Sunny and Music

Christie D just left a comment suggesting that Sunny listen to music when he wakes up too early in the morning. Actually, he already has the choice to do this, but I thought I'd mention a little bit more about his relation to music.

Music definitely moves him in a very deep way. Sunny told my stepfather recently that when he listens to music, he draws pictures in his mind. He's not a huge fan of reading, perhaps because he hasn't gotten to that stage yet of active imagination/creation that he's already achieved with music.

Our therapist is not really giving him therapy, but she's given us some great advice. One is to have periods of "quiet time" with Sunny where we all hug on the couch, turn off the lights and listen to calming music for five minutes. Guy puts on instrumental stuff like Miles Davis. It's sort of like meditation and helps him practice self-calming. We haven't done this in a while and probably should get back to it more.

Another piece of advice our therapist gave us was to put a CD player in his room. We have an old one my cousin gave us, and that's become his CD player. Choosing what music to play gives him a sense of control over his environment. We put on music for him at a low volume when he goes to sleep. His perennial favorite is The Wiggles "Big Red Boat".

He also plays his own music at whatever volume he likes when he gets dressed in the morning, when he puts on his pajamas at night or when he has the chore of putting his clean clothes in his closet. Otherwise, he doesn't spend any time in his room, because of the whole separation anxiety issue (when he puts away his clothes he always wants to have someone in the room with him).

When he's in the car with us, he has definite favorites for songs and radio stations. He often has us play "air band" with him. "Dad, you sing, Mom, you play guitar, I'll play drums!"

I don't think he has the attention span yet to actually start learning an instrument. He'll mess around on some hand bongos for a few minutes, but that's it. Maybe in a year he might be at the right stage.

Unfortunately, his favorite music is classic soft rock. I hate classic soft rock. Oh well!

This is his favorite song ever.




This is more my kind of music.

Dekalb County Goings On

Right now Dekalb County is getting a lot of attention because of the feud between the new CEO, Burrell Ellis, and the Chief of Police, Terrell Bolton.

Police chief, CEO feud embarrassing, familiar

No one other than Bolton and Ellis can say exactly what caused the dispute that erupted last week in a public relations disaster for DeKalb government.

Ellis fired Bolton’s top civilian aide and put Bolton on leave pending an investigation into unspecified allegations. He said he is not satisfied with Bolton’s practice of taking comp time, his frequent trips to his family home in Dallas or his job performance, including Bolton’s efforts to reduce crime.

Bolton labeled the investigation a “witch hunt” and asked the GBI to take over that probe and investigate Ellis as well. The GBI said Friday that it could not do so based simply on Bolton’s request.

Among Bolton’s complaints was the conduct of county sheriff’s deputies in Ellis’ security detail. The presence of those deputies — from the independent Sheriff’s Office rather than the county government’s own police force — has its roots in DeKalb’s history and Ellis’ political experience.

I know which side I'm on. I don't agree with the "you should all get along like adults" finger-wagging. So far, I have faith that Ellis is doing his best. He needs to clean out Dekalb, which is rotten with incompetent Vernon Jones cronies like Bolton. I read Dekalb Officers Speak so I get a sense of what's going on behind the scenes; yes, it's a highly biased blog, but I've followed their links to read what mainstream media in Houston has said about Bolton, and none of it is flattering.

Even though Bolton is really a Texas outsider, maybe he'll decide to follow an old Dekalb tradition and assassinate Ellis. I'm sure Ellis has had the same thought, which is why the separate security detail is an excellent idea. I just hope Ellis can fire Bolton as soon as possible and get further into the serious work of cleaning out Dekalb.

Almost There

Sunny has earned six stickers so far. On the day he last woke us up, he still earned a sticker because he didn't do any name-calling or pushing or hitting. As long as he can make it through today, he'll get seven stickers, and then he can take back his beloved Legos.

His behavior has been quite good lately!

He said an interesting thing last night. As Guy was tucking him into bed, Sunny said, "tell Mom I love her, and I'll love her even after she's dead." Guy laughed about it with me later that night... "I guess when I die, the love gets cut off right away!"

The visit to see his foster family and bio grandma (and maybe his mother's grave) is coming up soon. We probably should be prepared for more emotional storms at that point.

The Chest Pain Was Not a Bruise...

... the pediatrician said it was a simple muscle strain caused by overexertion.

Sunny did have a long nature walk with his Nana yesterday, then played lightsabers with his friend for half an hour. I wouldn't have thought it would be an issue, considering what a dynamo he is. I guess it's a good reminder he does have limits.

I told Guy to pick up some Tiger Balm or mentholated rub on the way back home. Apparently Sunny's already saying he feels better.

Whew!

Down and Up and Down and Up

On Friday night he had another violent fit, this time upon refusing to go to bed at 9PM.

We took him out to the car again. He tried to hit us. When he did that, I sat next to him, holding his hands, and told him we were not going to let him hurt people. Unfortunately, Guy happened to turn his head around from the front seat at the exact wrong moment and got a nice punch in the nose.

This one didn't last as long as the others. Within 45 minutes, he had apologized, and said he was ready to leave the car and brush his teeth and put on his pajamas and go to bed. And he did, peacefully.

The next three days were pretty good. He's earned three stickers so far, for Saturday, Sunday and Monday. He needs to earn seven to get a drawer of his toys back. He'd still lost all his video game time for the weekend without hope of redemption. On Monday he did ten workbook sheets with me without any crying or complaining. Later that day, I took him out for ice cream as a reward for his good behavior so far (he's out of school all this week and I was out of work on Monday).

This morning he woke us up at 4:30 again.

It's hard to explain how incredibly irritating this is. One of us goes to lie next to him for a bit to get him back to sleep, but he doesn't want to do that... he wants attention. So when Guy left to go back to our bed, he started yelling "GOODNIGHT" at the top of his lungs at us, every minute.

We both got up and gave him a choice. He could stay at the dinner table doing workbook sheets, or we could go to the car. He wouldn't choose, so I picked him up and we took him to the car. He didn't kick and fight, didn't call us poopooheads, and he got in the car by himself. There, we were faced with another problem. He wasn't raging violently. If you're a sleepy kid and you're in the backseat of a car, that's not a punishment at all... so I had to keep waking him up every few minutes by shifting his blanket (we couldn't let him be in a cold car in his pajamas with no blanket).

Whereas before, we had bad behavior plus violent raging, the two problems are now split apart. That's good, but it means we have to change tactics yet again.

He eventually decided to go inside, where he did workbook sheets. He complained a lot, but he didn't scream. This was the worst of it:

Sunny: "When I get older I'm not going to live with you anymore."
Mom: "Well, most kids don't live with their parents anymore after they get older and turn into adults."
Sunny: "I was planning on staying with you anyway. But you give me too many time-outs, so I'm going to move out when I get older."

We told him we were not happy about his bad behavior, but we were glad he didn't make his bad behavior worse by hitting and name-calling.

We meant it. The highlight of my morning is the fact that I was not called a poopoohead. The exhilaration almost compensates for the grinding fatigue.

He's lost all his TV time for the day, but Guy is giving him a chance to earn it back later by doing more workbook sheets.

Also, Guy just told me Sunny has been complaining about a pain in his chest when he breathes deeply, so he's going to take him to our pediatrician in an hour, as long as Sunny says his chest is still bothering him. We both panicked a little and thought about telling our agency worker. Then I went over the events of this morning and realized that since Sunny got in the car by himself, there is no way we could have caused it. It's probably a bruise he got by falling asleep, on his stomach, on top of one of the seatbelts. Sunny always complains very dramatically about minor scrapes and bruises but then forgets about them quickly once he's distracted. We'll see if he still wants to go to the pediatrician in an hour, and then see what she says.

I can't wait for the adoption to be finalized. Until then, we're always going to be panicked about even the most remote possibility he could be taken away from us.

I still plan on following almost all the same rules after finalization. No locking in or out, no physical discipline. I agree with their spirit. It's just that we won't have to worry about every single scratch and bruise so much.

Octuplet Rage and Foster Care

I'm not interested in attacking or defending the woman who had octuplets. I still don't fully comprehend why she's getting so much attention. I'm beginning to work it out, and the reasons are ugly.

As someone who's going through fertility treatments (albeit pretty mild ones) I know a fair amount about reproductive technology and about what having octuplets involves. It's scary. I would never get into that situation. If I even got CLOSE to that situation, I would hit the big red flashing ABORT button.

I think she made a pretty bad decision. I also think her doctor is unethical and the ART field should be more regulated, much like it is in Europe.

But in a larger context, people make bad decisions all the time... much worse decisions than she's made. There are men who go around creating babies like freaking lawn sprinklers without feeling the slightest sense of responsibility. These men don't end up all over the news. They don't get anonymous death threats because they're "wasting taxpayer money."

The hatred for her is way out of proportion. An article at Racialicious looks at the racial angle, and there definitely is a connection, because some of the vitriol ties into anti-immigrant sentiment. Ultimately, I think it's more like 60% sexism and 30% class and 10% race. She's become the archetypal "bad mother," a scapegoat for societal fear and loathing about women.

