Category Archives: special needs

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Posted on by December 23, 2024

How hard is it to read the word “graph” when you know all the sounds? On a good day, not hard at all. But on a rough day when you’re operating from fear and control, impossible.

“What do the letters ‘ph’ say together?” I ask. He knows this.

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Not only does he know this, but I just coached his sister through reading the word “sphere” two minutes earlier, so he just had a refresher course in the “ph” sound. And that might be the very reason he’s choosing this hill to die on – it makes it all the more obvious that he does know, but You Can’t Make Me Tell You.

“Ape,” he says.

We both know it’s wrong. He does a quick extra chore to regroup while I work with someone else.

I ask again. “Ape,” he says, knowing it’s still wrong, it will always be wrong, never in a million years will “ph” ever say “ape,” but if I asked him what his name is right now, he’s just as likely to answer “Hippo.” Or, you know, “Ape.”

Another chore. Wash some windows. Specifically, “Wash the two windows behind you,” I tell him.

He starts doing a third window, though. So I say, “Go ahead and finish that one. You can do three.”

He stops half way through the last one.

“I’m done,” he says. We both know it’s not true.

“How many windows did I tell you to do?”

“Three.” Okay, kind of. I’ll give him that.

“How many did you wash?”

“Four.”

“Really? How’s that?”

He counts the panes, two on each window – one, two, three, four.

“So how many did you wash?”

“Three.”

Because two plus two is three. Because what he’s really saying is, Ef you. You can’t make me.

And I can’t. We both know that’s true. But what he doesn’t understand yet, is I don’t want to make him.

I want him to do it himself. For himself. Because he is loved, and he is valuable, and his days are valuable. I know it’s true. Some days, I think he might finally believe it’s true, also. But not today.

Not all days are like this. It used to be, for years, that every day was like this and worse (so much worse), but now he goes in phases – good days and bad days, great weeks and terrible weeks.

But it’s Christmas time, and right now he’s having some really hard days, because festivities and gatherings and events, oh my. The turmoil this brings up for kids with a background of trauma can be immense, sometimes catastrophic.

But it’s nothing like it used to be.

It used to be, we had to avoid almost everything that involved people because people didn’t know how much their well-intentioned interactions with our kids cost our family.

It was easier to just avoid them. We could at least avoid those triggers…but isolation also cost our family.  

Eventually we learned how to communicate what our kids’ needs were to the people around us – family, friends, our church, our school, our medical professionals. And that quickly helped us discover who “our people” were – they were the ones who respected the boundaries our kids needed. The ones who didn’t, weren’t.  

If this sounds familiar to you, I have some quick resources for you to help the holiday season be more fun than a root canal without anesthesia. Been there, hated that. Some days, as you can tell, we’re still there. But it’s nothing like it used to be.

This post explains the Why Behind the Weird Limits to our people. It helps family, friends, teachers, and other professionals understand exactly why it is such a no no to overstep attachment boundaries with kiddos who have a background of trauma. It’s chapter 2 from Upside Down: Understanding and Supporting Attachment in Adoptive and Foster Families.

Or there’s this: The Upside Down Cheat Sheet is a quick, one-sheet reference. Don’t be afraid to click on it; it’s a free download, no signup required, with a few basic principles to remember. Print it out and give it away as much as you want. If you charge people for it (good luck with that), I will find you…and I’ll ask you to share your savvy marketing skills with me.

And, need the whole book? It’s just 100 (ish) pages – a quick, easy read, and it’s funny. Because I’m funny. At least, my friends think so. You can buy it in stores everywhere or get it directly from us and take advantage of our discounted prices for buying multiple copies. It’s also now available in audio here. Everyone needs this information and we want to make it easy for you to have it, because adoptive and foster families need real support and understanding from their people. If our community can learn, yours can, too.

So that is a look into our fishbowl, seven years into this. At least the windows are clean.

May your gatherings be filled with joy, and your home be filled with peace and as little aftermath as possible. What you’re doing is hard, but you’re doing a good job. And that’s the truth.

work in progress: what happens when we fill the lake

Posted on by February 5, 2025

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

losing no time: how we make up for past choices

Posted on by September 27, 2023

The days are long, but the summers around here are short and this one is gone. We were a month late in planting the garden this spring because of morning sickness and all sorts of I-couldn’t-even, so here in the middle of September we finally have zucchini blossoms galore…and three miniscule zucchinis, smaller than my pinky finger.

losing no time: how we make up for past choices

Did we miss out on the growing season? Yes, and no. We did what we could. There’s always next year. And we grew plenty, just not veggies.

My belly is growing. People seem skeptical when I tell them Kavanagh’s not due until December – the other day I almost knocked myself over just trying to put my socks on while standing up.

