Letting the guard down

After reading many stories from other parents who adopted older children I expected Claire to resist affection from us and also not want to share affection with us either.  I was surprised when she kissed Daddy on the cheek the first day and didn't physically resist a hug.  In fact, she never resisted hugs or kisses so I was a bit surprised after reading that most older children do resist it.  I mean, I can understand not wanting someone you just met to hug you.

I never really thought much about it except for the fleeting thought of that it was one challenge we didn't have to work through.  That is until about a week or so ago.  Even though Claire didn't resist affection from us and would show us affection as well I noticed a shift in her; almost like a guard came down and we worked our ways into her heart a little more.

She hugs back now.  I mean really grabs on and hugs back instead of having her arms around us but we're really doing the hugging.  She seeks me out to give me a kiss.  When it's time for the kids to catch the bus they wait in our front yard until the bus starts coming down the street and then they hurry to to the bus stop.  Every day this week she has run back up to the front porch towards me.  The first day I said "what's wrong honey, did you forget something?" and she smiled and said "no, I give you kiss."  She had big puckered lips and laid a big fat kiss on my cheek and then ran off saying "bye bye Mommy, I love you."  It just made my heart melt.


She initiates the affection now and I can clearly see it is different than before; even though I didn't know before that anything was off.  It is so neat to see the guards come down and her heart fully open up to us.

Four months ago

Four months ago today we walked into an orphanage in China with so much excitement and uncertainty to meet our new seven year old daughter. While the first few minutes of our meeting were happy, Claire eventually realized what was about to happen. She was about to leave with people who don't look like her, don't speak her language and her hope of returning to her foster family wasn't going to happen. This picture is the last one we took at the orphanage before Claire started crying. While I'm smiling, you can see the pain and fear in her eyes. Looking at this picture brings tears to my eyes now; just seeing her emotions written all over her face.

And now, four months later this is what we see. No more fear, no more sadness, her anxiety of being abandoned is starting to diminish, she's speaking nearly fluent English, and she's even beginning to read! Her face looks much happier now, almost relaxed in way. Do we still see some grief? Yes, but it's getting more and more rare that she cries for her China family.
Some big news that I haven't shared yet is that she remembered her phone number in China and we had a contact in the country call it to see if it was indeed her foster family. It was. We have their phone numbers and email address and I've been in contact with her foster aunt (a yi). We have sent them many pictures of YaYa and I've talked on the phone with her a yi. Claire knows that we have contact with them and that she can talk with them if she'd like; she doesn't want to. The one time she thought she did want to call her foster grandfather answered the phone and Claire melted into a puddle of tears on my shoulder; it was too hard for her. We don't know the entire story yet of what her life was like in China. She tells us lots of stuff and we ask her questions but it will probably be a year or two before she can really tell us what her daily life was like with her foster family. One funny story she told me is her two a yis (one big, one little she says) took her at nighttime and they went swimming and came back in the morning. The tone she used made it sound like it was a secret swimming trip. I know her a yis loved her very much. The one I have email contact with has said she will send us photos of Claire when she was little. This would be a priceless gift!

Another long update. You know, I would be able to stop posting such long updates if I did this more often but with 4 kids to raise and a house to manage, the time just seems to slip by so quickly.
School
Wow, Claire loves school! She fits in wonderfully and has made many friends. She's somewhat of a celebrity among the students and has sparked a puppy love crush in many boys. She decided that she'd like to ride the bus so I let her try a couple of days and she liked it. I still pick the kids up in the afternoon but they ride it to school in the morning. She has abandoned sitting with Emily or Matthew on the bus in favor of sitting with a friend from her class.
She has found her independence while at school and will push Emily away in the hall if she feels like Emily is trying to help her (read: control her). Her teacher is amazed at her progress and has been extremely helpful in Claire's transition. At the start of next year I have consented to have Claire assessed for extra reading help. If she qualifies for the help she will get daily sessions with the reading intervention teacher. This extra help has made me feel secure that declining the ESL services was the right decision. With the work I am doing with her at home and daily reading intervention at school I am confident that she will be caught up and achieving grade level skills by the end of 1st grade, if not before.

All things medical
Claire has a huge amount of anxiety when it comes to doctors or dentists. It took us 20 minutes just to get her to open her mouth at a recent dentist appointment, and that was after I reassured her over and over that it would not hurt.