I just don't see what she's done to deserve all this rage. One criticism is that she's "stealing from taxpayers". What about all the bailed-out executives who got billions in bonuses? Her media rights will probably be enough cover medical expenses anyway, and even if they're not, any added tax burden is dwarfed by other more successful, less hated thieves.

The most disturbing part is the dehumanizing language toward her children, with so many people calling them a "litter". Whatever you've judged that she's done, they're little babies. Sins of the mother? Come on.

I wasn't going to post anything, but Torina just put up a rant, and I have to chime in and say that I feel much the same way. Apparently some of the commenters on this case are even saying that her babies should be taken away, which is ridiculous.

I CARE. I care about every kid out there. But those octuplet babies are STILL BEING TAKEN CARE OF. Let's worry about the KIDS THAT ARE NOT BEING TAKEN CARE OF. HELLOOOO!!!! They are all around us! There are 650 kids waiting in to be adopted from foster care in Minnesota RIGHT NOW. If you care about children, what about these kids???

Kids are removed because their parents NEGLECTED THEM, BEAT THEM, SEXUALLY ABUSED THEM. Not because their mom had too many eggs implanted by some idiot doctor. Let's start caring about the kids we already KNOW need us. These octuplet kids, as hare-brained as their mom might be, she hasn't hurt them or done anything criminal yet. So let's move on to the kids who really need us.

And to address another type of comment on this case -- as I've said here before, using children in foster care to condemn parenting choices you don't like can be really exploitative. "The octuplets' mother should have adopted from foster care" -- I don't think so. She sounds way too immature to handle that. I'm adopting from foster care, and I don't go around using my choice as some kind of self-righteous bludgeon, because that's not fair to anyone, including my son. Whenever anyone says "X should have adopted a waiting child instead of Y" I always wonder, have they put their money where their mouth is, have they themselves been through foster care, or have they been involved extensively in some other way? And if none of those things are true, they probably need to shut the hell up, because they're just exploiting the existence of waiting children without helping the situation at all.

I Just Had a Long Talk with Sunny's Foster Mom

He would sometimes do the same thing at his foster mom's house... wake up the whole house at 5AM on a Saturday morning by screaming as loudly as possible.

She used to take him out to the car too!

I feel a lot better now. She has a ridiculous amount of parenting experience. She has four or five biological adult kids, four special needs adopted kids and has fostered for decades.

She talked for a while about how she noticed a huge difference in kids that she parented "straight from the hospital" versus at two or three years of age (like Sunny). The ones that came to her older had control and attention issues (like Sunny), and the age was a lot more of a factor than things like drug exposure.

She wasn't talking about attachment in and of itself, although it's definitely attachment related.

I'd emailed our worker earlier about the tantrums, and she asked me if the adoption finalization might be a reason behind this increased turbulence. I don't think it is. I asked Sunny tonight if he was sad about it, and that it was OK if he was sad, but he didn't seem to be interested. As far as he's concerned, the finalization is just a boring adult ritual that means he can finally get a magical thing called a passport that will let him visit Japan.

I also asked him if he was sad because mom might have a baby. I told him that I wasn't sure if that was going to happen or not, just like I wasn't sure BB was coming to live with us, but I hoped it would all happen because then he would get to be a big brother. He seemed more mildly hopeful than sad. I showed him that clip of the easy no-blood natural childbirth scene from The Business of Being Born, and he was really impressed, and asked me if that was happened when Mommy ___ gave birth to him. I said I wasn't sure, but that it was probably like that.

I asked him if the trip to see his foster family was making him sad. He said that it was... that he really wanted to go, but sometimes he was sad thinking about the trip.

I'm trying to wrap my head around that. Maybe he knows he's going to be reminded that he's not integral to their family anymore. He'll be a visitor, an outsider.

Ultimately, I don't know if we're going to be able to untangle the emotional logic behind all this. We just have to stay consistent, yet flexible, and above all, keep a cool head and not screw up.

Plan of Action - Implemented

Well, he did wake us up at 6AM, like I thought he might. It was obviously a power play... nothing to do with nightmares this time.

We burned through stages 1-3 pretty quickly, and ended up in the car. By the way, I like using the car (the email comment a few posts ago gave me the idea) because it's a safe place to have a tantrum in. It's padded. He can't get out because of the child locks, he can't throw anything, he can't destroy anything -- it's Guy's car, which is a lot older than mine and the upholstery is nothing we need to worry about. Guy and I took turns sitting in the front seat.

When he started hitting I went into the backseat and held him down. I hate, hate, hate doing this but it has to be done. He'd struggle for a while, then promise to stop hitting, then I would let go of his arms... then he'd hug me and cry some more. I'd tell him, "I love you, I won't hurt you, but I will not let you hurt other people."

We told Sunny he could leave the car either when it was 7AM (his normal wakeup time) or when he apologized and wrote ten sentences. We ended up staying in the car until 7AM, but he did apologize.

I'm going to tell our agency that this has been going on and how we're handling it. I want to make sure we're covered and that I'm following all the discipline rules, which are pretty strict. As our trainer once quipped, "you can't lock them in and you can't lock them out." I would think it's OK to lock them in a car, as long as you're in the car as well.

I asked Sunny why he was doing this all of a sudden, but he didn't know. We also told him we were willing to do this every morning if necessary, and he was going to get to know the inside of the car really well if he choose to continue this behavior. He also lost all his TV time for today.

I'm proud of Guy... he kept his head and made it clear to Sunny that we're on the same page.

As soon as we got back into the normal morning routine, Sunny was in a great mood again.

Tomorrow morning might be easier because Sunny will have had swimming after school, so he'll be a more tired out. Guy is also planning to take him on a nice walk with the dog.

I'm just choosing to be very detached about this rough patch. I'm not going to let it emotionally exhaust me. We're thinking about getting his medication upped, but we're going to try and wait it out until he's well into his neurofeedback treatments.

Plan of Action

Last night Sunny slept like a log, of course. But tonight Guy and I are ready with a plan of action.

If Sunny wakes us up at four in the morning:

1) He gets a hug and instructions on how to go back to sleep. If that doesn't work...
2) One of us will lie next to him in his bed for a while to see if we can get him to go back to sleep. If that doesn't work...
3) He will get instructions to play quietly in his room while we sleep. If that doesn't work and he escalates (almost certain at this stage)...
4) Door-slamming will get the door taken off the hinges. I told Guy I want the hammer and WD-40 ready. Hitting, kicking or biting will mean he gets held down until he stops. Screaming and insulting means he gets taken out to the car and put in the backseat, with one of us in the front, until he stops raging and can give a real apology, however long this takes.

I just hope we don't have to implement any of these stages tonight. I've still got that nagging low-grade cold and my throat feels terrible. I'm going to take some cold medicine soon and go to bed early.

Sunny's behavior has been pouty but overall decent. These last two nights we've spent the hour before bedtime playing Scrabble, and he gets whipped because he can't build words bigger than three letters... but he always tries hard and handles losing well.

Feeling a Bit Better - Products!

I'm starting to feel vaguely human again.

Guy is going to talk things over with Sunny after school and will apologize for yelling. My mother is cooking dinner tonight, so I can relax.

Here's something to lighten the blog mood: a couple personal care product reviews for Sunny. I had an old draft post with more product reviews for things I use myself, such as Giovanni Straight Fast Hair Straightener, but I'm too tired to finish up all my recommendations.

These products (available at drugstore.com) are great because...

- they work
- the fragrance is not too strong
- they're not all just petroleum jelly or mineral oil
- they're cheap


Vaseline Intensive Care Cocoa Butter Deep Conditioning Body Lotion
Sunny needs a lot of moisturizing after every shower or bath. I used to buy a more expensive Aubrey Organics lotion, but it got used up so quickly. The Vaseline brand lotion works great, it smells good and it comes in a huge bottle with a convenient pump. I've tried a few other lotions in the same price range, but this one is definitely the best. It's powerful, and he has never had dry knees or elbows using this lotion.



Cantu Shea Butter Leave In Conditioning Repair Cream
Sunny likes his hair super-short. I cut it myself with an electric shaver. However, for the winter I've let his hair grow out just a bit in order to keep his head warmer. I used to use a dab of oil (again, an expensive natural organic mix) but that wasn't doing much of anything once his hair grew longer than a centimeter and little ringlets started forming. This Cantu hair cream is awesome and keeps his hair looking shiny and healthy. It needs to be reapplied every morning. It comes in a large tub, and only a small amount is necessary.

Email From a Reader

I have an email from someone who wanted to leave a comment but couldn't because of my registration settings. I asked for permission to post it here so others can read as well, got it, so here it is.

First, when I was a kid, I had bio-feedback (like neurofeedback I think) and it was very effective for me. I went for a few months when I was in high school- fifteen maybe- and I’m now 36 and I still use the techniques I learned then and they still help. I was taught them for pain management, but I’ve used them very well for anger management as well.

