I’ve been doing grandly in my ankle brace. I took the kids on all sorts of adventures over the long weekend. It hurt, but I just ignored it.
Then Tuesday when I went to PT, my ankle was so swollen it was barely recognizable. I had a cankle for sure. I explained I’d had a busy weekend and we took it easy at PT, and iced and elevated it.
Well yesterday it was still swollen but not hurting that bad, so I got up suuuuper early and cleaned. I did dishes and laundry, picking up and putting away, sorting and organizing, wiping down, dusting off, and scrubbing. I conquered the entire first floor of the house.
Then I proceeded to have a busy day with a medical appointment I had to do a fair bit of walking to get to because parking sucked. It was a pre-op appointment for my ear tubes. (Hooray! That’s finally going to happen!)
But come evening I felt like my ankle brace was squeezing too tightly so I took it off and examined the damage.
Alas. I have truly overdone it. I have no patience for this down and out stuff. None. I want to be my usual energetic self, getting things done and giving the kids a good time! ADHD is striking HARD.
Today I’m back in my trusty boot. I can barely hobble. I had to make Seth take Sprout to a doctor appointment for her first covid shot this morning because the walking would be too much for me.
It doesn’t help that Sprout is a boredy-pants when we are stuck at home. She wants to run! Bike! Climb! Swim! The kid sits still as well as I do and sitting around the house makes us both cranky. The only way to make her content-ish is to sit and watch movies with her that are either terrible, or which I’ve seen dozens of times before.
She’s currently into movies about witches. We did the Wizard of Oz and Hocus Pocus, but I’m out of ideas with just those two. Best kids movies out there that feature a witch? Let me know your suggestions! My foot begs you to come up with some. 🙂
I vowed earlier this year to give the kids a wonderful summer. It’s been one full week since school let out, plus a few days. There has been a little bike riding and some time in the new disc swing in the backyard – swings and bikes are things all good summers must have.
We went to a carnival on Friday night at the nearby fairgrounds. There were rides and junk food and games and fireworks. Kiddo’s Mom joined us for a while, which was great for Kiddo, who had a blast making her Mom scream on crazy rides.
Kiddo rode this like 5 times, and made her Mom ride it twice. This was Kiddo’s favorite ride. It squealed metal-on-metal and creaked and groaned and made me nervous!Whee!
Seth and Sprout only came for a couple of hours of kiddie rides then went home early because we didn’t think Sprout could survive until fireworks at 9:45. It turned out we may as well have let her stay because she didn’t sleep until I got home anyway. She spent the rest of the evening crying that she missed me. Methinks the kid and I spend a wee bit too much time together!
The fireworks display turned out to be really good. Kiddo and I enjoyed the heck out of it. She came home exhausted with a carnie stuffed animal and a lot of cotton candy, and collapsed into bed fully clothed. Mission accomplished! I tucked in Sprout for about the 18th time apparently, and she finally went to sleep.
Then I went and laid my overstimulated self in bed and stared at the ceiling for quite some time before I could calm down enough to sleep. Was it fun for me? Not so much. I clumped around the place in my boot to protect my ankle, spent much of the time balancing on a tiny collapsible stool I brought with me because I can’t stand for long, and got a bit too much sensory input overall. But Kiddo and Sprout had a blast and that’s what counts. I did enjoy the fireworks at least!
The following day Seth worked. I decided the kids and I would christen our new local pool membership, and made the mistake of telling the kids at 10 am that I was taking them to the pool when it opened at 1:00. They were So Excited that they insisted we all get our swimsuits on immediately. Then we sat around the house for a few hours in swimsuits. Nap time was a shambles because Sprout was too excited to sleep, and Kiddo kept interrupting our attempts to nap announcing how many minutes there were until the pool opened. I gave up on naps and we scooped up a neighbor kid Kiddo is friends with and went to the pool.
