(Foster) Pilgrims' Progress

Many of you have asked if I am seeing any improvement in previously mentioned issues so here goes...

1) Eating habits - getting much better...still spilling on shirts and floor but they are doing their best to use utensils and not their fingers. They are sitting until dismissed and want to pray at meals after the main prayer. We have done two restaurant outings and they did okay.

2) Whining and pouting - WAY better...K still has to push us to see if we mean what we say but is immediately and immensely contrite when she knows she is going to time out. S has had several days without a time out at all. Once she FINALLY understood that the next step after a verbal warning was a time-out, she is starting to learn to rein her emotions back in. She used to go from zero to sixty into the red zone routinely and now, she realizes we are not budging. They also have started playing by themselves better, which was something that did not happen for three months.

3) Name changes - this was one that we were not sure we were going to do but in talking with other foster moms and in realizing that we would like a little more identity protection, given the proximity of the birth family, we have decided to change their first names upon adoption. We talked about names that have significance to the family and let them choose from those. S is all for the change...K was a little more reluctant. They are keeping their current names as middle names so we have started mixing in their first and middle names in addressing them to get them used to the identity. DCFS is not really for changing names as they say kids have enough grief and loss but other foster moms have said their kids viewed it as a "rite of passage" into their new family. The difficulty is that S and K will have had a full or partial school year with their existing names so the transition may be a bit rough for everyone to remember.

4) Transitions from birth family - as the girls get more comfortable with their new home/family, they have started opening up more about their past. Some of it is pretty shocking, some of it is frustrating, and some helps us to understand them a whole lot more. S, in particular, remembers A LOT and hence, has had a tougher transition. We have talked about what a birth mom is, what an adoptive mom is, and what a step mom is and she can now differentiate. We've also talked about what it means to be adopted. I told her that I know about her birth family and that it is okay to miss them and talk about them. She still doesn't understand why she can't live with her grandma and the reason why is too complicated for a six-year-old to understand.

5) Attachment - what nobody told me is that I would possibly be the one with "attachment issues"...the girls have done fine. It took me a good two months to feel like their mom, especially when there are definite personality clashes from time to time and a general tendency for one of them to run at hyperspeed non-stop all day long. My head would be reeling at bedtime and I'd wonder how in the world I was going to get up and do the whole thing all over again the next time. That's when I remember my sister Mary's quote from Isaiah 28:10 "Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little..."

Sometimes I am too close to the process to see the progress but this foster pilgrim will keep building and re-building foundations and pray that God will grant the increase.