Also, I have two children adopted through foster-care. My oldest, S, has fits like Sunny. I wanted to let you know there are others in the same boat, and to share what we do that has helped (it’s a bit of a different situation; S is five, he’s been with us for three years, and so he doesn’t really remember his other families although he *knows* of them and we write and talk on the phone). So, for what it’s worth, here is our approach and why we developed it:

We live in an apartment, with our landlords below us, so the screaming is REALLY an issue (although they are very nice and patient about the whole thing). Since it's me he wants to have with him 24/7, my poor wife gets stuck with this (otherwise it's a reward) but we take him out to the van (naked once when he was younger- it was a shock to him that we really did, but our van's windows are coated so it wasn't too immodest) when he starts screaming, hitting or throwing. He goes in the back, and my wife sits up front and at least pretends to read a book. Every minute or two, she looks up and calmly asks if he is done. When he is able to say yes (this can take a long time) she goes in the back with him, cuddles and talks as needed, reassures him he's loved, and brings him back inside. If it's really cold out, she buckles him in and drives while he screams. We prefer not to drive if possible though because he's distracting and we dread having to explain what's going on if we got pulled over! Over time the hitting has stopped (it's been about a year) but he still throws things if they are to hand. Anything he throws goes into time out for a week.

Thanks for the blog- I really enjoy reading about your experiences and perspectives.

-J

Exhausted

Yesterday Sunny had great behavior. I congratulated him and gave him a special sticker. This was one of the seven in a row he needs to earn back a toy drawer. As a bonus, he also got another one of his Hot Wheels back.

But he was in a very bad mood when we woke him up at 10:30 to pee. Then he got up at four in the morning and made us miserable for the next four hours.

If he wakes up with a nightmare, he can come in our bedroom and get a hug. Then he has to go back to bed, or else play quietly in his room. He's done this successfully a couple times before, but not tonight. He didn't want to be awake and alone in his room, no matter what, and he started getting mean about it.

DOOR SLAM
MOM AND DAD AREN'T BEING VERY NICE TO ME
WHY AM I ACTING LIKE AN IDIOT? WHY AM I SO STUPID???? WHYYYYYYY???!!!!?
DOOR SLAM
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIILLL
MOM AND DAD AREN'T LISTENING TO ME
MOM AND DAD ARE IDIOT POOPOO FARTHEADS
DOOR SLAM
ARRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHH
I'M VERY MAD
THIS IS THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT
WAAAAAAAAAILLLLLL
DOOR SLAM
IF MOM AND DAD AREN'T GOING TO BE NICE TO ME I'M NOT GOING TO BE NICE TO THEM
DOOR SLAM

I tried reasoning, but he was already in that state of cold rage.

I ended up getting up at 5:30 and going to the living room with Sunny. Guy got some more sleep. I am very irritated with Guy right now, because he made the situation worse with his temper. He's great at parenting except for a couple weak spots and this is one of them: he isn't good at being woken up.

When we lived in an apartment, I once had to pull him away from attacking our terrible upstairs neighbor, who started playing the R. Kelly song "Ignition" on auto-repeat, at full volume, and then left to get high for the night, not returning until one in the morning. When I say "pull him away" I mean that literally. As soon as our neighbor got back home, Guy kept charging up the stairs at him, and I kept grabbing him by his belt and vigorously hauling him back down the stairs (I'm fairly strong and I weigh a lot more than Guy). When I told my mother the next morning, she replied, "Welcome to a long life of pulling men off of other men."

When Guy gets upset like this I not only have to figure out how to calm Sunny down, I have to figure out how to keep Guy from yelling and cursing at Sunny. Sunny needs to have consequences for his bad behavior but they can't be given when people are out of control like that.

One consequence Sunny got was that his mattress is now on the floor. I warned him last week that if he showed his anger by jumping off the bed in a threatening manner, I would take away his bed. Also, the next time he slams the door, it's getting taken off its hinges.

I'm willing to try just about anything. Once his adoption is finalized, he'll be allowed to sleep in the same bed, and if he has a nightmare, he can come sleep with me for a while. It's going to happen soon... we sent off the signed affidavits the other day.

I've also decided that he's not going to be allowed to hit. If that happens, he's going to be put on the sofa or bed in a hold-down. I don't care how much he is screaming that we're hurting him or twisting his arm or "using too much pressure" (yes, he said that). He's going to hurt himself worse if we don't hold him down. I told him that too. I said, "we are never going to hurt you, but we are not going to allow you to hit."

I don't think Sunny was being as remorseful as normal in the morning. He was still in a very nasty and controlling mood, although he stopped being totally oppositional. He was doing so well yesterday.

I was lecturing him on the way to school. I don't know if any of it sunk in. He said he was thinking about moving to another home when he got older. I told him he could move out and make all his own decisions when he was 18, but other than that, he was stuck with us. He said, "I know, I'm talking about when I turn 18." I ended with a pep talk... he was a good boy, and I knew he could do better if he tried harder to control his anger.

This is depressing. I'm exhausted and stressed, and I have a mild cold, and my period cycle is way off because of the stupid drugs. THE WORLD ISN'T BEING VERY NICE TO ME! WHYYYYY?!?!?!

I recited nembutsu this morning in the car on my way to work and that calmed me down a lot, as always.

Hilarious Picture

The picture I just took tonight was hilarious. You'll have to take my word for it.

Sunny is lounging in the bathtub with a plastic bowl on top of his head, pretending to smoke an imaginary cigarette.

So It's Not Just Me

I had a nice talk with Sunny's foster mom last night. She said she was wondering if he was going to have those big, way-out-of-control hour-long fits with us.

When he first came to them he was "fine", but after a while he started having those hourlong tantrums. That's when they started trying a series of medications, ending up with the atypical antipsychotic he's on now. She said he still had the fits, and they could be set off by an adult or child in the house telling Sunny what to do... and the pattern was pretty random.

She said "I was beginning to think it was just me!"

Now I feel the same way. Whew, it's not just me. This is not the absolute worst Sunny has ever behaved.

She believes he has something neurological that makes him behave that way... of course he doesn't want to do it, he feels compelled.

It's impossible to put a finger on exactly why. I seriously doubt he has real (i.e. genetic) ADHD. I don't think he has any kind of bipolar either.

Here's a pretty broad list of childhood bipolar symptoms with my remarks added. I'm aware of a lot of the controversy regarding overdiagnosis of childhood bipolar, and I'm taking the list with a grain of salt.

• an expansive or irritable mood (Sometimes)
• extreme sadness or lack of interest in play (Never. He's very resilient. He'll get sad, of course, but he recovers quickly)
• rapidly changing moods lasting a few hours to a few days (No. He's consistent. He's either energetic and sweet, energetic and cranky or just plain energetic.)
• explosive, lengthy, and often destructive rages (Sometimes)
• separation anxiety (Yes, definitely. But he's OK at school or playing with other kids or other adults.)
• defiance of authority (Sometimes... more at home than at school)
• hyperactivity, agitation, and distractibility (Yes, although he's able to focus for quite longer periods of time on things he really enjoys, like Legos)
• sleeping little or, alternatively, sleeping too much (not really, 10 hours a night seems to be his natural time)
• bed wetting and night terrors (Bedwetting yes, night terrors yes, but rarely)
• strong and frequent cravings, often for carbohydrates and sweets (Come on, this is a ridiculous "symptom")
• excessive involvement in multiple projects and activities (yes, has a harder time staying on activities in school compared to his classmates)
• impaired judgment, impulsivity, racing thoughts, and pressure to keep talking (Yes, very impulsive and talkative... impaired judgment, not really)
• dare-devil behaviors such as jumping out of moving cars or off roofs (No. He's daring, but has a great understanding of his physical limits.)
• inappropriate or precocious sexual behavior (No)
• delusions and hallucinations (No)
• grandiose belief in own abilities that defy the laws of logic -- ability to fly, for example (No)

He doesn't fit any other diagnoses. I think FASD is out of the question. He was more than 8 pounds when he was born, and many of his particular mental strengths are the mirror image of the problems that kids with FASD tend to have. He's a Go Fish expert card-counter, and his sense of direction and memory for landmarks are better than my own.

I don't think these fits have changed my basic approach to Sunny's issues. Number one, he's a strong-willed child. He'd be a strong-willed child even if he had a totally normal and boring childhood. Number two, his mother was not consistently there for him when he was an infant and toddler, and then he lost her. Other people were there for him, which is why he doesn't have attachment disorder, and why he's so trusting . But it's still a huge loss. Knowing that she died is another loss, but I think it affected him less than the initial loss... the time he knew for sure he was never going back to live with her.

We can't change Sunny's basic personality. I wouldn't want to. But I'm confident we can help him grow out of these fits, and that he will find ways of untangling the complicated knot of loss/control/anxiety he's been forced to live with. I think when he can be alone in a room by himself, at ease with himself, this will be a huge marker of progress. It sounds so simple...

The Latest Fit Was Very Bad

Sunny had a fit a week ago that lasted an hour and a half. It was pretty bad. My husband lost it about halfway through and started yelling at him to shut up.

