I never thought adoption was easy, but the more adoptions I experience, the more I realize just how hard it is. This was the first time for us to add older children to the family, and the first time I ever had to travel without Mr. B. That was hard. It is hard for the kids at home to be without Mommy for 3 weeks. It is very hard to come home and try to meet the needs of the "old kids", while trying to integrate two "new kids" into the family. Bonding with 4-year-olds is very different than bonding with babies. And of course now I am even more outnumbered. Don't let these cute kids fool you, they all have lots of demands and needs and are not shy about letting Mommy know about them.
The first few weeks home I was so jet-lagged that just getting everyone dressed and to church on time seemed like a major accomplishment. I even managed a photo of all 6 kids, holding still for a few seconds and all looking at the camera at the same time. Usually one is picking their nose at just the wrong minute.
Bonding with the new kids has gone really well.
Dealing with a 3-year-old who had to give up Mommy for three weeks, then share her with two new kids who jumped above him in birth order, was not so easy sometimes. We had so much just raw emotion coming from this little guy, it was a little overwhelming sometimes. Every night he would cry and say, "I was so scared when you were in China. I don't want you to be away." The poor little guy held it together until I got back, and then it just came out in floods over the past few weeks. He is doing better now. He sleeps in his own bed again sometimes, and if he is in our bed, he only holds onto me with one hand and foot, instead of wrapping himself around me like a koala on a eucalyptus tree.
I managed to find some time to work on my awful looking flowerbeds.
There is always a little helper!
In spite of a few weeks where it seemed like at any given moment at least two kids were crying, and mornings where I wished I could just pull the covers over my head and sleep just half an hour more. (But I knew from the strong aromas wafting towards me that if I postponed the diaper changes there could be bio-hazard cleanup jobs all over the house). I could hardly believe the doctor in the ER when he told me that my new son was impacted with poop. Being the Mom, who was cleaning up two large productions per day, I never dreamed the poor guy was constipated. After a few doses of Miralax, I thought our whole house was going to go up in a giant brown mushroom cloud. I am not a fan of Miralax. Violence is not the answer.
We had a week or so where the kids were SO over the honeymoon (I thought it would last longer than it did, but no) of having new siblings that I dropped all pretense of homeschooling or housecleaning and spent the entire day refereeing. I can say that I have no desire to ever have a job like UN peacekeeper. Trying to keep the peace between 6 kids just wore me out, and they were only armed with legos and tinkertoys.
There was relief in some funny moments, when little by little they started to bond with each other. I'm not sure what was so funny about eating popcorn with a plastic spoon, with a wet washcloth on the head, but this had all 6 kids in stitches.
One day Fermin drew a picture of himself and his new sister, and taped it up by her crib. She LOVED it. That picture is still there and still brings a smile to her face.
Jose reading a book to his new sister, with his arm around her. Awwwww.
Besides church, we ventured out of the house for violin and viola lessons, and soccer. Fermin and Jose are both enjoying playing soccer. It is my completely objective opinion that those two Guatemalans out on the field are the cutest little soccer players ever.
We had to retrieve Therese from the soccer field a few times, but she was thrilled to just be a spectator when her cousin Emily let her sit in her pink chair and wear her sunglasses.
John Francis was happy being on Mommy's lap.
I feel like in a lot of ways our transition went very well, considering that we were adding two 4-year-olds to the family. John Francis was used to living in a group foster home, so he adapted readily to our routine, and Therese copied what everyone else was doing. Neither of them have any serious behavior issues that you sometimes hear about when adopting older kids. It has been a tiring month for me, going back to having two kids in diapers, and having one of my "old kids" regress in potty training at the same time. I have cleaned up more poop and pee than I can even remember, and had to get used to using fun stuff like Miralax, suppositories, and enemas.
It can be scary when you have a new child, you take them to the doctor, and you cannot answer any of the questions they ask you. You cannot answer them because you just met your child and have very sketchy medical information from their life in China. Add to that not being able to communicate very well with your new child, and medical appointments can be very stressful. Both of the new children get very upset in a medical setting. Therese starts bouncing off the walls, hiding behind the stroller, and yelling, "NO!" whenever the doctor looks in her direction. John Francis goes into shutdown mode and passively resists. One doctor looked at me skeptically when I assured him that John does talk like a normal child. He looked so spaced out as soon as he saw a white coat that the doctor had no idea what his functioning level is.
It has been an exhausting month but things are getting better all the time. I even got back to doing schoolwork late last week, and managed to get the laundry put away. When we go somewhere as a family, I've learned that we need to budget an extra 20 minutes just for the loading process, to get everyone seated and buckled in. Now if I could just get a little more sleep, life is looking better and better. Maybe in a year or so I will be ready to think about filling one of those extra seats in the van........
