really great people. Lucky for me some of those people are foster parents and others were in the process of beginning foster parents. I was able to talk with them and in February we made a move, literally from an apartment to a house, and made the big FC leap and requested paperwork for the licensing process. It was easier, in some ways, than I had thought it would be, and way more complicated in other ways. However, after a l-o-n-g few months of paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, doctors appointments (I’ll leave out my husband’s horror stories from this), home visits, purchasing beds, sheets, wall décor (thanks to my wonderful mother), dressers, doing more paperwork, more home visits, 14 hours of training, and more paperwork,

WE ARE FINALLY LICENSED FOSTER PARENTS!!

We (well I) received the call on Friday, June 28, 2013 at 2:33 PM (yes, I saved it) that we were licensed and they wanted to talk to us about a child! I was so excited that I screamed and startled my co-workers (luckily we were outside)! I was so excited that I cut off the voicemail and didn’t finish listening to it (which would prove to be a problem later). I guess what I should mention is that the call came in at 2:33 pm however I did not see the missed call until 5:30 PM! I returned the call, to the number which showed up on my caller Id. We’ll apparently after 5pm that line is redirected to an emergency answering service and they were none too happy that I was calling and wasn’t really sure what I was calling about. I didn’t have a child’s name or where the child was from. I hung up very disappointed as I really wanted to know about this child, but decided I would just have to wait….

Well later that night I listened to the voicemail again and learned the worker had actually called from the office but left her cell number. I was so mad at myself! I was so excited that I called her at 9:30pm (which I absolutely hate when my clients do it to me) and left a voicemail. It was a long weekend waiting and wondering when and if we would get a call about this child or any other child.

FINALLY, Monday morning came and at 8:15am we got the call about little miss C. After I spoke with the worker about how we were ABSOLUTELY ready for a child, and NO we did NOT want to wait awhile after getting licensed to take a child (who does that?), I was given a few details and I (of course being responsible) told them I would run it by my husband and call them back. Keenan had just gotten home from work and we were talking when the call came in. I gave him the details and his response was, “well of course we’ll take her, I mean where else is she going to go!” We were so excited, we started talking about all the different things we needed to do to prepare. Because of little miss’s “issues” we knew that the computer and our phones would need pass codes, the TV would from now on be G rated, and we would need to put a monitor in her room. I called the caseworker (CW) back and said we would absolutely take her and I would be off by 5pm but would leave early if necessary!

Well, we ended up having to wait a whole day to get her, due to scheduling of visits and transporting her from another town, but Tuesday was the day. We were so excited we could not wait!