alphabet soup

alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kids

There are no regimented minute-by-minute agendas here. Just a loose schedule with firm standards, attempting to run a tight ship in choppy waters. It’s a little nuts.

I’m learning a lot about not being in control…about doing things differently than we’re used to.

It’s not an overnight process for me; there’s lots of trial and error for this detail-oriented INTJ. As other things speed up and complicate in life, other things have had to slow down and simplify…and my conversion from Type A to Type B is still in the highly experimental beta stage. 

alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kids

But there’s progress: I broke up with Martha Stewart. Her photos are gorgeous, her style is impressive, but I think meals categorized as “quick and simple dinners” should require less than 35 steps, 2 food processors, and a therapist. 

alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kids

When I actually make myself a lunch instead of just microwaving leftovers, it’s pretty simple fare. Veggies, toast, an egg…nothing fancy. But I crowd the mushrooms and can only take a couple of photos of the process before I make a mess and wreck the egg, thereby reminding myself why I write about peace in sentence fragments and stick to making coffee, leaving the world of food blogging to the capable hands of those who have more patience than I do.

alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kids

We do school differently now. After teaching our first three kids to read by age six, teaching preschool to our new 8-year-olds who are learning letters and sounds and shapes with our four-year-old is new territory for me.

Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners, like a saddle-donkey.

– Charles Dickens, Bleak House

alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kids alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kids

The milestones are different, the challenges are different, and my involvement with them is different than it has been with any of our other kids.

Sensory issues. Institutional autism. Trauma. Attachment issues. Fetal alcohol spectrum.

alphabet soup: yielding control and simplifying while homeschooling/preschooling special needs kidsIMG_5421ship at harborphoto courtesy of Unchained

Or, commonly abbreviated: SPD, IA, PTSD, RAD, and FAS. It’s quite a cocktail, made more complex by the fact that some conditions are typically dealt with in ways that are counter-productive to others. For example, with attachment issues, you do ABC, and never, ever do XYZ…but with FAS, you usually do XYZ because ABC doesn’t even apply. Awesome.

And for a child who has both, and more? Fortunately, we have 20 more letters of the alphabet to tinker with in trial and error. Nothing fancy, try not to make a mess, and for crying out loud, don’t worry about wrecking the egg. Priorities.

Which means I’m letting go. Teaching Andrey and Reagan in the normal way usually becomes a mutinous game of manipulation – if I point to a red circle and ask them what it is, they’re just as likely to give me the wrong answer on purpose (“yellow square”) as they are to give me the right answer on accident.

 So preschool, for now, is sneaky. 

It looks like me teaching Chamberlain while they are playing nearby or looking at a book.

In reality though, they’re eavesdropping. They’re watching closely, listening in, often pretending not to. And they’re learning, in spite of the alphabet soup of diagnoses they could be labelled with

Sometimes they join us to play with letters and numbers and such. I’m learning to haul up the anchor and move on after just a few minutes while they’re still cooperating – if I don’t, three seconds later there is testing, manipulation, and mutiny, and we’re sucked into the vortex again.

Keep it short, keep it happy, keep it simple. And then change course, before it’s too late.  

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We write letters on little sticky notes. We write letters on the windows with dry erase markers, and then cover them with the matching sticky notes.

We write big letters in glue, and cover them with tiny pieces of torn paper (learning letters + sensory play + motor skills = big win).

We color and scribble and fill up notebooks with lines and curves that often don’t make sense. And assessment doesn’t come in questions and answers – it comes in the turning of the tables, when we eavesdrop on their play and conversations with each other.

Do they know colors? Heck yes – just listen to them argue over lego pieces. Can they count? Depends on who’s asking – but listening to them play Hide and Seek reveals quite a bit. There’s progress, and the simplicity keeps me sane.

Of her childhood, Helen says herself that, save for a few impressions, “the shadows of the prison-house” enveloped it. But there were always roses, and she had the sense of smell; and there was love – but she was not loving then. When she was seven Miss Sullivan came to her. This lady had herself been blind for some years…

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It is not too much to say that imprisoned and desolate child entered upon such a large inheritance of thought and knowledge, of gladness and vision, as few of us of the seeing and hearing world attain to.

Like all great discoveries, this, of a soul, was in all its steps marked by simplicity.

– Charlotte Mason, vol. 1, Home Education

I need Him to remind me often about why they choose to stay in the dark, and why He chose us to be their family. This lady had herself been blind for some years…

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Learning is not merely the two-way street of give and take between teacher and student anymore.

