One Year Home!

One year ago today, we were getting ready to travel across the ocean with our boys!

 I have needed to update everyone for months, but life with 7 kids at home including a busy three year old makes quality computer time a very rare indulgence.

So much has changed in one year. These boys have blossomed! 

They are happy, healthy, speak fluent English, and have bonded with us nicely. It feels amazing to be where we are now, when we think about where we were a year ago. We have all come so far and have learned so much!

For the first few months, we all wondered what on earth we had done. :) It was such a hard transition, especially for Eli, who is closest in age to Louie. I talked about it in my last update, at three months.

The biggest challenge, though, is having so many kids who passionately care about the same things and are the same age emotionally. With Anya, Hazel, Louie and Liam, it's like having 3-year-old quadruplets. Everything is a competition. Everything. I wonder how long we will be in this phase of life. It could be years...the girls mature like slow-growing trees....very slowly. It's so challenging when they are all together. Taking them all places at once takes an *unreal* amount of patience. You can imagine how frazzled I am taking them to church on my own. (Jeremy is the bishop of our ward, so he sits on the stand.) I actually had a babysitter coming during sacrament meeting for a while, to stay home with Liam and the girls. It has settled down now, though, and I have a wonderful friend at church who helps by letting a couple of them sit with her family. 

Louie

Our little Louie turned nine in April and is still in a size 5 clothes! His CP makes his muscles continually fire off, which makes his metabolism fast. It's so hard getting him fattened up! His walking and balancing skills are exactly the same as they were a year ago, which is discouraging. We tried botox injections and stretching and he still falls constantly.

Louie is learning social boundaries and how to play without doing annoying things like screeching (one of my big pet peeves.) It's taken lots and lots of correcting and reminding. :)  He also likes to sulk when he doesn't get his way, and he puts his hands on his ears when he's being corrected in any way, shape or form. (Two other things I struggle with tolerating.) He also gets really emotional on other people's birthdays. These are all classic post-trauma behaviors in kids. We can't expect him to not have these kinds of behaviors...they come with the territory. We have our moments when we want to get mad (and sometimes do,) but for the most part, we just try to love him through it all while he figures out this thing called real life in a real family. 

Like I've mentioned before, there is something special about our Louie. You can just feel his warrior spirit. It's radiant! We have no doubt he is meant to be out in the world sharing his LIGHT! He had a very, very bleak future in China because of his disability. He will shine here.

Louie was taught by the full-time missionaries during the summer and he soaked in the gospel like a thirsty sponge. He asked very deep questions, and always knew the answers to the missionaries' questions, surprising us many times. He was baptized  as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in August, by his dad. It was such a special, wonderful day. 

We decided to keep Louie in 2nd grade this school year so he could get caught up. He's so little and socially behind, we figured he would fit in better. I also pulled him and Eli out of the Chinese Immersion school and put them in the charter school behind our house that our kids have all gone to. It was a hard decision, but I'm so glad we did it. This way, I don't have to carpool to get them to school, and most importantly, Louie can spend more time working on his reading and English skills.  This school is a Title 1 school that has lots of aides to work with kids who are behind. He is on grade level in math and is just now learning to sound out words. So we are focusing on reading as much as we can and we're hoping he'll be able to catch up with his same-grade peers. He has pretty much forgotten his language, which is so sad. Hopefully he can pick it up again in high school Mandarin classes. It was a choice we had to make in order to simplify things and help him progress academically. It helps that Louie LOVES school. Everyone there is so great with him and wants to help him progress as quickly as possible. This is such a blessing. He also loves Cub Scouts. I'm thankful for that program because it gives him something to look forward to after school. 

We love Louie and we are so blessed to have him in our family!

Liam

Our baby boy is still the dictator in our house! He knows exactly what he wants and he makes it known very passionately. He is just so stinking cute though. He has all of his older siblings and his mom and dad wrapped around his finger. I mean, look at those little dimples. Could you just die?

Liam is also speaking English like a native! He is such a smart boy. He goes to a neighborhood preschool, which he loves, and he already knows his colors and animals and lots of other things. His favorite pasttime right now is watching Old Mac Donald videos on You tube and playing in the bath tub with his farm animals. He is my little buddy. He follows me around all day and loves going bye-bye with me while everyone else is at school. He loves going on walks to see the ducks and horses, too.

