Unexpected Parenting WIN!

If you follow me on Facebook you may remember this status I posted sometime just before Christmas:

Tonight this scenario played out while Celia was napping:
Caroline- (counting her money from her wallet) "Charlotte, let's go downstairs. Mom, you can't come since we are talking about something that's a secret. It's for Christmas, but it's not a present, it's something in an envelope."
She then proceeds to come upstairs to ask me how to spell "orphanage", 5 minutes later she comes back to ask how to spell "charity" and finally a few minutes later she needed me to spell "Africa". They asked if they could use the sharpies to decorate the envelope.
I know it's a surprise and I have "no idea" what they're doing ;) but I have a feeling I'm going to be an incredibly proud mama!!!

Well on Christmas morning we found this envelope under the tree:

(It says "Clean Water fo(r) all people")

And inside was this note along with $30 in cash:

(Dear Mom and Dad, Caroline and Charlotte are sending money to charity to build a well in Africa.)

Wow.  I was blown away.  What 9 year old thinks of this?  How did we get here?

It is true that they are from a rural area of Ethiopia where, when they first came to our family, they recounted to us how they remembered bathing, going to the bathroom and DRINKING water from the same river.  When they first came to America, like nearly all Ethiopian kiddos who come here, they both had intestinal parasites that were remedied with a couple of rounds of antibiotics.  Some families I know didn't have it quite that easy.  Their life involved dealing with these parasites, and sometimes worms, for months after the child(ren) were home.

Because of this realization, Mike and I looked into finding a reputable organization that was building clean water wells around the world, and particularly in Ethiopia.  That's when we found out about charity:water.  

In December of 2011 charity:water happened to be raising money to build a well in Tigray, Ethiopia.  So, instead of going to a store and buying a gift for the adults in our families we decided to make donations in their name for this well.  We did something similar the previous Christmas after watching a documentary on Netflix called "Making the Crooked Straight" about an American doctor, Dr. Rick Hodes, who practices in the capital city of Ethiopia treating people from all over the country who have tuberculosis of the spine.  This is a curable condition that needs surgery.  We were so moved by this documentary that we made donations instead of buying gifts and on Christmas morning we showed our families the documentary.  We have continued this tradition every Christmas since, with choosing a different cause to support each year. 

For those of you thinking "You don't give your kids presents on Christmas????!!!" you can relax.  Our children receive more than their fair share of gifts (mostly because of their grandmothers) but Mike and I have consciously tried to reduce the amount of gifts they get from us and Santa (who by the way I am super sick of, why does he get all of the credit for the gifts I BUY?!  But that's a separate post).  Partially because they all have sensory issues and get overwhelmed easily and partially because we want to be conscious of making sure that our kids know that this holiday isn't about gifts.  

Another tradition we have started with our girls is that when they have a birthday party where they invite their friends, we allow them to choose a charity or cause to support then we ask for donations instead of gifts on the party invitation.  I remember the first time we did this I got a few calls from panicked parents.  "Can we just bring a small gift?  My daughter doesn't understand that she can't take a gift to her friend at her party."  No.  Explain to your child that we are collecting money to send to people in Ethiopia (we donated to Feed the Children for their first party) so they can have enough food to eat.  I realize these kids were 5, but why not start them early understanding that there are less fortunate people in the world?  Each year the twins have raised around $100 for whatever cause they've chosen to support.  This past fall was Celia's first experience with this and she decided to collect pet food and we took it to our local shelter.

Again, not to worry for my poor little girls, they get plenty of presents from us and our families for their birthdays.  My favorite thing that has come of us starting this tradition with our girls was the day they came home with a birthday party invitation.  It was for one of Charlotte's classmates, and she was asking for food donations for a local food pantry instead of gifts.  You know who it was from...that panicking mom I spoke with on the phone only a couple of months earlier!  The twins were so excited that she was doing the same thing they did, and it was not lost on them that she got the idea from their party.

So I guess to answer my own questions...they learned it from all of the little philanthropic efforts God has inspired us to make as a family.  We've modeled to them that it means so much more to send your money to a good cause in someone's honor than to spend money on something at a store.  We are blessed with a little extra spending money so if there's something little I'd like for myself, I can usually buy it for myself.  For the majority of people around the world "spending money" or "blow money" is an unknown luxury.  I am so glad that my children are soaking in this concept of helping others.  I know this is planting the seeds for what GREAT things God has in store for them in the future!

Christmas Break...I'm so over you!

The kids have been home with me for 20 days.  TWENTY DAYS.  I feel like I am writing this from beind enemy lines, in the trenches of motherhood.  It's not been pretty, although I've been told that when I look back on it...years from now, it will be funny, so here goes.