A bit of advice for parents adopting older children- if any way possible, try to get both parents to attend medical and/or dental appointments. If you both can't attend then try and split them between mom and dad. With J's job it isn't feasible for him to attend appointments during the day and I understand that. After a few appointments where blood was taken or dental work scared her it really started to impact other areas of her attachment with me. I was the bad guy. I was the one picking her up from school and driving her to appointments and I'm sure in her eyes, I was the one allowing others to cause her pain even though I know it's actually to help her. She doesn't understand that we're trying to help her, trying to treat her teeth to make them better; right now she only sees it as pain and I'm allowing it. Not only would splitting up appointments between mom and dad help with the attachment stuff, I have to admit that it is emotionally exhausting on me. I feel selfish even saying that because I know it's 10 times worse for her but it's the truth. For over an hour recently at the dentist I reassured her, stayed positive, gave her choices, tried rewards, tried bribes, got a little irritated and said she needed to open her mouth, felt bad for telling her that and went back to being happy and positive, etc. Then I gave up. THEN, that night she said it didn't hurt. grrrr

The other bit of advice is start out with a dentist who will do sedation dentistry. Claire did so well with her first dental appointment and let them clean her teeth and do x-rays so we stuck with our family dentist to start treatment of her many dental problems. I would count on any child adopted from China over age 2 or 3 to need fairly extensive dental work. Claire needed 4 extractions and 4 fillings. The first treatment visit started out very well but when one tool popped on her tooth and made a loud noise she freaked out. I really don't think it hurt as much as it scared her. From then on getting her into a dentist chair willingly has been difficult. We had an oral surgeon sedate her for the extractions and now we just need to get her fillings complete and her space maintainers in. She won't do it so in June we have an appointment with a pediatric dentist who will do conscious sedation for treatment. If I knew then what I know now, I would have started out with that route to begin with. I do not want to scar her forever with dental anxiety but I think it has already happened.

Siblings
Claire bonded very quickly to Emily and Jacob but Matthew took a bit more time. I don't know if it's because they are the closest in age or something else but Matthew really had to try to win Claire's affection. If he did something wrong she was right there to dime him out and he really couldn't do anything right according to her. Once she got over whatever it was that she didn't like about Matthew she realized he is actually a good big brother. She even chose to sit with Matthew on the bus at first, which really irritated Emily. Look at this picture taken in the airport when we returned home. I love how Matthew and Claire are checking each other out. He was so happy to meet her and she's thinking "yea, who are you and why is MY mommy so happy to see you?"

Now we hear and see this around the house a lot between the two of them.

ESL

Four weeks after starting school I got a phone call that really should have been made much earlier. The school district had to test Claire's proficiency in English so they can offer services if they are needed. I was welcomed to attend so I did.

Claire was tested in four areas but definitely the hardest one was the auditory section. It was determined that Claire is just below or right at the kindergarten level of a native English speaker. To me, I think that sounds awesome. She obviously qualifies for services but we declined them. If we chose to have her be in the ESL program it meant that she would attend a different school than Emily and Matthew.

I am 99% sure ESL services would be beneficial for Claire but I've already witnessed that being in the same school as her siblings is even more beneficial. If she were our only child I would bus her to the school that offered ESL services. If ESL was offered at our home school, I would definitely have her receiving services; but it is not offered due to space issues.

I made sure that declining services now wouldn't affect the possibility of needing ESL services in the future. So, if our school does get an ESL program in the future we can have Claire start receiving services. She assured me that we can reevaluate anytime in the future and she can still receive services, if needed.

We were told by the adoption doctor that most children are fluent in age-appropriate conversational English in six months. The disconnect comes in academic English. Someone who is fluent in conversational English can have poor academic English skills. ESL works to close this gap and bring them up to grade level academic English. Since Claire will not be receiving these services at school, I will be working with her at home to try and close the gap.

It is amazing how much she has learned in only two months. She can recognize all the letters in the alphabet (upper and lowercase) and she has learned all the phonic sounds for them as well. She can sound basic words out using phonic skills and has started to read. She is starting to learn sight words and I hope to have her finished with the kindergarten sight words by the time school starts again in July.