I kept them separated, and eventually Sunny tired himself out and I was able to put him to sleep.

When he gets into this state, he can't be reasoned with. I've tried some things that worked before. Saying how he feels -- this doesn't help because he already knows how he feels (very angry). Asking him what he wants -- he doesn't know what he wants. He'll just repeat accusations. Mom and Dad are being idiot poopooheads and it's all their fault.

We can't ignore him. That just makes him angrier. We can't send him to his room. He won't stay there. We apply consequences like taking away toys and privileges. That makes him angrier as well. I'll ask him if he wants a hug, but even if wants to hug, it won't stop him being angry.

Tonight he had a fit that was shorter but even worse. My husband didn't lose it this time... I almost did, though. I was horribly upset because he started hitting me. He was escalating, and I felt helpless to stop it. First there was running up to me and pretending to kick me, then he threw a stuffed toy at my head, then he actually kicked me to see what I would do. I told him hitting was unacceptable and said he was going to get toys taken out of his room if he continued, I started taking toys out, he started punching me and running at me.

It all started when he wouldn't eat his vegetable. The usual consequence for that is that he doesn't get any extras or dessert or after-dinner mints. He seemed more upset than usual about that, and called us idiots. Guy gave him a long talk and asked him to look into his eyes. I thought that was bad idea -- I just wanted to give him a time out right then -- but I didn't say anything, I just went to clean up the kitchen.

Then it was my turn to make a mistake. I wanted to make sure he'd do his time out as soon as possible, so I told him he needed to start it. I should have waited for a cool-down first. That's when he started running up to me...

The worst part of this was, I had just found out earlier that my mother had a suspicious mammogram result. If there's one thing that reduces me to a quivering wreck it's thinking what would happen if her breast cancer came back. My father was the one who called and told me about the mammogram result. He gave me a meant-to-be-reassuring-but-actually-horrible-demoralizing speech: "you know, at our age the shadow of the big C is everywhere!" So I wasn't 100% in the game tonight anyway.

Sunny was in a cold rage. He wanted to hurt me. I didn't know know how to snap him out of it, so I just figured I needed to take out his toys and stand my ground.

He broke down crying a couple times and claimed I hit him. This is a pattern I've seen before. He throws himself around violently, bangs himself (never seriously) and then blames someone else and starts crying. I think it's his own way of trying to deescalate, of trying to bring himself out of the state of aggression. He knows it didn't really happen that way, and he never persists in that claim after he cools down.

Sunny snapped out of it a few minutes later, after he went downstairs to talk to Guy.

He apologized thoroughly. We decided that his toys were going to stay out of his room, and he could earn them back. Every week that went by without a big fit or calling us names, he can choose a drawer of toys to take back. Guy had another talk with Sunny about hitting. I gave him a big hug and told him this was the worst behavior I'd ever seen him do, but I still loved him and always would.

Sunny and I spent the last 30 minutes before bedtime doing a scissors-and-paper activity. We put him to bed with no problems.

Guy said he doesn't know if Sunny really loves us, but I told him I didn't have any doubt about that. Of course he loves us, but he hates us a little bit as well. Gaining us meant having other people taken away. He's going through a stage right now where he isn't interested in talking with his foster mom on the phone. That might be part of it. I told Guy I really understand how he feels. Sunny has so little control over his life... sometimes when we tell him he has to do things, it's like rolling a dice and one out of every hundred times we get the wrong number and the switch will flip and he remembers all the things he lost control of, and he tries to get it all back by lashing out.

Just because I understand it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt like hell. I was crying for a while tonight after Sunny went to bed.

Just because I understand it doesn't mean we'll be able to stop it in future. Maybe the neurofeedback will help. Maybe his medication needs to be raised slightly (this would be a last resort).

There's a big likelihood my mother's results are nothing to be worried about. I'll know soon. If they're not, as my dad reminded me, plan B has to swing into effect. My mother isn't quite old enough for Medicare, she's otherwise uninsurable because of prior breast cancer, but she's still covered under national Japanese healthcare. She'd have to go to Japan to be treated, and I'd go there as needed. I hate Tokyo and it always makes me miserable and depressed. I want to go visit Japan with Sunny as soon as we can get him a passport... but spending as little time in Tokyo as possible. I hate the U.S. healthcare system most of all.

I'm an optimist when it comes to Sunny. 99% of the time he's a fantastic kid. He has a lot of empathy and intelligence in order to learn how to regulate himself better. Our therapist thinks all he needs is time. We're going to her now more for us... last session she didn't even bother talking to Sunny. It's just helpful to go every few weeks and hear we're not totally wrong, and get a few useful tips in the process. For example, I told her about how I recently realized Sunny had a very hazy understanding of who was black or white, so we went over a lot of people he knew. His bio mom was white (not black as he originally guessed) and a lot of his friends he thought were white when they were really black. In terms of famous people, I reminded him Obama and MLK are black, Beethoven and Bach from his music class are white (turns out I could be wrong about Beethoven). She told me this was all pretty normal. She gave me a tip for when we go on the visit in March: if we decide to visit his mother's grave, Sunny should be given a useful task to do while he's there in order to feel more in control of the situation.

Typing all this stuff out has helped me feel better. I'm going to bed early now.

I Suck at Support

I thought I'd mention this in relation to the last post.

My cousin (here's my last long post about her) has been up and down. She hasn't had a major attack in a while. Her disability checks finally started coming in, so her financial situation is better.

My mother went to therapy with her earlier this week. My cousin mentioned that she was very intimidated by me, and I often made her feel insecure, even though she said she knew it wasn't my fault.

For example, recently my cousin told my mother and me that the therapist did a budget with her, and she felt like it was a really great step. I said, "Awesome! Now all you have to do is stick to it."

In light of the fact that I'd made her a budget last year that she never followed, apparently my words really hurt her.

From my perspective, it's hard to know what to do about things like that. I'm a straightforward person, and I'm not good at reading other people's emotions and predicting their reactions. I thought I was doing well because I never once nagged her about not sticking to my original budget. In that original financial advising session I told her she should cut out all salon expenses, and then a few months later I saw she got a new weave, and I never said anything. Using a budget is 10% formulation and 90% follow-through... that's all I wanted to stress to her.

She doesn't blame me, I don't blame her, but our relationship is not what it could be.

I tend to think she's a lot more secure than she really is. That's a common issue with her. She used to be a high-powered saleswoman; she cracks jokes all the time and appears to be totally confident. I used to be a bit envious of her confidence and social ease, in the sense that I sometimes wondered, "Would I have grown up to be that way if I hadn't been through so much social trauma as a kid? Is that a genetic inheritance that should have been mine as well?" But my mother explained how it's all just a front she had to put on in order to survive her toxic family environment. It's even self-defeating, because people assume she doesn't need the help that she really needs. I don't have that insecure core because I was raised in a healthy family structure.

It's almost impossible for me to act in a way that I don't feel. I'm kind of an anti-actor. I can be diplomatic, I can choose words carefully, I can put on a very detached front, I can slip into a teaching persona if I speak in front of a crowd... but that's about it. I'm incapable of manipulating people. I'm even incapable of flirting. It's been both a blessing and a curse. It's hard for me to understand the behavior of people who are presenting with a "false front" because I can't put myself in their shoes.

I want to make a positive difference in people's lives, and I think I've succeeded in some ways. I have to work within my limitations. For example, I'd make a terrible therapist. If I know something that can help someone, and they're interested in learning it, I can teach it to them pretty well. But other than that, it seems like it's better for me to step aside and just listen.

Sigh... anyway, I've offered to go into the next therapy session with my mother and cousin. This is with the understanding that it's totally for the benefit of my cousin, and is not all about me. I just want to know the best way to support her. My mother let my cousin know about my offer, so I'll wait and see if she wants me to come.

Meandering Reproductive Thoughts

I'm on my first IUI.

I wasn't originally going to do any drugs, but my doctor persuaded me to take some. So for the last three weeks I've been taking a colorful spectrum of drugs to be swallowed, injected or otherwise inserted. I thought it would all be covered by my insurance, but it turns out the injectables weren't. Argh!

So far I haven't had any side effects other than an increased craving for carbohydrates. I'm definitely gaining weight because of this.

I've been reading a few fertility forums. The information is really valuable. But I have some problems dealing with the atmosphere of relentless positivity and emphasis on support at all costs. For example, the idea that mentions of pregnancy and childbirth are something that a lot of women need to be protected from.

I don't want to judge other people, because it's really about me and my own issues. Maybe I'm a horrible jerk who lacks empathy. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. In other types of environments where the goal is support at all costs, I've noticed that the goal is often achieved by stifling dissent or constructive criticism. I understand the need for "safe spaces" and I've benefited many times from belonging to them. The important part of a safe space is that you should be protected from people who deny your reality (something which can be depressingly common outside the safe space). But there's a tricky balance involved as well.