It’s a super nice facility. Clean and neat, with a pool that has a slide and diving boards, along with a super shallow end for Sprout. She can actually stand in the shallow end! She can’t at most pools. Mind you that still didn’t prevent a near drowning incident where she lost her footing and panicked, but she’s begging to go back again today so she wasn’t too traumatized.
There’s a concession stand at the pool, so the kids got their first soft serve ice cream of the season there too. $2 a cone. Can’t beat that!! Kiddo is begging to get swimming lessons so she can use the slide at the pool, so on Tuesday I’ll see if I can make some swimming lesson plans for both kids.
In my book kid summers should always include swimming and carnivals, in addition to swings and bikes, so we’re off to an acceptable start. 🙂
Up next? More swimming at the pool, a trip to the local beach soon, and perhaps a cookout there. Hopefully next weekend we’ll do some stream wading and look for crayfish, which is also a required summer activity. Camping happens in August. And I hope to squeeze in a little canoeing at some point too.
What’s on your list of required activities for kids for summer?
I woke up at 2:20 am, wide awake. You know the feeling. Thoughts about random nonsense marched through my brain like ants at my sleep picnic. I eventually got myself up and came downstairs for some guilty pleasure: HGTV. I shared the watching with a house centipede walking around my ceiling above me, keeping me company while hunting down the spider population. It was a wary peace. Those things give me the shivers.
Around 3:00, something started rumbling internally. By 3:30 it was full blown intestinal misery. So much for sleeping the rest of the night – I spent it in the bathroom or on the couch next to the bathroom waiting to return to the bathroom. Ulcerative Colitis is no joke. Body? I sincerely apologize for indulging in Pizza Hut one last time yesterday afternoon. I remembered loving it when I was a kid but it’s a mistake I shan’t repeat as an adult. Lesson learned. Pizza Hut (dairy and grease) combined with UC and my lingering cold and cough made for a miserable night.
I needed a good night’s sleep, too. I worked my tail off yesterday cleaning the house preparing it for the baby who didn’t come here. I cleaned off surfaces we haven’t seen in weeks (hi coffee table!), I did dishes, I did laundry, I put away all sorts of detritus in our bedroom and changed the sheets and organized and folded and put away nonstop from 4:15 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
But you know what’s positively exhilarating? I did it. I didn’t nap or stop every 10 seconds to rest. And I didn’t collapse at the end of the day a mere shell of a human. My foot and ankle put up with the abuse remarkably well and I got it done.
This morning at 5:30 when I gave up my cozy spot on the couch for a resentful cup of coffee, I didn’t just sit down. It took me ages to finish even making the coffee because I was absentmindedly cleaning. Coughing, but cleaning. Like I used to. Before foot surgery.
Suddenly I stopped cleaning and wondered: could I possibly be back?!? Is Enbrel going to tackle the fatigue after all? Is this foot actually going to heal?
It won’t be a particularly good day off 6ish hours of sleep last night and this lingering cough and the vague feeling like my guts can’t be trusted, but hot diggety, this newfound hope is going to get me through it.
The sweet babe we were expecting to come to us today? Yeaaaaah… not so fast. The judge, rightly so, decided to send her home to her parents instead. The county was planning to recommend she go home by the end of summer anyway, and the parents have been doing everything they need to do, so baby girl is going home today ❤️, a little early, and bypassing our home entirely.
It’s a happy ending for baby and her parents but alas! I’m sad not to have a babe for the summer! Of course, the court hearing came AFTER I’d already gone and purchased a new pack and play… heh. Well, we need one anyway if we are going to continue to do respite care.
The exciting thing for me is that in all the scrambling we did to make sure we could take good care of the baby, I found a new babysitter! They’re worth their weight in gold, so I’m positively delighted by this turn of events! Sprout needs a sitter so Seth and I can go out on occasion, and so I can go to my own medical appointments when Seth is working. Talk about a lucky find.
