I have been thinking about this topic for such a long time. We have been with John for five months now. In some ways it feels like yesterday in others it feels like this is how it has always been. Since John has been home, I have combed over other's blogs looking for some help on this transition. What I have discovered, is there are not a lot of people talking about the specifics of the first few months home. The result of my discovery is feeling a little isolated in this experience. So .... I thought I would talk about some of the nitty gritty details that we went through in these first few months, what we have learned and what we still need to learn. The hope is that others will see a light at the end of the tunnel, and feel supported through this cyber friendship.
In case you didn't know, making big life changes in a family does not come without some hiccups. Even though I have experienced bringing 5 babies home from the hospital, multiple moves, job changes, etc. adoption has been it's very own experience - totally different from anything else, so the learning curve has seemed greater. Some of the hard things I have learned:
1. Just because I was a mom of five already, it did not make me an expert on parenting a 6th
2. Bringing home a two year old is NOT like bringing home an infant
3. There is a learning curve that takes some time to understand
4. Flexibility is essential
5. Some days are just down right hard and less joyful
6. Don't set each other up for failure
7. Dreaming of how it will be can be different in reality
Some of these may seem so obvious, I realize that. I really had pictured how this experience was going to be, and there was very little if any negative I could imagine. Our agency had us take many hours of adoption training, we had 5 kids already, one with significant needs - how hard could this really be? Many people compared this experience to bringing home a newborn. I LOVE newborns - no problem! Well that brings in point number 1 and 2. For me this experience has been completely unique. It is not like bringing home a newborn, unless your newborns have come home hitting and hurting your other children. That was so hard for me to watch Kate getting hurt. It had never happened before in our home, and it was not a pleasant experience. I wanted so desperately for John to feel loved and accepted so I was not sure how to help him feel that while I was feeling mamma bear protection over Kate. Time heals and with some patience and some love and some discipline it has worked itself out. Now they love each other like siblings, but in the beginning it was just hate and jealousy. That was really hard to experience.
I want to talk a little bit about setting each other up for failure. This was something that took awhile for me to figure out. Here is an example of what I mean. Nap times were a combination of a necessity and a nightmare. We had the kids sleeping in the same room, which they loved. However, at nap time they turned into Tasmanian Devils and absolutely destroyed their room. I mean they would take every book and throw them on the floor, sometimes they would rip the books to shreds, they would empty all drawers of clothes, they would urinate all over the beds and bedding and sometimes I would find feces smeared all over anything they could be smeared - including Kate! It would take me hours to clean the room back up. I needed alone time so desperately that I would continue to put us through this nightmare. Then it hit me - I was setting the kids and myself up for failure. So I started slowly eliminating problems, by the time I was done with the "elimination" they only had beds left in their room - nothing else - no books, no book shelves, no dressers and no clothes that they could reach. I even went a step further and bought zip up jammies that they would wear back words - and when that wasn't enough, I would zip them up back wards with a safety clip attached for safe measure! Yeah - it was extreme. We were in desperate times people! But once I realized that we were all failing, and that in turn we all deserved some success during this transition, it was an easy choice. Nap times became pleasant again and good for all of us.
I am not going to hit on all points. After that last paragraph do you really want me to say more? Yeah, I didn't think so. Time is a great healer. Be gentle to yourself. Some days you may just be a baby sitter instead of mother of the year - that is ok. Things are so much better now, that those really hard times feel like a distant memory, and something that we can just remember instead of experience daily!