Today on the way to school I heard one of the sweetest sounds. The kids were listening to a patriotic CD with their headphones on and I heard this tiny voice from the back of the van singing something. I listened for a bit and then realized she was singing "My Country Tis of Thee." Oh my goodness; it was so sweet. Then when the song was over she said "Emily, you know what? I like-uh America."

Two months home

I've put this off for some time; always coming up with something else to do because putting up these posts usually takes quite a long time. I tell myself that I'll do it once the kids are in bed but then I just want to sit. So, here we are; one week? Two weeks without a post? I've lost track.

Language
Claire pretty much refuses to talk in Chinese to us. I think she still understands some but when we say something in Chinese that we know she understands she looks at us, shrugs her shoulder and hands and says "I don't know?" in her cute accent and inflection. Today I asked her if she wanted bing jiling (ice cream) and she tried to act like she didn't know what I was talking about but then after some prompting I asked her what it was and she said "ice-uh cream." So, it's in there. She doesn't point and grunt so much anymore; she asks for everything in English. You'd probably never guess that she's only been home two months if you didn't know already. She is starting to use pronouns and talk in 3rd person a little bit less.

Family life
Imagine children when they are about 2-3 years old. In their mind they think "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" and when they want something they just take it. The idea of sharing hasn't formed in their thought process yet. Well, even though Claire is 7 and has the mental aptitude to understand sharing, I think she is almost like a 2-3 year old level with her siblings. Remember when I said it was very much like bringing home a newborn when we first arrived home? Well, she's aging fast and we have issues occasionally with sharing or not sharing I should say. She wants to play with the toys that belong to the other kids but no one can touch her toys and if one of them has something that she wants, she will just grab it sometimes and try to take it away from them. She's gotten upset and cried because she wanted to play with a toy of Emily's that she'd just gotten and was a bit more protective of. I let Emily have her space and didn't make her share with Claire (she had already shared that toy several times) and Claire got upset. I let her pout it out and didn't over talk the situation. We've always let our kids have some toys that are only theirs and if they don't want to share them they don't have to. Claire gets the same treatment with her things but doesn't fully understand yet that the rule goes both ways.
Other than the younger than age appropriate sharing issues, the kids all seem as though they've lived together forever.

School
Claire really likes school now that she knows I am returning each day. I took her some medicine in the middle of the day this week and asked Emily to walk her back to class. I looked down the hallway and saw Claire telling Emily to stay away because she could walk on her own. I had to laugh and it made me realize that she is really comfortable at school now.

Stories from China
We learned last night that the story of Claire attending school in China is not what we thought. When looking at a photo album I had kept with the pictures we received during our wait she said "school" when she saw the orphanage pictures. I said "Beijing?" (what she called the orphanage before) and she said "yes, big big school." Well, now that ALL makes sense. Other families who adopted older children shared stories that their children were taken back to the orphanage much earlier than Claire was and were told it was so they could attend school. Her "really big school" was the orphanage which would also give a lot of insight into why she really freaked out when I told her she was going to school. I also think it has something to do with the melt down when we walked into the Sunday school class a few weeks ago. In her mind, school is where she was taken to when she left her nai nai.
Claire has also started talking more and more about her house in China. She calls it "China house" or "China home." She says it was a little house with three beds. The harder things for me to hear are that her older brother cried "where is my sister" when she left. I asked her if nai nai cried and she said yes and Claire said she cried too. These tid-bits have made it hard for me because it makes me question if bringing Claire here to the US really was the best thing for her. What would have happened if nobody selected her from the list? Would she have stayed with her foster family forever? When she aged out of the orphanage at 14 years old would her foster family allowed her to stay and keep her in their family? So many questions which simply have unknown answers but it makes my heart question if taking her from her China home was best. I know we love her, I know she will have a good life in the US, I know there have been so many times in this journey when I know we are experiencing the hand of God and it makes me think this is the best thing for Claire. But, the lingering questions are still there.