It's a bit easier to describe in terms of adoption communities. Forums that cater to adoptive parents are common. If an adoptive parent is feeling hurt or frustrated or in pain, the support can be really healthy. It can also be really counterproductive and infantilizing.

For example, on one forum I'm at (which is primarily but not 100% supportive) a parent asked for advice on how to explain that her young child, adopted from Russia, was of Roma descent. She was already fielding a lot of questions about how her child "really didn't look Russian". Especially in summer. She was worried about anti-Roma prejudice so she was thinking of how to keep her child's background from being a topic of discussion.

All the adoptive parents of color on the site, including myself, gave her the exact same advice. DON'T KEEP IT A SECRET. Emphasize Roma heritage and Roma pride. The child is going to have a much, much different experience of race than a white Russian adoptee. Realize that you're in a transracial adoption even though you never signed up for one. We all did this with as much politeness and empathy as possible.

She didn't want to hear our advice. She just wanted to be propped up in her decision to keep it a secret. In fact, she quickly left the forum in a huff because she wasn't "being supported".

A need for emotional support shouldn't translate into entitlement to act stupidly or selfishly.

And this has very little to do with infertility, but I'd like to mention how much I hate the word "triggered". I would never use it myself, because it reduces me to some horribly passive inanimate object. I can be insulted, angered, enraged, humiliated, upset, disturbed, shocked or saddened. But I can't be "triggered", unless I actually had a flashback or a seizure or something like that.

In any online environment where the word "triggered" is really popular, I get the impression that the participants are presenting themselves more as collections of traumas than the individual human beings that they undoubtedly are. Why would you want to depersonalize yourself? I don't understand the motivation.

I'm probably reading too much into it... ultimately, it's just a case where a word is undergoing a semantic shift.

Anyway, back to the infertility stuff. I'll make some posts about my protocols and results because I want to contribute to the same sharing of information that has already given me great benefit. But I'm just not into the emotional support aspect.

A set of information that really helped me was reading (on a different board) accounts of the LEEP procedure. I had that about twelve years ago for cervical dysplasia. I've wondered for years whether it would affect my fertility, but my doctor says my cervix looks great and is definitively healed.

I had such a terrible experience with the LEEP. It really have me a healthy fear and distrust of any medical professional who gets close to my reproductive system.

In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have had the LEEP procedure at all. A lot of times if you come back in six months for another pap smear, the dysplasia clears up on its own. But the doctor recommended the LEEP and I was so scared of cervical cancer that I agreed with anything he said. I was told it would be a simple outpatient procedure with no pain, so I planned on taking the bus home afterwards. When I got onto the table, the nurse placed an oddly-shaped, heavy pad on my thigh. "What's that for?" I asked. "Oh, we're just grounding your thigh." That's when I started panicking. The doctor brushed aside my questions and gave me the attitude that he was doing me a big favor and I needed to quit whining... so I just laid back and let them go ahead and electrocute my cervix in what turned out to be the most painful experience of my entire life. And then I took the bus home.

Many women who had the LEEP procedure reported back that it was no big deal. But a few were like me, and said things like "OH MY GOD THE PAIN" and "I had a really painful natural childbirth and it was a walk in the park compared to the LEEP procedure." What must have happened was that the local anesthetic was not working correctly. Instead of giving me more anesthetic or looking into the problem, the doctor just didn't give a damn...

I wish this was all information I knew beforehand. But now I'm always going to research the hell out of any drug or procedure.

Let's see how IUI #1 goes.

Sunny recently asked me a birth-related question. We were talking about someone else's baby, and he asked, "how do babies get out?" I said they came out through the vagina, which was part of the private parts that women have. He seemed kind of weirded out by that. He said that that wasn't the only way that babies came out, sometime they came out through the stomach. I congratulated him on knowing that, and reminded him it was called a Cesarean section.

We haven't really had any big talk yet about this stuff, partly because he knows a fair amount about the facts of life already. He knows that you have "sex" and that women can get pregnant and have babies. He knows proper words for private parts but messes them up sometimes, most hilariously, "peanut" for "penis".

I've stressed the word "private parts" in that they're "private" and they belong to him only. For example, when I put lotion on him after the shower, he's always responsible for lotioning his own private parts. I think he needs to be more educated in this area, but I probably wouldn't be the best teacher. Luckily a group we belong to has great classes on stuff like this, so I think I need to sign him up soon.

I'm thinking about showing Sunny a carefully selected clip from a great documentary called The Business of Being Born. There are a few scenes where a woman gives birth very easily, at home, with no blood and no screaming, and it's very inspiring (although not terribly representative of the average birth).

Name Changing Post

Posts about changing names have been popular lately so I thought I'd add a short note of my own.

Sunny has a very standard Anglo-Saxon first name, middle name and then his biological mother's last name, which is kind of unusual but also Anglo-Saxon.

By coincidence, his middle name is the same as Guy's middle name and his father's first name.

We never thought about changing his first name, because that's what he's used to. We might have thought about changing his middle name if it wasn't already the same as my husband's. We were originally going to add on (my last name) hyphen (Guy's last name). Our workers said they didn't think that was a good idea, the name was too long then, and we should just drop his original last name. We went along with what they said.

A few months ago, when I talked about names with Sunny, he mentioned that he liked his last name and didn't want it to go away completely. We have the final word over that, so we're going to go back to the original plan and he'll stay with firstname middlename biolastname adoptedhyphenatedlastname. It's going to lead to bureaucratic complications, but what the heck, tons of people with Spanish-style sentence-length names deal with that already.

That's one of the advantages of adopting older kids, I guess. You don't have to make all the tough decisions. If Sunny feels like changing his name later, it's up to him. Right now he's happy with what he has.

As for me, I have an Anglo-Saxon first name, Japanese middle name and Anglo-Saxon last name. When I meet people for the first time, I frequently get a double take. "You're (confused look ) (insert name)?" It's irritating because I like my name and think it suits me just fine. The worst is when I tell someone my last name and then they sort of knit their eyebrows together, sigh, and ask me how to spell it, because since I look Asian of course it's got to have tricky sneaky weird spelling. I can tell when they're doing this to be obtuse as opposed to regular spelling confirmations. My last name should be impossible to misspell! It's like "Miller" or "Cook" but they're expecting me to spell it "Ng".

When I was born, my mother gave me her last name. My father was there, but they weren't married at the time, and weren't even planning on getting married. The hospital staff didn't understand her freewheeling feminist ways, so they gave me my father's last name even though she told them not to. She later corrected them and my social security card was issued under my correct last name. My original birth certificate still has the wrong name on it, and I had to do an official name change five years ago even though I've been using my current name all my life anyway.

All of this makes me very resistant to the idea of having the "right name" and conforming to social conventions on naming.

On the other hand, I've done some career counseling before. And this has never come up, but if I did career counseling with someone with a very "ghetto" name, I would almost certainly float the idea to initialize their name on resumes or applications. There's a difference between what's right, what's ethical and what will actually get you the job. The statistics are pretty grim.

One argument against conforming is that you wouldn't want to work in a racist workplace anyway. I think that's too stark of a choice. We're not comparing working at Office KKK versus Office NAACP. Many hiring managers are subconsciously biased but can make more egalitarian decisions when actually face to face with someone. Also, a lot of people just really need the paycheck right now. For example, given a choice between depressing jobs, I'd rather work in a racist call center than in a non-racist chicken-processing plant.

There are plenty of good ethical arguments against conforming. It's a terrible thing to give up a little piece of yourself like that.

The better off you are, the more control you have over your environment and the less your name matters. I'm lucky I have a decent job and I don't have to worry about it much. And my face-not-matching-name issues are irritating, but they've never really affected me economically.

If I had my father's last name things would have been different. My father's last name is long and incredibly difficult for the average English speaker to spell or pronounce. It inspires panic and can almost produce tears of frustration. It's kind of funny to watch, in a perverse way.

Mellow Yellow

Sunny got to watch the inauguration on TV with his first-grade class at school. I got to watch the inauguration behind a corporate firewall which screwed up the webcast, so I didn't get to watch it at all.

Sunny said his favorite part was when Rev. Joseph Lowery said "mellow yellow."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid the outpouring of inaugural joy over the racial progress represented by President Barack Obama, there was a single, humorous mention of work still to be done.

After the first black president had been sworn in, Rev. Joseph Lowery' ended his benediction with a rhyme familiar to black churchgoers:

"We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around..."

There was laughter from the enormous crowd. The 87-year-old civil rights pioneer continued:

"When yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."

The crowd thundered, "Amen!"

I don't go to a black church but I'm pretty familiar with that rhyme. He used it at the rally we went to last year. I've seen Lowery speak a bunch of times at different Atlanta events. The man is a powerhouse. He's everywhere! I even have a picture of Sunny and him together, although it's not a very good picture and you really only see his back.

I explained to Sunny that the different colors in the rhyme stood for different groups of people. Yellow stood for Asians, like me and Ojiichan. I also added that I normally don't like being called "yellow" but I'll give Lowery a pass on that one. Black stood for black people and African-Americans, red stood for Native Americans and so on.

