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It's hard to believe, but we realized that it has been 2 years now since we began our adoption journey! Wow! Time goes soooooo fast! I have to admit that adopting 2 girls with special needs has been quite challenging. Is it challenging in the ways I thought it might be? Not usually! I had visions of the possible horrific situations the girls may have faced and thought they would be extremely homesick. But these ideas weren't the case at all! They were happy to be here and DID NOT miss Liberia at all. Most of the things we faced (and in some cases still are facing) were just annoying kid behaviors (although sometimes taken to the extreme!!). Overall, I think they adjusted pretty well and it has been a joy to see them grow over the course of the year. Are we still facing challenges after a year of having them here? YES!! We are still not fluent in ASL but I do have to say that we are able to communicate with Josephine very well in spite of this. Josephine had many "orphanage" behaviors when she first came and was very rough-hitting and grumping A LOT! She does this rarely now although last week she did have a very bad day!! That was her first bad day in 4 months! When she first came, she had days like that at least a two times per week! She really has come a long way and I am always encouraged by her progress. She will be getting two hearing aids of her own soon and the audiologist was very excited by her response with the newer hearing aid in her right ear. She is not sure how much benefit she will get from this. Will she be able to speak? We don't know-actually, Josephine doesn't want to learn to talk and says "signing is better"!! She is learning to read and knows many more words than she did at the beginning of the year. The one thing we still struggle with (and probably will for many years) is food issues. She never hoarded food or anything but she will eat until she is stuffed full and complains her stomach hurts-she has even run to bathroom to throw up after eating too much. I have had to make many changes to our dining habits which include putting a reasonable amount of food on each childs plate (according to the size of the child) and not putting food on the table or offering seconds. I really struggle with having to control the amount of food a child eats but I was really tired of having Josephine tell me that her stomach hurt after she ate-obviously she does not know what "full" is yet. Some of the older kids seem happy that I am doing this because they are growing "up" and not "OUT"!! Usually, they have fruit after lunch and dinner and usually have an afternoon snack. But Josephine is still not able to say "no" to more food. Recently, in her junior church class, when snacks were sitting out, she ate 1 large cupcake 4 mini donuts and a glass of soda (this was after she had a large bowl of cereal for breakfast). I am suprised she didn't vomit on the ride home! Even though I began to limit her food intake, she has gained 20 lbs since she came home!! At first, it was only about 5 lbs. but then she really started hitting that puberty growth spurt and now has gained a total of 20 lbs. and quite a few inches. When she came, she was about 4 inches smaller than our 5 year old (he's 6 now) and now she is a little taller than him. With Leona, we are still having the lying and wetting issues although they are nowhere near as frequent. Josephine never had the bedwetting issue although she did use pullups for the first week here. I am sure many are wondering exactly how we came to realize that Leona wet her pants on purpose (I, myself , find it hard to believe that any child would WANT to do this!). As a mom of 2 bedwetting biological children, I knew that it was a very real possibility to have a child who is not able to wake up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night-two of my boys just COULD NOT wake up and wet the bed almost every night-one until he was around 6-7 and one until he was over 4 1/2 years old. They rarely woke up dry and we used pullups to minimize the laundry-sometimes they even wet through them. We used pullups on Leona at first and the pullups were always wet ,however, on the occasions when she forgot to wear a pullup, she used the bathroom in the middle of the night and in the morning and woke up dry. My two bedwetters would NEVER have been able to do this! When I forgot to put a pullup on them, they woke up SOAKED!! There were also occasions when she peed her pants in the daytime, only it was usually at a time when she was doing something she didn't want to be doing and wetting her pants was a convenient way of getting out of doing it. For instance, once she was in time out and asked to go potty and I said sure go ahead. Then no more than 10 minutes later, she asked again to go potty. I told her she just went potty and she immediately started whining and crying and peed on the chair (obviously she didn't go the first time! She actually did this same trick more than once!). On the other hand, once when we were in the grocery store, she asked to go potty and I asked her if she could wait since the potty at that store was pretty gross. She said yes but by the time we were done in the store, she had to go more. I told her to go sit on the bench while I checked out and try her best to hold it in because home was only a few minutes away. I made sure she could get out of the van and run to the potty (expecting that she would be wet since it had been over a half hour since she asked to go potty the first time!). She made it to the potty just fine without a drip in her panties. Recently, she had a dry bed for almost a month and then on Saturday morning, she woke up soaked. We were going to church to do some work and on Friday she told me she didn't want to go to church, she wanted to stay home. Normally, she loses the privilige to do anything fun for the day (like going out to the park etc.) and apparently she thought she would not have to go to church if she was wet because I asked her in the morning if she knew what we were going to do that day and she replied "Yes, we were going to church but I cannot go because I wet my pants" (of course, she went anyway). Do I think all children who are adopted and wet the bed have this same situation? NO WAY! But I definitely think , in Leona's case, it is a way of manipulation and sometimes for attention (she saw our 2 year old getting a lot of attention for learning to go potty and then her wetting became more frequent again!). We are thankful that she is doing quite a bit better than she was but are praying that she will realize it is not a good way to get attention and manipulate others. To her, we call it making the "right choice" to stay dry and try to minimize even mentioning wetting her pants (NO LECTURES FOR IT-that's too much attention and has definietly made matters worse in the past!!). One of the things I find most exciting about Leonas progress is all the questions she asks about God, Jesus, and the Bible. Of course, she has also come quite a way in her schoolwork-it's really been pretty amazing in that area. Do we think we'd ever adopt again? Well, if we though the Lord were calling us to adopt again, yes, we would. Although, I have to say right now, I am feeling bit overwhelmed just thinking about it! But, overall, our adoption experience has been a beneficial thing for our whole family. |
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