Dentist
This week was long and I'm sure very scary for Claire. She had her first visit at the dentist on Monday and it was to extract one of her upper teeth. The dentist told me it was the easiest and quickest thing to do so that is why we started with it. It didn't go as planned. The dentist was able to get one tooth filled but when she attempted to extract the tooth it cracked and the noise freaked Claire out. After that she was done and would not open her mouth to allow a second try. We left there with her in tears saying "I no like the dentist" and half of the tooth still in her mouth.
Two days later I took her to oral surgeon to have that tooth removed and three others. She was very nervous and repeatedly told me "I no like the dentist" and I just told her "I know" each time. They put her to sleep to do the extractions and thankfully, she doesn't remember any of it. She was groggy and grumpy for a few hours afterward but was running around the back yard by evening time. She's rebounded quite well but knows we have to return to the dentist to get her "new teeth" (space maintainers). She tries to tell me no but I keep a happy face and attitude and tell her "Yes! You'll have new teeth to eat hard things!" I'm going to win an Emmy yet, even if it is just for the Mommy Red Carpet Club.

And, I know you love reading and all but what you're really checking here everyday for is pictures. So, without further ado, here are pictures of Claire.
I saved very few of Emily's clothes from this size. Emily wore this when she was around 4-5 years old so that means this dress was in a tote for nearly 5 years. Claire loved it when I pulled out of the closet and insisted on wearing it to school. It is actually too big on her but thankfully it has a tie around the waist so I could cinch it down a couple of inches.
Claire has learned how to spell quite a few words. First was her name, then mom, dad and few other easy ones but the first word outside of family relations she started spelling and recognizing is stop. I had no idea what she was writing on her easter egg before dyeing it so we got a good laugh to see she very proudly wrote "STOP" on her egg.
Claire's first Easter with us; isn't she a doll?

The longest of updates

Consider yourself warned- This is long and will entail a lot of scrolling. Don't start this until you have a drink in hand and time to kill because it will take awhile.

Before we came home from China we tentatively planned a trip back home to introduce Claire to all of her extended family. We thought a month after arriving home would give her time to settle in for a bit before taking a trip. In hindsight, I would have waited longer and/or done things differently.

Here is what we did:
Throughout our adoption journey we had many, many prayers lifting us and Claire up from the church that several of my family members attend. In particular a group of school children took a real interest in our journey to Claire and prayed for her every morning during their Sunday school class. In addition to introducing Claire to these family members (one of which is her great grandmother) we attended church with them on Sunday morning.

I don't want to say this was a mistake but we learned first hand that Claire definitely has issues relating to her adoption. This sounds like an obvious statement, almost like "well, of course she does!" but we don't truly see them every day. 99% of the time she appears to be very well bonded and attached and is genuinely happy so her sudden fear and emotional response was a little bit of a surprise to us. The minute we walked into the Sunday school room she burst out in tears even though Daddy was holding her and had no intentions of putting her down. We aren't sure why she broke down but the theories we have are maybe she thought we were leaving her there or seeing pictures of her at the orphanage triggered memories. We are leaning towards the first theory because she showed signs of abandonment fears a few times during our trip.

Before leaving for our trip I told her we were going to Meme's house (J's mom) and she looked at me and said "NO." I told her again that we were going to visit Meme's house and even though she knows exactly who Meme is, she still said no. I assured her that we were all going and she would never be without Mom or Dad and that we were going to stay 7 days and then come back home. She cheered up and the day went on, until I actually packed her suitcase later in the evening. When she saw me putting her clothes in a suitcase she told me no again; she did not want to go to Meme's and I reassured her again that I would be with her.

After getting to Meme's she was very happy and adjusted well and a couple of days later we were going to my Mom's (Nana) house for dinner. When I told her we were going to Nana's house to eat she gave me the look and said no and began to cry again. I told her that I would be with her and told her I would never leave her, she still told me no. We went to visit Nana for dinner, she adjusted well and was happy all evening.

For the rest of the week she was great and then I told her we were going back home, to our house and I got the look again. Just when she got comfortable after a few days I told her we were going yet another place and I could see her brain going into abandonment fear again. I explained to her, our house, your bed on top and Emily's bed on bottom, mommy's bed, etc. She asked "my bed top, Emily's bed bottom?" and I told her yes. She got it. You know how I know she got it? She literally jumped up and down several times and yelled "YAY, YAY, our house!"

So with our first trip done she has learned that we leave together and return home together. But, I would give advice on doing things a bit differently than we did if I had to do it again. This is really a trial and error type of thing and what worked or didn't work for us might be completely different for another child.