He asked "What about me?"

I told him he was black and white. He said, "Yay!"

MLK Day March and Inauguration

We marched in the MLK day parade again, this time with Sunny. He had a great time. I didn't take any video footage this year, or I'd post it.

Today he'll be watching the inauguration at his school.

American Family just had an interesting post about "dumbing down" King's message in school. It makes me think about how I teach these issues to Sunny. It's so hard to think of how to balance everything. I feel like he's very fragile. He's just now learning what being African-American means, and that he himself is African-American. I don't want to push him too hard and tell him what he is or how he has to identify himself. I don't want him to think that being African-American means cutting himself off from his multiracial heritage and his white family. I just drop things now and then, such as telling him how Barack Obama is a lot like Sunny because he is black but his mother is white.

Whiteness is an insanely difficult concept to grasp for an adult, much less a six-year-old.

Since Sunny goes to a very diverse, minority-white school, one that I know doesn't tolerate bullying, I don't have to worry so much about direct attacks with racist abuse. I do have to worry about more subtle but powerful problems, like colorism among the black kids.

I also trust his school to teach history. So far he hasn't come home with anything that sounds wrong to me. He knows, in very general terms, about slavery. We're still working on the Civil War. I recently explained that Atlanta was burned to the ground and that's why we don't have any nice older buildings like some other cities do. He wanted to know who the good guys were and the who the bad guys were and which side we were on. I couldn't really answer to his satisfaction. I said the North was right and the South was wrong, so even though a lot of people died in the war, a great thing came out of it: slavery ended.

I didn't tell him that my ancestors on my mother's side fought for the Confederacy. I did tell him, once, that when my mother was born, it was illegal for her to marry my father. I don't think he could grasp that yet -- he looked so confused -- so this kind of family history is something to put off for another year until he's ready. And talking about race in my maternal family is going to be more pleasant than talking about race in his biological family...

In a way, it's easy to teach this kind of history because we're surrounded by it. Today, waiting for the march to start, we were standing next to a Civil War plaque on the ground that commemorated the first civilian death in 1864. At the end of the march, I pointed out to Sunny the church in which Martin Luther King Jr., and his father before him, preached. I'm trying to keep things factual, and also tied to the present day. King's message is relevant to a huge spectrum of social issues, from local to global, represented at the parade yesterday. Stopping the execution of Troy Davis. Union solidarity and the Employee Free Choice Act. Peace in Palestine.

I don't think Sunny is ready to understand how bad things really were/are. I wouldn't take him to any exhibit on segregation or slavery. In a year's time, he might be, and even if he's not he'll start absorbing it anyway, so I have to be ready.

It's so strange the things he tends to focus on. The fact that Lincoln was shot in a theater seems to haunt him, and he brings it up now and then out of the blue. He's fascinated by violence and shooting, the kind you see in video games and children's cartoons (and I don't think it's an abnormal fascination at all, or else these cartoons wouldn't be full of it) but he really has a very low tolerance for realistic versions. "Hide my eyes, mom! Tell me when it's safe to look!" he'll say. I think that's why he likes Scooby Doo so much... it's a safe way to be scared.

I feel torn about the inauguration today. I want him to understand how important this milestone is. But to understand the real importance, he would have to understand the pain. He doesn't now, but he will soon.

Adoption Tax Credit Clarification, Plus Some Obnoxious Opinions

I got a lot of comments on the last post, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit.

First of all, the tax credit isn't really $10,000; it's increased every year and I had an older figure in mind. For tax year 2007, it's $11,390 and it should be $11,650 for adoptions finalized in 2008. This link at NACAC does a good job of summarizing the situation for foster care adoption families.

Basically, you can get the whole credit if you've finalized a special needs adoption. If you're getting any kind of state adoption subsidy, that means it's a special needs adoption. It doesn't matter if the adoption was free. You don't have to claim expenses. If your adoption in 2007 was free, you get $11,390. If your adoption cost $5,000, you get $11,390. This is in the form of a tax credit. So if your tax liability is less than $11,390, the rest of it rolls over to another year. NACAC has some examples and a link to the IRS publication.

I'm going to pay some money for my adoption finalization, which should happen this year very soon, so I'll expect to get this tax credit money next year. My finalization isn't going to cost anything at all, because I get a reimbursement from Sunny's state. My trip expenses for the first trip visiting him are also going to be repaid at that time.

One thing I don't understand very well is the situation for non-special-needs adoptions from foster care. I suppose these would be children who were fostered from birth. In foster care, "special needs" is a very inclusive category and encompasses plenty of kids who are quite healthy. Here's the definition from Georgia:

In the State of Georgia a child who is considered special needs for the purpose of adoption meets the following criteria:

a. Any child eight years of age or older.
b. Any child of African-American heritage who is one year of age or older.
c. Members of a sibling group of three or more who are placed together.
d. Members of a sibling group of two where one is over the age of eight or has another special need.
e. Any child with documented physical, emotional or mental impairments or limitations.

People who do private domestic adoptions and international adoptions get the same tax credit, but they have to file expenses. So if they paid $5000 for an adoption, they would only get $5000 back. So at least in that one way, special needs foster care adoptions are privileged.

Here's my first obnoxious opinion in response to Sang-Shil's comment/question. I don't believe people who are not independently wealthy should be encouraged to adopt internationally using short-term lures like the tax credit. It's just too dangerous.

This doesn't mean that working class and middle-class people can't be great adoptive parents. It's not a judgment on parenting skills. It's a judgment on the terrible state of children's healthcare in this country. I've just heard too many horror stories.

It's not easy for families who have adopted from foster care to get services, but at least we have Medicaid and subsidies. When things go wrong for international adoptive families, there's no safety net. When they start off, they don't think anything will go wrong. The agencies certainly don't have any vested interest in telling them scary stories about attachment disorder and PTSD and fetal alcohol syndrome. If they're lucky, and they usually are, things will go reasonably well from a health perspective. If they're not lucky, they will end up shattered, bankrupt and their children will be taken away and age out in foster care.

I've heard so many of these stories. Here's a comment that a person just now left at the link I gave for my tax credit policy suggestion:

derinever
1/15/2009 10:44 AM
I adopted a child internationally. There is no social suport for these children He is not able to be educated in America's failing education system. These orphaned children have a risk for learning disabilites and psychological problems from neglect abuse malnutrition and lead posoining. Stop the adoptions until America can commit to helping these kids. My son has NO school. He is eight years old. We have tried to get him help paying more than fifty thousand dollars of failed therapies and tutoring. Tax credits wont change his future of less hope due to poor education help

Just another example. Sunny's foster mom has adopted several children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I want to do a detailed post about some of these children later, so I won't talk about them much more. I was shocked when I found out that one of the girls was 14, because she looked and acted like she was 10 years old. She was also an incredibly sweet, caring and peaceful girl. Sunny's foster mom worries about their future, obviously. But she knows a lot about their disorder. Their medical care doesn't cost her anything... and one of them was hospitalized for months, at death's door, when he was Sunny's age.

His foster mom told me that one of her neighbors had adopted a girl from Russia, and sort of sadly shook her head. She had severe FASD. The family put the girl in an institution when she was 12 years old and she's been there ever since. I wonder what kind of toll that took on their family.

I think that a lot of parents adopt internationally, realize they're in over their heads, then pull it together and scrape up all their resources and work through it. But the ones that don't... I wish there were more statistics about the intersection of international adoption and the foster care system.

There have been about 20,000 international adoptions a year in the past decade. So the tax credit is costing the government $200 million a year. I think this money could be better spent 1) regulating international adoption agencies and preventing corruption 2) ensuring potential parents are educated about the psychological AND cultural needs of international adoptees 3) scaring the hell out of them (the same treatment foster care adoptive parents get in trainings) so that they know for sure what they might be getting into 4) ensuring better healthcare, or at least educating parents about what services are available.

I realize that a lot of what I'm saying could be taken as pathologizing international adoptees, so I feel like I should apologize for that. But I'm coming from a background where you assume an adopted child will have issues due to a traumatic background, so that you're pleasantly surprised when they don't.

Take my dad, the international (non-transnational) adoptee. He's incredibly strong, tough, brilliant, humorous and independent. He's also got some attachment issues. The more I learned about adoption as we were researching, the more I realized how losing his parents in the war affected my father and could have caused him to behave in some really extreme ways that almost permanently alienated me from him when I was a teenager. Ah, the fistfight episode. I'll save that for another post someday.

Anyway, I think that ALL children and families should receive the best care. In a better system (and I hope an Obama administration gets us there as quickly as possible) all families will never have to worry about giving up custody of their children because they couldn't afford residential treatment. Ultimately, this is a problem that affects adoptive AND birth families of all varieties.

Second obnoxious opinion: I am not quite so sure about removing the tax credit from private domestic adoption. Ultimately, I don't think the tax credit there is a good thing. But I've heard one convincing argument that it ultimately relieves strain on the foster care system and helps some children, because otherwise some of these children would end up in the foster care system, with all the huge delays and potential for disrupted attachment that the system entails.

