Monday, March 22, 2010
Tonight around 9:30 we got a call from our agency, Covenant Kids (CK) asking if we would take an 18-month-old Caucasian girl for foster care. Of course we jumped at the chance. They asked if they could bring her over the NEXT DAY! We will refer to her as LP.
As was mentioned last Sunday, Debbie did indeed show up Tuesday morning at 11:00 AM to go over the paperwork for our OTHER foster child, CO. He and his CPS case worker arrived around noon.
CO is from El Salvador and has beautiful, lightly-tanned skin, big brown eyes, and big, curly dark brown hair. He weighs 23 pounds (we needed to know for the car seat) and is very cute! He has a very large, bubbly personality. Other than asthma (which we have not seen ANY problems with – even with our dog Scarlett all around), he is a physically and psychologically healthy little boy. He crawls at lightning speed, can easily stand on his own and can walk well with a little help of our hands or table or wall.
At 5:30 CL’s mom (remember our 3-year-old from respite that we still had) picked him up.
At 6:00 our CK Case Worker, Erin arrived, followed shortly by the CPS Case Worker with LP. LP has a fair complexion, big brown curly hair and steel blue eyes. She is a very happy child once she gets past her initial shyness. Her speech is somewhat developmentally delayed, though she is clearly very bright, other than her speech, she is a very healthy child. She also looks out for her new foster brother and tries to help us around the house. She is a very fast runner!
Scarlett is not very happy about our new additions. She is not getting petted as much and, more importantly, she is getting poked in the eyes and all over the face. She generally avoids CO as much as she can.
We got both of them with plenty of clothes (very rare with foster care placement) with some even new plus some toys. CO came from Jonathan’s Place, which is a “’home-style’ emergency shelter for abused, abandoned and neglected children...” See http://www.jpkids.org/ for more information on it. It took five full loads of laundry to wash all their clothes. Remember, they are only 12 and 18 months old, so everything is already small!
It took 1 ½ hours to get CO down to sleep the first night and almost 45 minutes to get him back to sleep when he woke up (I got up 5 times the first night). LP was not much better. Fortunately, Melinda and I work through things and figure out what does and does not work. Even after 15 minutes of pure excitement in the bath, it now takes us less than 15 minutes to get them both asleep, LP sleeps through the night and CO only wakes up one time a night now (and I can get him back to sleep in 5 minutes).
CL needs to be rocked for 10 minutes, a white noise generator, one blanket, a night light and likes to curl up in a little ball. He also is the one who needs warm milk at 1:00 AM while changing his diaper. LP needs no lights, lots of blankets, repeated patting on the back, white noise generator and I need to stay in the room until she falls asleep (or gets close). She now sleeps through the night. Trial and error!
We also went from utter chaos at meal and bath times to very organized and happy times.
Even with three meals plus two snack times the biggest challenge now is just to fill up the day with enough activities. They are too young to sit still and watch a movie and even with a lot of toys it can get a little tiring engaging them all day.
Of course, all of this trial and error would have been much easier had Melinda and I had not been sick all week!
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