New Pictures with My Predictions

As I was getting ready to do a blog post yesterday with our fundraising update, I got an email with NEW PICTURES of our kids. Oh happy day! It is crazy to think that these are probably the last pictures we will get before we meet our kids face to face. I so wish I could post them, but I can't. Since I can't, I'll give you my observations/predictions about our kids from all the pictures we have received:

Our oldest girl already fits the oldest child, mothering role. In the few pictures we have of all three kids together she is touching and/or holding Isaiah in every one, usually putting his face close to hers. In the picture I got of them all together yesterday, it seems as though Isaiah did not want to cooperate for the picture, so she leaned down and helped him to look at the camera by putting her face right up against his. Miss Responsibility. She reminds me of me. Especially because she seems to internalize life more than her sister. And holy cow, looking at her pictures yesterday . . . she looks SO MUCH OLDER - not very little-girl-ish at all! It freaks me a out just a little . . . okay, a lot!. I have size 10/12 clothes ready for her so we'll see if I've guessed her size right.

Our younger girl is going to be the life of the Lee party! She has the biggest smile and a lot of spunk, I can tell! And I'm guessing she is good at going with the flow. She reminds me of my sister. I think she is the same size as Mya, who is 7, so I have size 7/8 clothes ready for her.

And Isaiah . . . all I can say is that he and Abram are going to be quite the pair! I have a feeling they are about the same size. I can't wait to see them running around together. I talk to Abram a lot these days about Isaiah (and the girls) during day-to-day things. For example, when we go to Target, we now use the big carts with seats for two kids behind the cart (feels like I am pushing a semi truck - those things are huge!). Abram sits in one side and we talk about how Isaiah - or "Aiah,"as Abram calls him - is going to sit in the other side.

Abram likes talking about the kids, but my sweet boy does not know what is going to hit him. People ask me how Abram is going to do when the kids come. And my answer is: I think it is going to be terrible for him for awhile. I think he will love having Aiah as a companion since he is extroverted. But, he is going to hate the fact that his toys are no longer his. Oh, and not having ALL of mom AND dad's attention . . . that is going to hurt, too. Poor guy.

Seeing the kids' pictures is always exciting, but to be honest, it also freaks me out and makes my stomach feel like it is falling out from underneath me (like on a roller coaster)! I know it is going to be crazy, hard, fun, painful, terrible and wonderful all at the same time.

But, just how hard and painful is it going to be? And how long is it going to take for them to bond with and depend on us as their parents? Are the girls going to accept me as their mom when they have already had and lost biological moms and a foster mom? Oh, and they don't speak any English. How is that going to go?

When people ask me if I am excited for our kids to come home, I never know quite how to answer. I absolutely cannot wait to see them and wrap my arms around them. But, I have more feelings of fear and trembling than I do warm fuzzies when I think of them coming home.

I guess the answer is that we are READY. We are ready to have our kids home. We are ready to become the family that God had in mind from the beginning of time. And we are ready to see how all of this is going to go down!

And we are depending on God to make it through every waking moment.

Re-Dos

A great post about re-dos from my favorite adoptive, blogging mom, One Thankful Mom. After reading about the principle of re-dos in Connected Child and other Empowered to Connect resources, we have been implementing it with Abram for awhile. We find it so helpful (even though Abram doesn't have any extreme behavior issues stemming from a "hard place")!

Here is the post:

Last night I had an errand to run. I drove a few minutes to a house in town and knocked on the door. A little girl answered and a scowl appeared on her face. She demanded, “Why are you here?”

You can imagine that was not the greeting I was expecting — especially since I was at my friend, Michele’s, and the child was my daughter.

I said, “Dimples, that is not a respectful or kind way to greet me. Let’s shut the door and you can try that again.”

I pulled the door shut, stepped back on the porch, paused, and then knocked again.

This time I was greeted with a cool, “Hello,” but it was a big improvement. I’m not opposed to setting the bar low when I know that striving for more may make a small situation develop into a big, ugly scene.

I put a big smile on my face and playfully said, “Hi Dimples! How was your day? Did you have a good dinner?”

Later as I talked with Michele, I relayed the incident to her and she shook her head. As we were grabbing our things to go, she cheerfully said, “Hey Dimples, let’s practice giving your Mom a really good greeting.” Dimples looked up in surprise — even Aunt Michele knew and now she wanted a re-do too! But Michele playfully encouraged her and I stepped out the door again. This time when I knocked, Dimples met me with a big, silly smile and an exaggerated greeting. We all laughed.

It’s important not to come down with a sledge hammer on small incidents, but it is just as important that we don’t ignore them either. Let’s set the standard we expect, especially when it comes to respect. The bar may need to be low, but we can slowly move it up and keep believing our children are capable of more.

This is what Dr. Purvis has to say about re-do’s,

By actively replacing misbehavior with correct behavior in your child’s memory banks, you can help the child encode competency. A re-do “erases” the muscle memory of the failed behavior and gives the child the physcial and emotional experience of substituting a successsful one in its place.

And this quote is extremely appropriate,

A re-do can be as simple or complex as needed. As many doors as it took your child to go off course, that’s how many you have to revisit and correct each false step. The Connected Child p. 98

After the Airport

I was reeled in to read this excellent, but-will-not-give-you-warm-fuzzies blog post a few weeks ago when a friend posted one sentence from it:

You cannot just be into adoption to adopt; you have to be into parenting.