I hesitate to put out that argument. Private domestic adoption is not a subject I blog about, but I do know that there is a lot of stigma on women who voluntarily give children up about adoption... popular ideas that they do it because they're hopelessly dysfunctional and drug addicted and so forth. It's a stigma I don't want to contribute to. I think that today, women decide to relinquish for really diverse reasons that are linked to a lot of factors involving class, race, ethnicity and religion.

However, stating the opposite -- that there's no overlap between mothers who voluntarily relinquish and mothers who get involved with CPS and go through involuntary termination of parental rights -- would be false. There is a small degree of overlap. I've heard many cases of women who "voluntarily" relinquish via a private adoption, because they've had other children who ended up in foster care, and if they didn't do a private adoption, they know they'd have their baby taken away by CPS anyway. At least with private adoption, they have a greater degree of choice.

(This certainly wasn't the case with Sunny's mother. She had a case open with CPS because of Sunny, but everyone, especially her caseworker, was pulling for her to keep BB. If she hadn't died, she certainly would have kept him, and I like to think they would have been very happy together)

So the countering argument is that maybe the tax credit for private domestic adoption does serve a societal purpose. It can also help encourage African-American parents to adopt privately, thereby increasing intraracial adoptions. I've heard a lot of African-American parents are leery of paying any money at all for private adoption because of moral reservations as much as financial ones.

Ultimately, I still don't agree with it. I think it should be replaced by more specifically targeted tax credits and subsidies. And private adoption agencies are so poorly regulated that I wonder how much of the adoption tax credit really goes to the parents. Like I said in the original post, I wouldn't be surprised if an agency would just build the subsidy into their fees and treat it as pure profit on their end.

Also, when it comes to private domestic infant adoption, there's no shortage of parents due to money. There is a deeply disturbing hierarchy where healthy white babies cost the most, and black and/or disabled babies cost the least. There are only a few infants that are in danger of ending up in foster care because their potential adoptive parents can't afford to adopt... and these babies are the ones that cost the least. I don't blame private adoption. I'm pretty neutral on it, from a perspective of policy. It simply reflects the screwed-up values of our society, no more, no less.

What I hope is that as our country improves its safety nets, there'll be less of a need for things like adoption subsidies. Also, the need for adoption will decrease and there'll be less waiting children. Poverty isn't the single driving force behind adoption, but it's frequently a major contributor. For example, if you're a mother with a combination of mental health and addiction issues, and you come from a family with resources, you'll probably keep your children. If you have the same set of problems and come from a family with no resources, or grew up shuttled between foster homes, you'll probably lose them.

In the short-term, until we get to that better place, special needs adoption subsidies are vital. I don't know what would happen if I had to pay for Sunny's medication on my own. The very thought gives me shivers. Right now, I'm proud that what we give Sunny is not too far away from the very best. Non-generic-available medication, therapy, a tutor that specializes in ADHD, the prospect of experimental neurofeedback treatment, a college savings fund, all the way down to organic fish oil vitamins. I'm lucky because Sunny's needs are really not that severe, but if they were, we would be able to pay for much more treatment without bankrupting ourselves and driving ourselves to the limit emotionally.

Vote For Me!

If you're signed up at http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov and have few spare seconds, vote up or comment on my ideas.

They're too focused and specific to make it into the finals, and I also stuck to creating ones that hadn't already been mentioned. However, the site is going to give them a LOT more exposure than they would have had otherwise.

Encourage Foster Care Adoption - End Tax Credit For Private/International Adoption

I am an adoptive parent of an older child from state foster care. Our adoption costs nothing, and he will receive a subsidy until he is 18 and I will also get a one-time $10,000 tax credit.

This is a good incentive for people to adopt from foster care. There are many older children in the system waiting to be adopted. In the case of my son and many others, the option of placing him with birth relatives was explored for many years, but it did not happen because they were not willing.

The incentive makes sense because if these children are not adopted, the government will spend even more money maintaining them in foster care. The outcome is worse for the child and for the taxpayer.

However, what doesn't make sense is that private adoption (people who pay adoption agencies money for infant adoption from birth mothers) and international adoption parents also receive this $10,000 tax credit.

I am not against these forms of adoption, although I do think they need to be regulated more. However, I don't think they should be subsidized by the government, especially when there are so many older children in state systems waiting to be adopted. The money would be better spent improving and reforming our foster care system.

The private adoption agencies that charge money for adoption just pass the cost of the tax credit on to the parents anyway. They may market babies to parents by saying, "oh, this adoption is going to cost $25,000 but since you get the tax credit it's really going to be 'only' $15,000". Without the tax credit, maybe they would just charge $15,000 anyway.

This tax credit is only a sop to the adoption agencies. It should be ended, and this will save the government money. It should also encourage people to look into FREE adoption of waiting children from the foster care system who might not otherwise have an adoptive home.

Standardize College Accreditation and Regulate "Rip-Off" Colleges

College accreditation in the U.S. is a confusing mix. The highest standard is actually regional accreditation*. Six regional agencies establish accreditation of every school from Harvard to two-year community colleges.

National accreditation is something quite different, and regionally accredited schools usually won't accept nationally accredited credits. Many diploma mills and for-profit schools take advantage of this situation to rip off students.

Many for-profit technical colleges are owned by corporations who spent most of their money on marketing and advertising, not on teachers and students. Their targets are working-class and minority and military and immigrant students. They promise that they can help get student loans to pay the overinflated tuition (when the student could go to a less-flashy, government-subsidized community college for 5% of the tuition). They use “hard sell” tactics, walk the students through taking out large loans telling them they are guaranteed to get some wonderful job with NASA if they sign on the dotted line. Once in, they will attempt to pass you through even if your work is not up to college level. Teachers are encouraged never to fail students in order to keep the tuition stream (composed mainly of student loans) flowing. If students graduate, they graduate with a substandard education that many employers don’t even respect, plus crushing student loans. Many default.

College accreditation needs to be tightened up, federalized and made simpler. And then higher education marketing should be much more regulated. You shouldn’t be able to promise some of the crazy stuff those people promise.**

I suggest that the regional accreditors should be combined into a new federal standard. No matter whether you are studying for a PhD in Philosophy or a community college certificate as an Automotive Technician, you should be guaranteed a minimum standard of education.

All for-profit colleges should be required to provide students with impartial information about tuition, college budgets and probability of credit acceptance. If they make claims about future employment, they must be able to back up these claims. Any college making outrageous promises or using "hard sell" techniques should be fined out of existence.

America is falling behind in many educational areas, and improving our accreditation system should be a low-cost, high-benefit element of any higher education plan.

* read more about accreditation at http://distancelearn.about.com/od/accreditationinfo/a/regional.htm

** Here is one example, among many, of a lawsuit involving such false claims.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DR

Fully Fund Efforts to Combat the Hepatitis C Epidemic

Hepatitis C is the most common blood-borne chronic viral infection in the United States. Once exposed, most individuals remain persistently infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), with 70% developing chronic liver disease and its often life-threatening conditions. At least 4 million Americans currently have chronic hepatitis C, with 25,000 new infections occurring every year. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the death rate from HCV-related liver disease will triple by the year 2019. No other disease burden is expected to increase as rapidly as that of hepatitis C in the coming decade.

Despite these staggering statistics, the federal government has not provided adequate funding or legislation to mount a comprehensive effort against the disease. Only $17 million is spent each year on viral hepatitis programs. This funding is not enough for states to provide testing, surveillance, prevention, and education services – let alone care and treatment for those in need.

My stepfather has lived with this disease for many years. He contracted it as a medic in the Vietnam War. It is estimated that at least 10% of all Vietnam veterans have Hepatitis C. He receives regular monitoring and treatment at a VA hospital, but his long-term future is frighteningly unknown.

I ask that you address this serious public health crisis in three ways:

-- Add language on your website about the hepatitis C epidemic and how you plan to address it.
-- Support a $50 million in Fiscal Year 2009 funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Viral Hepatitis Programs.
-- Support the "Hepatitis C Epidemic Control and Prevention Act *" or similar Act which would create a comprehensive effort by the federal government to address the epidemic.

*http://olpa.od.nih.gov/legislation/109/pendinglegislation/hepatitisc.asp

Tantrum Report

This last week has been a bad one for tantrums.

Thursday night, at bedtime, he had one of the worst tantrums I've ever seen. It lasted an hour but felt like an eternity. Screaming, crying, door slamming, "mom and dad aren't being very nice to me! If Mom and Dad aren't nice to me, I'm not going to be nice to them! Butthead farthead poopoohead peepeehead idiot jerks!"