It’s an ocean to navigate, and the familiar constellations are upside down in this new hemisphere, along with new ones we’ve never seen before. We yield to the Captain who calms the storm…and there’s fresh coffee in the galley.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption

offering chocolate: the business of redemption

Well, friends, it’s been a year since we showed you what we really look like. It’s time for an update. We’re a year older and wiser. We have matured.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

Just kidding.

We have our third (out of four) post-adoption home visit coming up, and we had to whip up a fast family photo again for Spaghettia. Last time we were professional and had “real” pictures taken. These ones, of course, are fake.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

This is me, every morning before Vin goes to work, with my very best “Noooo! Don’t leave meeee!” expression.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

Reagan is clearly the only normal one among us.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

How are we doing? It is up and down, forward and backward…I think that’s the same answer we’ve given for the last 18 months. It’s still hard. Progress is measured in micro-steps. We still deal with diapers and purposeful misplacement of bodily fluids and manipulation/disobedience that borders on levels of insanity.

We’ve learned that both of our adopted children are actually terrified of (and resistant to) many forms of success, celebration, and achievement (not super uncommon with kids who have similar backgrounds of trauma, neglect, and abandonment) and often regress instantly and violently after a victory. It makes things like school, potty training, holidays, and, uh, waking hours difficult. 

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

Birthdays, too. Today was our Andrey’s birthday. We had presents wrapped and an awesome, low-key dinner planned. Just us. And yet…

No bueno. Misbehavior followed misbehavior, poor choice after poor choice, and he sabotaged his special day at every opportunity to turn it around. It’s been Proverbs 26:11 almost daily for the last several months, and his much-anticipated birthday was no exception. It was pretty rough, both to watch and experience.

Last year I wrote this about our Reagan:

She is rejecting us to keep from being rejected first by us, but she doesn’t realize that. She chooses to stay in a cage with no food and water, though the door is wide open. She is like an abused woman who has been in a bad relationship for too long, but refuses to break it off because freedom and healing are just too foreign and frightening.

And it still happens with Reagan, and it’s the same but different with Andrey. We offer chocolate – love, belonging, fun times – and he refuses it, only to go back to maggoty gruel.

It breaks my heart, over and over. His birthday should have been so fun. We want to celebrate his life with him. Holy hormonal weeping, Batman. 

We notice the raised eyebrows when people don’t understand the level of trauma they came from, and don’t understand the boundaries we have to place because of the amount of healing they need (No, I’m sorry…you still can’t dote on them, pat them on the head, or give them presents. We ask adults to “kindly ignore” them as much as possible so their attention and attachment will be for us, their parents…more on this in a future post). It hurts when people ask, “You’re still dealing with that?” as though it were our fault (I know this isn’t how the question is intended, it is just how it feels on our end), and surely Andrey and Reagan should be delightfully law-abiding citizens after being in a loving home for 18 months, despite the fact that they were neglected and abused for almost seven years.

And I want to say this in as loving a manner as I can muster: Friends and family, please don’t rush us. Man, we want this way more than you do. We hoped it would be easier. Of course we hoped attachment wouldn’t be an issue. We knew it was likely, though.

There’s this annoying little reality/theory/fact/whatever out there that says for every year your adopted child was in an institution, that is how many years it may likely take him or her to heal. I did the math, and thought…By then, Mattie will be 18. He might be moving out of the house by the time our house feels normal again. 

And then I thought about binging on ice cream and moving to a convent and how bad it hurts when mascara gets in your eyes when you’re sobbing. I thought of other things not fit to print. And also how I’m married, and not Catholic, and the nuns probably wouldn’t take me anyway.

And I thought of how He feels when He offers a new beginning, and we reject Him over and over. The book of Hosea is all too real to us now…we know what it is to love and to be shunned, to pray and cry and offer redemption to people who persist in choices that hurt them and us.

I myself taught Israel how to walk, leading him along by the hand.
But he doesn’t know or even care that it was I who took care of him.
I led Israel along with my ropes of kindness and love.
I lifted the yoke from his neck, and I myself stooped to feed him.

– Hosea 11:3-4

These kids are hurting, and we are often hurting, too. They came from awful circumstances, and they sometimes cope with that by creating chaos around them. Adoption always starts with grief, and, ready or not, adoptive parents choose to live it out with them.

It’s lonely, but so common – just not talked about openly very often for many reasons. We don’t want to dissuade people from adoption. We don’t want to be judged by the ignorant. And we don’t want advice from armchair quarterbacks who confuse watching an episode of Ellen or Nightline with authoritative experience in early childhood psychology and attachment disorder.