It wasn't just that it has been 20 days of Christmas break.  These past 20 days in particular have included the days with the most sugar and chaos of any other time of the year, along with the least amount of routine.  For any child this combination is a recipe for disaster, but for kids from hard places, we are talking nuclear meltdown.

Poor Celia was so confused.  First of all, she had only been in our family for 6 weeks at Christmas and if you've ever met my family, we are a lot.  A lot to handle, a lot to get used to and a lot to take in, just a lot.  Secondly this child has never celebrated Christmas the way we do.  She asked why we were hanging those socks on the fireplace.  Her other family didn't do Santa and stockings, so who knows what else they didn't do.  I must say that on Christmas day she did so well and wasn't at all overwhelmed. In fact all of the girls did great on Christmas day, when Christmas was over it was a whole different story.

This happened on December 26th.

This happened after she started crying at 8am that her shoes wouldn't fit over her "funny pajamas" aka footie pajamas, so I told her to take them off.  I meant that she should get dressed, but this worked too I guess.  That smile was forced, my friends, through a lot of tears.  This child was worn out from Christmas but she really wanted to roller skate at 8am.  Also, note that her necklace plays Ariel's voice from Little Mermaid when the sea witch takes it...over and over...and over again.  Sadly it's been "lost" for the last week.

That night my sister and her family came and stayed with us for a few days.  While it was super fun I found out that while 3 children can make a pretty serious mess, 5 children can make a tornado level mess.  Once they left we worked on getting the house back in order.  Right after I had vacuumed the girls asked to eat some popcorn that they had received for Christmas.  I said "Yes, but if you make a mess I will destroy you." I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that this next photo happened within 2 seconds of me finishing that statement...and then Charlotte was destroyed.

I am trying to learn to laugh at these things in the moment and to take a picture because people think I make this stuff up!  I couldn't!  I'm not that creative!

Another great idea I had was to switch up Caroline's medication over break.  I knew it would cause some behavior issues and I wanted her to be able to work through those at home rather than at school.  That was dumb.  Basically the other medication got out of her system before the new stuff could build up so we had a few days where I thought I was going to have to resort to drinking heavily.  One day we went out to get in the car and she had left a light on in my car overnight, so my battery was dead.  While Mike and I were outside for, at most, 8 minutes, she decided to take a wooden wand and hit a light on the Christmas tree.  I came in and saw broken blue glass all over the floor.  Assuming it was an accident I asked what happened.  What I got was that basically she meant to break it and didn't know why she did it.  What the heck do I do with that people?!  None of the parenting books tell you about how to deal with this, I've checked!  It's so hard to have patience with a child who doesn't understand why she makes these choices.

In the midst of all of this madness, it was time to celebrate Ethiopian Christmas. This was fun because it was Celia's first time going to the Ethiopian restaurant and meeting a bunch of other kids who looked like her.  I think it was also her first time trying Ethiopian food and she loved it, all of it!













Thank God that Caroline's meds finally started kicking in and I got to see some of her joy and contentment come back into her eyes. She was so excited to go back to school.  My kids crave routine and predictability.

Then snowpacalypse 2014 happened.  They couldn't play outside.  They couldn't go to school.  It was cancelled 3 days in a row.  THREE DAYS IN A ROW.

I decided to try to be the fun mom and let all three sisters from different misters sleep on the floor together when we found out about the snowday the night before.  They loved me that night, went to bed with all of their little dolls, and I scored some points for sure.  How did they repay me?  They were up and LOUD by 6:50am.  On their day off.  I have learned my lesson.  I will no longer try to be fun.

This morning, 2 out of the three of them were in tears before 8am, before anyone even went downstairs!  Charlotte "handed a book" to Caroline by throwing it at her head and it left a nice goose egg.  Celia had an accident in her bed and while Charlotte was trying to help her take her sheets off Celia began wailing because she didn't want to take her Hello Kitty sheets off of her bed.  This is like trying to negotiate with terrorists at this point, three little lady terrorists.  They don't understand logic, nor do they have any desire to.

I realize how blessed I am that my family lives close and are brave enough to take the three of them for a couple of hours at a time so I could get some work done.  When I picked the girls up today from my mother in law's house she looked like she'd been through a war.  We're tired.  These kids NEED to get back in their routine.  The past 20 days have reminded me why, although I have my teaching license, I should NEVER homeschool my children.

Someone asked me tonight if the girls have school tomorrow.  I said "I hope they do, because they are getting dressed and I am dropping them off at the school doors at 8:45am.  No matter what."

Trauma is a Tricky Thing...