He went into this "must have control" mode around bedtime. The first demand was that I sleep in the same bed as him, and of course I reminded him I couldn't do that. He knows that. And I would let him go to sleep in the same bed as me, on special occasions, if not for the fact that it's against foster care regulations in the state of Georgia and he could conceivably be removed for it, which is something I am never, ever, ever going to risk. So he basically used the refusal of an impossible request as the trigger to start a huge tantrum. We tried talking it out, we tried ignoring, I tried locking myself in my room... nothing seemed to work. Finally, after an hour, when he was much more tired, we laid down the law and told him he was just about to lose his Gameboy, his 6-year birthday present from his foster mom. We were going to mail it back to his foster mom and she could give it to one of his brothers or sisters. That snapped him out of it and we were able to put him to bed.

He was fine the next day and had pretty good behavior in school and then through the weekend.

Then this morning he had another fit. It started with him having a nightmare at 5:30 in the morning and wetting the bed. He came in our bedroom to tell us. I just told him to put his pad in the basket, change his pajama bottoms and go back to sleep. No one was angry at him. I gave him a big hug.

Then he kept yelling "goodnight!" and "see you in the morning!" at us. For half an hour. And knocking on our door to ask us questions. Could he listen to the radio. Sure, whatever he wanted as long as it wasn't too loud. What time were we getting up. Seven. Did he have to take a shower in the morning. Yes. The last time he knocked on our door we both yelled "STOP YELLING AT US!" and then it was on. "Mom and dad aren't being nice to me! Idiot jerks!" And the door slamming... we'd turned on the house alarm the night before, and he slammed his door so hard that it set off the alarm and a piercing siren woke up half the neighborhood before Guy could race to the panel and turn it off.

As a consequence, after school today he is going to have to knock on the doors of our closest neighbors and apologize for waking them up at 6 in the morning.

What a crappy morning. He apologized and was subdued for a while, then had another mini-fit when it was time to go to school. I always refuse to take him to school when he has an issue like this (it actually isn't very common). I just tell him I won't take him to school -- I'll simply wait -- until he has calmed down and made up, and if we have to be late, we'll be late, and we'll go to class together and tell his teacher exactly why he's late.

There's a song he likes from Wow Wow Wubbzie that goes "don't lie, don't lie, don't blame it on the other guy." I told him that he needed to take responsibility for not controlling his anger better. When he blamed his tantrums on "Mom and Dad not being nice to me" that was like lying and blaming the other guy.

My husband feels terrible. He knows he's not supposed to let his buttons get pushed, but says getting called things like "poopoohead" by his son is unavoidably painful. He gets really, really hurt and angry. I don't lose my head, but I've noticed I have a tendency to go into a cold, resentful state, like this morning. I didn't hug Sunny goodbye before school, and I should have. I know it's going to bother him that I didn't.

I don't know if there's anything we can do to prevent the tantrums. They're a difficult mix of calculation and uncontrollable emotional surges. They can't consistently be hugged away or reasoned away or bargained away. They're exhausting, but they don't fill me with despair like they do to my husband. We're having family therapy tonight and I think most of it is going to be for Guy.

He keeps worrying that Sunny will have violent rages as a teenager and physically attack us. I think that's really unreasonable. You also have to understand, Guy has also worried about the future too much. This is someone who gave a two-year leave notice at his last job. Oh yes, and he started worrying about getting divorced before we ever got married. We didn't even have any relationship problems, he just had this premonition we might get divorced, and to this day has the occasional nightmare about it. It's a character trait I've gotten used to.

Nevertheless, the last thing I want to hear when I'm in bed at night worrying about Sunny is Guy's detailed scenario of how Sunny is going to start punching holes in our wall as a teenager, we'll have to spend all this money on fixing the holes, then we'll have to call the police on him, and we'll want to send him to military school but they won't take him and blah blah blah.

I'm a fatalist, not a pessimist. I expect things to muddle through. If something bad happens, it's going to happen, so I might as well not worry about it. I've made it clear to Guy that I think all his scenarios do is send him off down a depression spiral.

Plus, military school is not going to happen and I find the whole concept bizarre. I used to be in an environment where I heard a lot of gossip from military boarding school, and the gossip was all about -- can you guess? -- homosexual rape and prostitution! Military school is almost as bad as prison or a freaking pirate ship! I think whether you're actually gay or straight is irrelevant in those environments... it's all about unhealthy power imbalances and hierarchies. Anyway, this is probably more detail than I intended, but I'm against single-sex education, even for girls. It's true there are certain advantages for girls that there aren't for boys, but ultimately, children need to learn how to have friendly, respectful, diverse kinds of relationships with the other half of the world that doesn't share their sex. I think that's a crucial goal, and sex segregation does not lead towards it.

Anyway, rant about military school aside, Guy is a a great husband and a great father and needs to stop tormenting himself, and in the process, exhausting me because I keep having to tell him to stop tormenting himself. However, on the positive side, at least we talk about this stuff between the two of us. It's a simmering pot but the lid isn't clamped down.

Sunny has been doing well, it's just these tantrums really color my perception.

His 1st grade ITBS scores came back, and they were pretty good. The majority were in the top 25th percentile. The scores that were bad all had to do with listening. I'm sure he's capable of much better when his focus increases.

I've decided on a place for neurofeedback and am setting up an initial appointment.

First Protest

I almost forgot to mention that Sunny had an important milestone this weekend: he went to his first political protest. This is a long-standing family tradition; my mother has been taking me to protests ever since I was a baby.

The AJC article is here: Pro-Palestinian protesters march on CNN headquarters

My mother helped Sunny make his own pro-peace sign. He was pretty excited about it. When we got there, he was initially a bit nervous because of the shouting, but once he saw there were a lot of other little kids there, he was fine, and really enjoyed the marching part.

Comments closed on this post because I'm not interested in sparking a debate on this topic. The AFSC/Quakers have the right idea, that's all I'll say.

Six-Year-Old Humor

One of my favorite comics (Tom the Dancing Bug) had an awesome capsule explanation of six-year-old humor.



Sunny is always cracking himself up with his potty humor. He takes his vast knowledge of classic rock and uses it for evil purposes. Here's a recent example of one of his songs:

"You're still the fart
That can itch my back
Still the fart
That can farty fart fart
We're still having fun
And fart fart fart!"

Maybe I'll get him a Weird Al Yankovic CD for his birthday. I think he'd really appreciate "Another One Rides the Bus".

Sunny's Getting Bigger (Another Medication Post)

Sunny has gained quite a bit of weight since coming to us. He's about ten pounds overweight for his age. The scary thing is, it's all muscle. He doesn't look particularly big... he's just very, very solid.

His old swim teacher explained to me that he had a tough time teaching Sunny because of his muscular build. Skinny kids float, chunky kids float, but Sunny sinks unless he forcefully uses his arms.

I think the 15% weight gain is turning his medication into a proportionally lower dose. It was already a very low dose... now I'm forced to consider the horrible prospect of raising it.

The medication is just so closely linked to his school. When he forgets it in the morning, or when we were trying to get him off it last year, his school performance just falls apart, and he can't write at all. He becomes so much more unhappy. He keeps falling into a cycle... frustration, anger, attempt to leave the situation that's making him angry, rebound back because he's scared of being alone, getting angrier, melting down, blaming himself. He still goes through those cycles on the medication, they're just a lot more frequent and severe when he's not on it.

Last night it was a simple request "please come over here, it looks like you need some chapstick" that started it off.

I don't want him to have to take medication for the rest of his childhood. He doesn't have any side effects now, but what if we raised the dose? What if he stays on it for years?

I'm going to try something new... neurofeedback. I've been researching it a lot. I'm not a believer in alternative medicine at all -- I think scientific trials are better proof than anecdotes or tradition. Neurofeedback seems like it's in a different category: promising, though not fully proven. The medication carries just as many if not more unknowns, however. With neurofeedback, the beneficial effects are supposed to be permanent.

The medication is free, because of Medicaid. A full treatment of neurofeedback might cost more than $5000. It's not covered by any insurance. The cost makes me nauseous. What if it doesn't work and turns out to be a complete waste?

I'm just thinking out loud. I haven't come to a decision yet, but I'm leaning toward giving the neurofeedback a try.

It's not like we're completely at the end of our rope. Sunny's behavior can be annoying at times, and I'm very worried about his future in school, but most of the time he's just a great little peppy kid.

On the plus side, he's had times recently when his focus is fantastic. Honestly, I never thought he would be able to play with his Star Wars Lego kits. Their boxes even say they're really for ages 8 and up. After a few rocky starts, he's starting to get the hang of it. He can focus and work on putting them together for up to half an hour at a time.

Sunny also spent more than half an hour yesterday taking apart a coffee machine. Guy likes to give Sunny small broken appliances to take apart, using real tools (hammer, miniature power screwdriver, pliers, wire cutter). Guy says the trick is to cut off the power cord first so Sunny won't be tempted to plug it into anything. Every ten minutes or so, Sunny would run into the house, show us a piece of the coffee machine, and breathlessly explain his theory behind why it worked.

We're also considering child modeling for Sunny. It's something he might really enjoy, because he's a total camera ham. Maybe we could pay for his neurofeedback that way! Errr... that sounds unethical, but I have to be honest, it's crossed my mind. Anyway, that's an easier decision. If he likes it, we do it; if he doesn't like it, we don't.