We want to be nice. Usually.

Whoops.

I know we’re not really alone. There are some great perspectives here and here and here. And here, too.

One of these years (hopefully before our oldest is eighteen) Andrey will take the chocolate we offer him daily – love, belonging, fun times – and stop going back to maggoty gruel. He will seek out and enjoy victory. He’ll be the same person at home that he is in public. The quick insta-grin he gives the camera in the midst of a sulking fit will actually be a genuine smile, instead of a mask that covers anxiety and anger.

He will be older, and wiser. Hopefully before he is eighteen, too.

We love him and long for his victory. The daily decision-making of how best to deal with each new spin is frustrating, but we have great hope. We intimately know how God brings people out of mucky history and into joyful relationship with Him, despite our initial lack of cooperation…despite a past that was no picnic.

He’s in the business of redemption, and it’s messy.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

So…our house wasn’t meant to be normal.

offering chocolate: the business of redemption (copperlight wood)

It was meant to have lots of chocolate.

the right fit

the right fit: how He molds a family of sore thumbs into His image (Copperlight Wood)

It is January and we are in a new year. Christmas came and went at our house, leaving behind new sleds and snowgear, and everything fits perfectly. In the yard, four inches of fresh snow is just waiting to be violently trampled by our six kids.

There is frantic donning of snowgear and the garage door slams repeatedly as they race outside, each hauling a plastic disk that promises to send them down the hill at warp speed.

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Except for one kid. Our youngest child is sobbing and wailing in depths of despair that would make Anne Shirley proud.

This mitten won’t fit on this hand! And this mitten is on this hand” – she thrusts it at me as evidence – “but the OTHER mitten won’t fit on my OTHER hand because ITS thumb is on THIS side!!”

We can hear the bigger kids outside, laughing, yelling, breaking a path down the sledding hill. But she is left behind, left out…and her shiny red sled surely pouts in sympathy from the lonely garage where it waits for her.

She flings both her arms out to show me. “LOOK!” Her four-year-old vocabulary is limited, but what she really means is Hey! This infidel mitten dares to defy me! Behold!

I’m beholding. The thumbs do look…funny. The mitten she’s wearing also looks funny.

Because she has it on the wrong hand. Upside down.

I take that mitten off and hold both of them in front of her so she can see what’s wrong.

“This is how you had them,” I tell her. “Now, watch this.”

I slowly flip the mitten over and switch them to the correct hands…and they fit. No sticky-outy thumbs or anything, and all is right with the world.

She’s four, and learning. But she’s not alone.

We all try to put things on in the wrong places, and then fly into despair when it doesn’t fit right.

Moms, especially, learn that the discipline, training, and schooling that worked for their first kid usually won’t be a perfect fit for the next child. Due to God’s flair for comedy, every succeeding offspring is usually the opposite of their older brother or sister. It’s a mathematical phenomenon.

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Kids are designed with the irritating trait of resisting to mold perfectly to the likeness of others. They won’t be made into their older siblings, and they won’t be made into us – their parents. We may share many traits and features with them, but they were created to mold perfectly to the image of the One who made them…and He doesn’t fit into any box we can come up with.

We have differing personalities and short tempers. We have special needs and often incompetent, pat answers. We are kept on our toes and on our knees.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

-James 1:2-4

Some days we are all thumbs, and they’re sticking out in the wrong directions all over the place: This kid won’t respond to this consequence and this teaching style doesn’t work for this kid and this other kid sticks himself out like a sore thumb that is pushing my buttons…and he’s doing it on purpose.

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We are stretched and grown beyond our parenting wisdom, and we cry for more.

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.

– James 1:5

So, we pray because we lack wisdom for the particular crisis at hand…but also, we pray because we have the wisdom in the first place to know that He must intervene in our lives.

Because honestly, what we’re really saying is, Hey! These infidel children dare to defy me! Behold!

We thrust the situation and these children and all of the sore thumbs at Him, and He gently shows us how to put things upright again. He shows us how He made us all to fit together.

Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.

– Ephesians 4:15-16

As we pray with wisdom, for wisdom, for our kids and all of our differences, He does more than just show us how He is making our kids into His image. He makes us more into His image, too.

He says, This is how you had them. Now…watch this.

And He shows us how we are made to fit together perfectly. 

the right fit: how He molds a family of sore thumbs into His image (Copperlight Wood)