“After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha 

Charlotte had a counseling appointment scheduled this past Friday.  I called and asked if I could bring Caroline instead.  She hadn't been in a month, because she was doing so well, but she had really started acting out and I knew she needed to talk to Dr. Cynthia. 

When we got there I explained all of the changes that have occurred over the past 3 weeks in our family and how I really think this has affected Caroline.  From what I had observed I could only conclude that she was feeling left out, like she wasn't the "star" of the show anymore, and she was withdrawing.  Caroline has always had an affinity for playing the victim card.  It just came naturally to her after all she's been through in her young  life.  So she went back for an hour to talk.

When they came out the Dr. says "It has nothing to do with her new sister."  "Then what is going on with her?" I asked, surprised.  "It's about Brutus."

Let's rewind about 6 months for those of you who did not have the opportunity to meet our special Brutus and do not know the tragedy of how he left us.  Brutus was a kitten that was discovered with his litter in our church dumpster one Sunday morning after church.  The pastor had just done a message about James 1:27 (Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.) and making room for one more.  Although we already had 3 feline friends in our home, Mike, the rational one, said "let's take him home." 

He was only 3 weeks old and not old enough to be away from his mother, so we bottle fed him for a couple of weeks.  He spent most of his days those first few weeks living in a pack and play in my bedroom.  The twins, who had only been with us less than a year, adored this cat.  They helped take care of him and it was very therapeutic for teaching them empathy.  Brutus was a very special cat.  He let the girls do whatever they wanted with him.  He truly thought he was a human infant.  At that time I was doing in home daycare so Brutus would sleep in the bouncy seat or the swing, and hop up in the high chair for snack time.  He would let the girls push him around in their little shopping cart or the baby doll stroller.

He also loved going outside.  I have always had only indoor cats, but this cat would literally BOLT out the door whenever someone even opened it a crack.  For months we would all chase him, catch him and bring him inside.  Eventually though we realized that he would always come back and paw at the door when he wanted in.  So we let him have his outdoor adventures.

 
One day this past summer Brutus went out for his daily playtime.  We were all outside playing, I picked him up, snuggled him a little and let him back down to play.  He would follow the kids around outside and play with them.  We were out in the front yard when I heard Caroline scream a scream I had never heard before, and to this day it is burned into my memory.  He ran out into the street and was hit by a car, right in front of Caroline.  If that hadn't been bad enough, she went into the street...picked up his body...and carried up to the house screaming.  He was gone.  She had his blood all over her.  I took him from her and set him down in the grass.  I got her inside, washed her up and the three of us sat on the laundry room floor for an hour and cried.  I held them and just kept saying how sorry I was that this had happened to them.  I had lost my fair share of pets over my lifetime, but NEVER like this.

This cat was Caroline's best friend.  She was traumatized.  When we went to see her counselor she said that it was not developmentally appropriate for her to be able to go and pick him up like that.  Most adults (including myself) couldn't even have done that.  She said that just shows how much trauma she has already experienced in her little life.

I kept asking myself, why would God have this happen?  Why her? What were we to learn from this? Hadn't she been through enough?  From talking with both of the twins about their experiences in Ethiopia, it was apparent that she bore the brunt of the abuse in the orphanage, so why traumatize her all over again? To make it 10 times worse, she was convinced that his death was her fault, and I understood as I was feeling the same way.  Why didn't I put him inside when I was holding him?  It broke my heart.

Then someone from church pointed out to me that now she can experience trauma in a manner that is safe and healthy.  She can experience being surrounded by loving and supportive people who will help her heal from this.  This time she can learn how to cope.  So, we coped, as best we knew how.

She was a wreck for a couple of months.  We went to counseling, had visits from therapy dogs and adjusted her meds, all seemed to help.  We hadn't had any issues until...we got out the Christmas decorations.  There was Brutus' stocking.  That old wound broke wide open.  Being an internalizer I had no idea how much it was affecting her and how much she was still beating herself up over it.

I now realized that just because I have healed from the loss of Brutus, she had not.  We will need to keep revisiting this issue over and over again.  I won't always be able to predict what's going to trigger this trauma.  We have had a couple of nights since then where I have just held her as she sobs about her kitty.  We pray, hard.  I ask that God wrap His arms around this child and let her feel His peace.  I ask Him to help her trust His plans for her, especially when they don't make sense.  I ask Him to give Mike and me the patience and compassion to get her through this.

I have been fortunate enough in my privileged life not to have experienced anything even remotely like what this little child has been through already at the age of 7.  I have learned so much about trauma.  It's a tricky thing.  I don't know what will trigger it or when. I don't know if her heart will ever fully heal from these wounds.  All I know is that she hurts and there's not a whole lot I can do about it except love her and hope that's enough.