1. I would wait longer before taking a trip for a long period (we were gone 9 days).
I really think she thought we were leaving our house for good and if we had done a one night trip it would've been less time that she mentally separated herself from our home. All of our family lives 4-5 hours away so a one night trip to visit them would've been too much so a one night trip staying in a hotel with just our family would have worked. It would have been a quick trip to show her that we leave and come home together and we most importantly, we return to our house. The next time we take a trip I will be taking along a picture of our house with a visual countdown so she can see how many days until we return home just to try and solidify to her that we are going back home.

2. I would have family come to our house to meet her.
Would we would have family members who couldn't come 4-5 hours to our house to meet her? Yes. Is it more convenient for us to go the 4-5 hours and meet everyone in one trip? Yes.
But, in a few days Claire met her grandparents, great grandma, my aunts and uncles, my cousins and their children, our siblings and their children and close family friends. It bordered on too much sometimes. She handled it extremely well and she may have the same response if we did it more gradually but she was all of a sudden surrounded by people who love to look at her and I could see the thoughts of her head written all of her face. She was shy with each new person for a bit but then once she warmed up she was very comfortable with everyone; which I think that is to be expected.

3. One night towards the end of our trip J and I decided to try and get away for a few hours; we left the kids with a very gracious Meme and explained to Claire that she was staying with Meme while Mom and Dad went to eat together. She seemed to understand so we left but stayed close to home in case she needed us to return. Towards the end of the evening we got the phone call that we needed to return home. Claire did fabulously until bedtime which is when we thought she might fear that we wouldn't return. The first night in China she was fine during the busy daytime but it was at night that she slowed down and realized she wasn't with her nai nai. We immediately went back home and she was happy to see us. I got her out of bed and cuddled with her on my lap for a bit to reassure her that we will always return and then she went to bed fine. J and I were able to spend a few hours together and even got to see a movie so the night was definitely not a waste.
If I were to do it over I would do the time away during the day so we weren't gone at bedtime. After a few times of that I would venture into trying to be gone during bedtime but this would only be with one of our Moms because she knows them and is comfortable with them.

4. Before meeting anyone new I would show her pictures of them and explain their relationship. She had never met my mom in person but had talked with her on Skype so when she saw Nana in person she knew exactly who she wasn't near as shy as with those people she'd never seen. When she'd meet one of our brothers she was all of a sudden face to face with a grown male who wanted to talk to her and she was pretty hesitant. She would sit with me or J and eventually warm up and then she was OK but I think it would have gone better if we had shown her pictures of everyone before meeting them.

5. Explain to everyone that although she doesn't speak English all that much she actually understands quite a bit so try and talk to her normal. She's not 3 and she's not deaf so speaking slow and loud isn't really going to help; she'll either understand it or she won't. At the same time explain to people that putting her on the spot in front of people is probably not the best idea. We are guilty of that as well but once I realized that she was very uncomfortable with everyone looking at her I tried to treat her like any of the other 3 kids so she didn't feel singled out.

I guess with all of this it almost appears that our trip didn't go well but that isn't the case; it was a great time and we all had a lot of fun. We also watched Claire overcome her fear of two more dogs and learned that she really loves cats. She was not afraid of putting her face right next to the cat and she loved to pet it whenever she could.

Today she started school and I was going to tack that onto this update but it truly deserves its own post; it will probably be another long one. I also have a lot of pictures from our trip and I plan to get to those after the new school stuff calms down and I finish unpacking and cleaning up around here.

Bits of randomness

Yesterday I took Claire to a doctor who specializes in foreign adoption medicine. She will do a very thorough post-placement exam and then pass the recommendations onto your regular pediatrician who usually isn't up to par on issues seen in children adopted internationally. The doctor was wonderful and spent nearly two hours with us going over every.little.thing. The end of the visit brought tears though because Claire needed to have blood drawn to check her immunity levels for vaccinations given to her in China and many other tests to check her overall health. Thankfully the phlebotomist was very quick and accurate and it only took one stick. Still though, she was public enemy #1 and I was #2.

One concern from the visit was Claire has lost 3 lbs since coming home. On a child who only started out at 42 lbs that is nearly 10% of her body weight. She is constantly hungry and I am constantly feeding her so I was very surprised to see that she not only didn't gain any weight but actually lost so much. We will continue to feed her every time she says she is hungry and monitor her weight. The doctor said she sounded like a child with a high metabolism (she never stops moving!) so that combined with the stress of this transition probably has her body in overdrive. With time it should get better and until then we will shovel as much high calorie, healthy food as we can into this tiny girl.

