Movie Night

Just popping in to let you know of a movie that will be on this weekend.

It's called Change of Plans. It's about a young, upwardly mobile couple who end up adopting 4 kids. It changes them. For a review, go check out my friend Lisa's blog - A Bushel and a Peck.

It airs this Saturday, Jan 8, on Fox at 8:00 ET (That's 7:00 Central).

(By the way, it is sponsored by Walmart and Proctor and Gamble).

I'll be watching it. I hope you will be, too.

Blessings to you,
Mamita

Why I Do the Things I Do

I've been doing a lot of thinking about where my parenting style came from. Why did I think the way I thought? Why do I parent this way? What were my expectations and what are they now?

Well, first off, I was a compliant kid. I was easy to raise. A look, a stern word, raised eyebrows...that's all it took to get me back on the path.

I'm a laid-back, go-with-the-flow kind of person. Structure is so confining.

I hate conflict. I'd rather have a root canal than a confrontation.

I hate for others to be disappointed in me. And I like to be well-thought-of. And I like my kids to make me look good. :-)

And I'm basically lazy. Yeah, it's true. I'd rather tell my kids what to do from the comfort of my chair than to get up and actually make them do it.


Does anyone see trouble coming? (I know all you adoptive moms are giggling.)


When Tim was first born, I couldn't have told you my parenting style, or even a basic game plan. I just figured I'd raise kids like I had been raised. Trouble was, I had NO IDEA how I had been raised.

My Dad was unexpectedly killed when I was 12. That's big-"T" trauma. I have very few specific memories of my childhood before age 12.

After Dad died, Mom did her best to hold it together. She was dealing with a rebellious teenage son (He had big-"T" trauma, too. We didn't understand that back then.), a hormonal pre-teen girl, and a 3 year-old baby. Excellent parenting strategies were not really at the top of her priorities. Surviving was. This was not the ideal training grounds for how to be a mommy.

So, when I entered parenthood, I was clueless (about parenting). Around that time, I became a Christian. It was a good time to look to God to figure out how to do this, so we turned to traditional Christian parenting classes. We got lots of great advice and many techniques worked well for us. Our big kids were turning out very well and we thought we had a pretty good grasp on raising kids.

However, one insidious little half-truth crept in to everything I learned. "Obedience, obedience, obedience. Obedience is the main thing." Obedience became my priority. Obedience was everything. As long as my kids were obeying, everything was fine.

Enter Cupcake.

Obedience does not come naturally. Compliance is hard to come by. Structure is necessary. Conflict is inevitable. Making me look good is not a priority. And laziness on my part is not an option.

All of my rough edges are being sanded down and I am being refined in the fire. I thought I was a pretty good mom. Pretty good is not good enough. Those ideas were second-rate.

I am learning through the school of hard knocks that relationship is the key. Relationship is everything! If someone is being a stinker, it's because there is something going on in their heart. If my heart can meet their heart, I can reach them where they are and meet their deep-down need. Then I can correct their negative behavior and be closer to them. That's win/win for me! That's win/win for them!

As Karyn Purvis says, "A variety of parenting strategies work on low-risk kids, but high risk kids require a very specific parenting strategy."

These kids need high nurture AND high structure. This is hard work. It requires everything I have and everything I am.

Through all this refining and pain, I am growing as a person. I'm a much better mom than I used to be (most days). I'm more compassionate. I approach my big kids differently as well. It's helping our relationships. It's changed how I see difficult people. My eyes have been opened to the hurting, scared children that are all around me. I see more clearly the character of God.

This is good and I'm so thankful to have the experience.

Blessings to you,
Mamita

Our Interesting Christmas

Well, you know my philosophy....

Why have a boring old traditional Christmas when you can have a wild, unusual, high-stress one?

So that's just what we did.