Oh My Soul, the book I started four or five years ago and spent the last four or five months finishing, launches October 16th. The Kindle edition just came available for preorder, and the paperback and hardback should follow next week.

(And now it makes sense that so many people teased us about having twins earlier in the summer because, yes, all these babies – it’s just that some of these babies were books.)

We’re ordering school materials, and to Chamberlain’s delight she discovered only three assignments left in her math book and I completely forgot to order the next level, leaving her math-less for a minimum of three weeks until the next ones ship up here. But I made a quick phone call to our umbrella school, and to my delight, we discovered they had an entire set on hand and we won’t miss a beat. Sorry, kiddo.

So much of what we do is not on an academic plan. Reagan’s language arts involves reading story books and picture books, and I document that it’s for “learning sentence structure and speaking in full sentences” but it’s also for understanding the relationships between birds and trees and seasons, how people interact with each other, and constant repetition of simple concepts we take for granted that fall through the holes in her memory.

Andrey has art on his curriculum, and the materials include cross stitch – not because he loves it (though he doesn’t hate it), but because it is good practice at following instructions and obeying, and gives an almost immediate reward or consequence for whether or not he does so. Botched string and knots to untangle are a remarkable illustration of not following directions; clean stitches that match the picture are clear rewards for obeying.

A few nights ago we talked with a new friend who worries that certain choices he made before he was following Jesus were the wrong ones – and he wasn’t talking about the easy, cut-and-dry kinds of choices. These were the kind with no obvious answer, the kind that people still struggle with even after surrendering to Jesus. They were the kind that force us to lean in hard and listen close, and even after the choice is made we wonder what would’ve happened if we’d chosen differently.

Did he miss out on the growing season? Yes, and no. He didn’t have the intimacy with God to move forward confidently when he had to make the call. But is he growing in that intimacy now, and losing no time in his forward progress? Sure looks like it.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

– Psalm 32:1-2, ESV

God is above time, and yet still in time, and on time, and never wasting time. He knows our weakness and where we’ve dug in our heels against correction, and where we’ve been moldable and allowed Him to move us. He’s not a parent like me, looking at a child still dealing with the same stuff from years ago and shaking my head, desperately wanting to say, If you had dealt with this earlier instead of shoving it under the rug – which has long outgrown the ability to hide the pile of detritus underneath it – you wouldn’t be dealing with it now, and the last several years would’ve been more pleasant for yourself, and for all of us.

I’ve been in Psalms. It’s a long book, I’m only forty-some chapters in out of 150, so I’ll be here a while. But last week I was in Psalm 32, and I keep going back to it.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long. (verse 3)

For when I pushed things under the rug and refused to deal with my issues, refused to repent, to apologize, to make amends, to acknowledge the truth of my actions, I diminished into an ever-shrinking ball until sparks shot out of me from the friction of my choices.

And I’ve been here, too; I’ve dug in my heels and been the stubbornest of sinners. Maturity isn’t shown by perfection, but by the ability to recognize sin and turn from it earlier than we were willing to before.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. (verse 4)

He wouldn’t let me get away with it; He loved me too much to leave me shrinking and imploding. He held my feet to His fire, and when I burned myself with my own behavior He gave me reason to move. And now as parents, He’s teaching us to hold our kids’ feet to the fire, too.

I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. (verse 5)

The pain forced me to admit reality. When I confessed and repented of the ways that had never worked for me, His light broke through and irrigated the stench of infection. Fear, doubt, shame, despair, vanished when I agreed with Him.

Therefore let everyone who is godly
offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters,
they shall not reach him. (verse 6)

We don’t have to drown in the fire of our choices; we can yield to His presence before we’re in over our heads. He pulls us out when we admit our need for Him and our inability to save ourselves.

There is no shame in the turning, only in our insistence to keep drowning – to stay tied to the millstone while sinking, to stay behind the gravestone He wants to move out of our way.

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”  

Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

– John 11:38-40, ESV

Martha is just like us. We look at our hard hearts, our hard situations, our hard children, and we ask, Do You not know how impossible this is?

Don’t you know that we’re out of time?

Are You not aware of how deep this hole is that we’ve dug for ourselves?

Do you not see how his heart is like that stone?

Do You not know that her brain was repeatedly blanched with alcohol while she was in utero and the damage to her memory, speech, cognition, and intellectual and social maturity are said to be incurable?

And He answers, Have you heard of what I can do with stones?

Did you forget that I am above time, outside of time, but never out of time?

Do you not yet know that I’m in the business of doing the impossible?

In spite of everything in her past and every diagnosis against her, Reagan is learning to read.

You are a hiding place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

– Psalm 32:7, ESV

He is the shelter, the Savior, and the celebration. And He tells us, Hey Love, the impossible is what I do.

_____________________

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