His main trauma issues include being on high alert and really reactive.  He hollers at the top of his lungs when he doesn't get his way and you can't withhold privileges with him....it just backfires. You have to tread lightly with him, using techniques like distraction whenever possible. His night terrors are finally a thing of the past, however he is still sleeping in our room and won't go to sleep without me lying right next to him. If I'm not home, he'll fall asleep on his own. But when he wakes up, he climbs out of his toddler bed and right into bed with us...and there goes my sleep for the night, as I am a light sleeper. I usually end up moving into one of the empty beds in the house once that happens.

With kids who have come from hard places, all your traditional parenting techniques go out the window. You can't let them cry it out. It will only make them feel less safe and secure, which slows their healing. So they get away with a lot more, and you feel like you're creating a monster. :) We're not sure how to transition him to another room. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open...as long is it is a connected way of parenting.

He's just so cute. I die over him on an hourly basis. This is his "assumed" position. Thumb in mouth, other finger rubbing his belly botton.

I tried a couple of times with potty training and gave up after a day or two of no pee going in the toilet, only on the carpet. We'll revisit this after Christmas. 

Reflections on Attachment:

Liam is our first adopted child who came to us as the youngest in the family. I've been floored at how easy attachment has been with him. I seriously have to remind myself that I didn't give birth to him!  It makes such a huge difference when they are the baby of the family, and not threatening to anyone else. We were taught the importance of staying within birth order from the start of our adoptions, but when we found Anya, Hazel and Louie, they were not younger than our youngest, yet we just felt like they were ours.  So we went for it.  I don't doubt any of them are supposed to be in our family for one minute. But attachment has taken a lot more work and has been complicated with the older ones. 

How Mama is Doing:

If you think about Jesus Christ, he had annoying, mentally challenged, mean people in his face all the time. Yet he was so happy and kind. What was the difference? Sure he not only had a bigger perspective of who these people really were, but what he also had a positive attitude. I have known all along that it was going to be up to me to change my attitude, and if I didn't do it, I was going to go crazy.  I felt like my emotions were so out of control. Jeremy would come home to help me just before church and I would cry in frustration because I had blown up at Hazel after one of her rages. It was a cycle of anger and shame and it seemed to go on and on and on.  It was no way to live. 

So I started listening to some Life Coaching podcasts during my walking, cleaning or driving time. Two of my favorites are The Lifecoach School with Brook Castillo and Bold New Mom with Jody Moore (who was trained by Brooke Castillo and brings an incredible LDS perspective into it.) Learning to identify my emotions as they are happening, and allowing myself to feel them instead of resisting them, has been a huge game-changer for me! It has also helped me with parenting because I can teach my kids how to do this at a young age. I can't recommend these podcasts enough, no matter what stage of life you are in.  It's like going to a REALLY good counselor, but it's free!! It's called "thought work." And I don't know how I went 45 years without knowing about it.  

The other thing I've been doing for the past 3 months is called Quantum Reflex Integration. It's a therapy that is done with low-level laser light, placed on accupressure points on the body and sometimes moved along the meridians. I do it with my kids to help them with all of their learning, physical and behavioral challenges, but the best thing is that, in helping them, I have been able to heal my secondary PTSD brain at the same time. The work is done with intention and focus, and while the lasers are on, there is a sweep of sound frequencies that come out. Your body chooses the ones it needs. So anyone in the room benefits from hearing it. The first month or two I felt like I had bad PMS all the time, and it was because my body was detoxing. It was bad. Haha! But I feel soooo much better now! The bonus is that it has been a great bonding activity that has brought me closer to my kids! They all (even my teens) love their laser time with mom. It's very relaxing. I need way more hours in the day to get around to everyone, though.  It's been a very slow process. But I'm seeing really encouraging changes in myself and my kids.  If you'd like to learn more about QRI, start with a book called The Symphony of Reflexes by Bonnie Brandes. Also, here is a great blog post written by another mom at this link: http://www.3of21.com/2016/10/information-about-cold-laser-low-level.html


Time to get back to life and feed these kids! Thank you to everyone who has loved and supported us through this journey! When I look back on this year, I am just amazed at all the progress and change that has happened. I know we are led and guided by a loving Heavenly Father who knows what is best for his children, and that makes all the difference in the world! I am grateful that our Savior atoned for alllll of my inadequacies. I feel Him there, making up for what I can't do on my own, helping me and my family to become all that God knows we can become. It's wonderful and exciting. Have a great holiday season!!