Last week, Steve and Sugar both had the stomach flu. Sugar's lasted about 48 hours. Steve's kept going on and off for the whole week. On Christmas Eve, he began to have severe pain in his upper abdomen. It was strong enough that I called his parents to see if they could watch Cupcake and Sugar while I took him to the ER. While I was on the phone, the pain subsided, so we decided to wait and see if it happened again.

It happened again.

Within 30 minutes, we were on our way to the ER. He was in such pain that I thought he might pass out during the 10 minute drive to the hospital. By the time we got there, the pain had subsided. They asked questions, ran tests, drew blood, poked him, and started an IV. He felt fine until noon, when he had another attack, which lasted 45 minutes. At that point, they drugged him up with pain killers.

He was diagnosed with mild (not currently life threatening) pancreatitis. Treatment involves hospitalization, rest, nothing to eat, and continual monitoring of vitals. He was admitted overnight. :-( He came home around 5:00 pm on Christmas Day, so he was able to enjoy small portions of Grandma's feast.

While we were in the ER, the most beautiful snow was falling. Everything was blanketed in sparkling white splendor. It was the perfect backdrop for our Christmas Eve Candlelight Service. My whole church family loved on me even though I had that "unshowered, uncombed, no make-up, no deodorant, straight-from-the-hospital" look and smell.



The big kids helped me with getting packages out of hiding and bedecked with bows. (Cupcake spent the night with the Grandparents.) I was in bed by 11:30, which is earlier than most Christmas Eves.



Next morning, the kids opened most of their gifts while I videotaped. We went up to the hospital to visit Daddy and show him the videos.



We saved the personal gifts to each other until Daddy got home.



It was hard on Steve to miss Christmas. He loves to watch the kids enjoy the holiday. The kids did pretty well with it. Sugar had the hardest time. She really hates medical emergencies. Cupcake held it together the whole time and saved her meltdowns until after Daddy came home. I felt like God carried me through the stress. I had extra energy and a very calm, optimistic, positive attitude, which is not like me in stressful situations.

As the new year rolls around, we look back and have much to be thankful for.

All I Want for Christmas is...

my FOUR front teeth!

Comfortable in His Manhood

I married a man's man. He's not afraid of what others may think. (Well, maybe a little...) But, nevertheless, he knows what's most important, and he's willing to act on it.

Cupcake has had a rough couple of weeks. Steve traveled and I was sick (at the same time) back in November. At school, her beloved wonderful teacher suddenly went on bed-rest a month before her due date. Two classmates and a neighber friend moved in the past month with very little notice. The Thanksgiving break with low structure, combined with Tim coming home and leaving again was stressful.

All of these things could throw a regular kid into meltdown. It's exponential for Cupcake. We've had an significant increase in defiance and behavior issues.

So, knowing that Cupcake was needing some special one-on-one time (and I was needing a break from the neediness), Steve offered to let Cupcake do a makeover on him.

Oh yes he did.



We began to see smiles.


We all giggled, then laughed until I was crying/snorting/snot-bubbling.


She likes that eyeliner.

It got worse. In the end, he looked like a cross between Marilyn Manson and the Easter Bunny, but I'll spare you those gruesome photos. Let's just say there's virtually no hope of him ever running for public office.

I think it was just the thing to turn Cupcake around. It lightened the mood in our house considerably for everyone. Things are looking up again. :-)

Thank you, Daddy, for doing what's needed, even if it's a bit uncomfortable and embarrassing.

Blessings to you,
Mamita

Sigh

Okay, so Sugar has had a nasty virus and a migraine for two days. It's kicking her tail. She's been running a fever anywhere from 100 to 105, even with motrin. She's been just miserable.

Cupcake has been jealous of all the TLC we've been giving her. So, tonight, I come home from church and hear that Cupcake put the thermometer we've been using for Sugar in her mouth "because she wants to get sick, too."

Ugh...

Blessings to you,
Mamita

Love and Compassion

(I've been working on this post for over a month now... Sigh... I'm just going to post it.)