Claire is pretty used to Toby now; I've even heard her say several times "I love you, Toby." When we leave the house she is person that locks Toby into his bed. At first I laughed because I think she enjoyed it a bit too much but now she blows him a kiss and tells him he's a "good boy." She has to be the person that runs upstairs and unlocks his crate when we get home too; although she doesn't have much competition for this job because the other three kids usually fight over who has to do it. The neighbor has a big dog who ran over here over the weekend when we were outside. She completely freaked out and started screaming so she definitely has a fear of dogs still.; J jokes that she just tolerates Toby because he doesn't go away.

She is learning so much English every day. Today I heard her say "mommy, come here!" and I followed it up with "please?" so she repeated it with a please. Now I've heard "mommy, come here please!" all day. I guess she's making sure I get the exercise I keep saying I need.
The doctor yesterday told us that most kids are age appropriate in conversational English in 6 months. That just shows how incredibly resilient and amazing children are!

After the trip to the school that upset Claire I realized that we needed to start talking about Claire going to school in the near future. She needed to know (in her limited understanding) that she wasn't going to stay home with mom forever and that she would be going to school with Emily and Matthew. So, that day after the kids were home from school we got out the calendar and wrote "Claire School!" on March 23rd. She's been counting down the days since then with excitement and when we went to the school this morning to check out the book fair she said "Claire school?" so I think she understands and she seems excited.

Homeschooling-
I have spent many hours with Claire working on ABCs, numbers, shapes, colors, phonics, etc. She is doing remarkably well. She can now say the entire alphabet and can recognize almost half of them visually. We work on the sound of the letters and with the help of catchy Leap Frog songs she's starting to catch onto phonics. We count to 30 a lot but she also knows the numbers by recognition up to 100 and I've heard her count on her own into the 60's. She knows and can recall the shapes circle, square, oval, triangle, rectangle and sometimes diamond. She can do addition up to 10 but I haven't tried subtraction. She can write her name without being told the letters and she can recognize that 'Claire' is her name and will say it out loud. She knows the seasons winter and summer and we're working on spring and fall. She knows that winter is cold and summer is hot. When we ask her what is winter she wrap her arms around herself and say "I'ma cold" and then fan herself saying "I'ma hot" when we say summer; she is such a ham!

A funny from today:
We ran to Walgreens to get more lotion for her skin. The doctor thinks the itchiness of her skin is related to allergies of some kind and recommended that we lotion her up twice a day to keep it hydrated. While there she found a cash register in the toy aisle and did her "Claire?" and point the cart. I told her no and then saw it was clearanced to $5 and thought it would help me teach her about money so I changed my mind and let her get it. We've played with it a lot today but the funniest thing was when she showed me the total and it was something like 193828192 and I responded with "Oh my goodness, I don't have that much money!" She excitedly ran back to the cash register, pulled out the credit card and smiled. One swipe of the card and the total was 0. What a great teaching...not! So I told her "oh honey, we don't use credit cards in this house, unless it involves a trip to China."

When we first got home I had intentions of posting a picture of Claire every day so we could look back and see her changes in the first year. Yea, that lasted all of about 4 days and then Meme went home and real life took hold. I do have pictures from most days so I'm really going to try and get them uploaded.

We got an update!

I spoke with our caseworker last Thursday about trying to get an update from Claire's orphanage. I fully expected to wait a month, at least, to get any information and I tried not to get my hopes up because I know from the orphanage yahoo group that they are very difficult to get updates from. Imagine my surprise this morning when I opened my email to find two new photos of her and answers to a few questions I asked.

Oh how I just cannot wait to smoosh her little cheeks!

Information from the questions we asked:
*Her nickname is YaYa (All children are called by a nickname in their family which is usually their given name repeated. So a girl named Ting would be Ting Ting. Claire's given name is Yuan so they made her nickname YaYa.)
*She does not like meat.
*She likes little cars and is happy when she gets a new toy.
*She is afraid of insects.
*She is still living with her foster family and we are told she knows she's being adopted.
*She is currently 45 inches tall and weighs 39 lbs.

This just totally made my entire week!