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. 1 Corinthians 13:1-8

One principle that is foundational to everything else we learned at Empowered to Connect is that love and compassion for our kids is key to success. We can follow any program, script, or technique and it will fail, unless we truly show our children that they are beautiful and precious. Our kids are more valuable than they know. It's our job to fill their hearts up with that truth.

When a parent is feeling empty, beat down, and hopeless, it can be very difficult to see our child as a precious kid who is scared to death and just doing his/her best to survive. It is necessary to step back now and then (or several times a day) to consider our child is not trying to get into trouble. They are just trying to get it right the way they know best. We need to remember that they are acting according to their worldview. The world is not a safe place for them. They must use all their skills to survive. To lose is to die. We want to bring them to a place where they know deep down that we are trustworthy and we're on their side.

If we don't know their history, we have trouble empathizing with it. Dr. Karyn Purvis did a great job in reminding us of just how traumatic trauma can be. I must have teared up or got the lump in my throat twenty times over the weekend (of the conference). Steve and I have more knowledge of Cupcake's history than most adoptive parents have, so having compassion on her has been easier for us than others. We felt really encouraged that we had done so much right in parenting Cupcake from the beginning. However, with Sugar, we often forget that she experienced intense trauma in the early days of Cupcake's arrival. Our young one brought her trauma into our home, and we were all traumatized as we witnessed and experienced just how deep and awful her pain was.

We've messed up a lot of things as we've adjusted to our new life, but our biggest mistake in parenting since bringing Cupcake home is that we have forgotten that all our kids were hurt by this. We have years and years of "traditional Christian parenting" techniques that have forged some very bad habits**. These old techniques seemed to work pretty well for our homegrown kiddos, but they absolutely backfired in our faces when used on Cupcake. And we're just starting to comprehend that they are backfiring when used on our big kids, too. (We're kind of slow that way.) We've been trying to parent three kids the old way, and one the new way. The inconsistencies are not lost on our daughters. It's time for a new start.

**Bad habits were formed when we learned (mistakenly) that obedience is everything. Obedience is definitely important in a parent/child relationship, but relationship is paramount. Jesus said, "If you love me, you will obey what I command." Notice: Love (relationship) comes first. Obedience flows out of love, not the other way around.

I'm going to have to have a separate post about this. If you want to pursue it a little further now, Stonefox over at Moms, Ministry, and More had a great post on this a while back.

Anyway...

What about babies from hard places?

A lot of parents that adopt infants believe that all this trauma parenting doesn't apply to them. They feel their child is/was too young to know. If they can't remember, it shouldn't affect them later in life.

How could a baby be from a "hard place"?

Dr. Tiffany Field did a study on the brains of children, both before and after birth. If the birthmother only experienced depression while carrying the child (no drugs, alcohol, abuse, etc.), the child's brain chemistry was different. The dopamine and serotonin levels were lower than normal. Three months later, they tested the urine of the babies. Their levels were still below normal.

So, what do these lower levels of chemicals do?

They cause babies to be anxious, afraid, fussy, or withdrawn.

If a child is adopted, he already has a gut feeling of rejection/abandonment. With no cognitive ability to understand or express that, a child carries a sense of impending danger. Early trauma affects the way a child feels, thinks, and acts, even if they have no recollection of the trauma.


Are you breathing?

Take a deep breath. I'm not done.

There is hope.



If you are aware of this, you can work to help your child succeed. Every kid can make progress towards forming healthy relationships. As the child connects with you, it opens up brain pathways that were closed. Social, relational, academic, and emotional growth can take place! I've seen it with my own kid. I saw it in the videos Dr. Purvis showed. These kids are dying to connect with us. They just don't feel safe. They don't feel that they have a voice. They feel their needs aren't important to anyone else. That's why they have to take care of themselves.

If you see your child through the eyes of compassion and you commit to the healing journey, you are on your way to witnessing a miracle.

It's going to take everything in you to bring out the real child beneath the survivor child.

Are you willing to go there? It will be worth it.

Blessings to you,
Mamita