I also found my own willingness to do respites for babies over the summer, so I’ll call the county to let them know they can call me for respites for babies, if any are needed. Perhaps that new pack and play will get some use soon.
I swore we wouldn’t be taking any placements over the summer. Or any more long-term placements at all, in fact. But there are always “circumstances” that make hard rules a challenge.
Late last summer we had a sweet, sweet baby placed with us for about a week. She was the cutest, most easy going, good natured baby I’ve ever met. My kids both loved her and there were fights over who got to hold her and play with her, and there were tears when she left to go live with a relative.
Well, for reasons I don’t know or need to know, she’s coming back into foster care for a little while until she can be reunited with her family. Because we have a note in our file to always call us first if any kid who has been with us comes back into care, we got the phone call. And because I’m me, I called Seth, and he immediately remembered the sweet bundle of joy this baby was, and to my shock, agreed to take her!
I’ve got to juggle baby sitters for Sprout’s appointments, and juggle respite care when we are in Ireland, and figure out if she can come to Maine with us in August. And we just got rid of all the clothes that would fit her. And the cribs. Oy. But! We have a pack and play and it will have to do. Hopefully she’ll have some clothes when she arrives. Heh. Fingers crossed.
Regardless of the sudden plunge into chaos, I’m thrilled! I adored the little tyke and am praying she’s still a happy kid. She’s the right age and is the ONE KID my two are happy to have again!
Sprout has been in need of a couple of new providers: physical therapy, and regular therapy. You’d think I’d be able to just pick up the phone and make a couple of calls and we’d be all set. But no, foster parent life ain’t that simple.
The problems start with Sprout’s insurance. It’s Medicaid and that alone makes things hard. There are very few providers who take Medicaid because I understand that it pays poorly and creates massive paperwork headaches. But Sprout has a special type of Medicaid apparently, as I’ve recently found out, that even fewer places accept.
We’ve tried 3 places for PT, including one that advertises it “accepts all insurance and Medicaid.” So we made an appointment there and figured we were all set. But then we got a call back from them, close to the date we’d been waiting for, to tell us they don’t, in fact, take Sprout’s insurance. False advertising, what?
I was so annoyed. I started making calls and searching the internet to find a new place that would take her insurance. PT is critical for her right now because we are trying to avoid having to subject her to another surgery. All told it took a total of 10 phone calls and several hours of my time and Seth’s time to find a place that could provide the desperately needed PT.
You might ask, doesn’t the school provide PT for her? Why yes, yes it does. Crappy group PT with a provider who is in way over her head with Sprout’s complicated issues. This new physical therapist will be in addition to the one that works with Sprout at her school.
If you think PT was challenging to find, hoooo boy, let’s talk about therapy.
Sprout has had therapy off and on and really needs it to help her learn to manage her big feelings about loss and missing people, as well as some newer big feelings about her short stature.
I know there’s a desperate shortage of mental health providers. I know it intellectually but wasn’t prepared for what it would actually take to find one.
It took:
17 phone calls
10 emails
And 1 bout of frustrated tears with a provider’s broken phone system and another provider’s rude clueless answering person.
The process almost broke me. I can almost laugh about it now, but my god. How do people who desperately need therapy for deeply troubled kids survive? My understanding is inpatient services are impossible to get, so people have been known to literally abandon their mentally ill children at the children’s hospital. And what if Sprout were in crisis? An intake session more than a month away would hardly help her. It’s a debacle that desperately needs fixing.
We finally have a therapy intake session set up for July. The provider sounds good. I’m praying she’s a good match for Sprout because we are out of other options.
You might ask, why doesn’t the case worker do this work for us? Because she’s buried alive in cases and tasks that no one else can do. She doesn’t have an entire day of her life to set aside for this nonsense. She has enough critical tasks that need to be done and doesn’t need to spend hours of time calling a broken phone system trying every permutation of key strokes conceivable to get a human.
All’s well that ends well I guess. We haven’t seen these providers yet so don’t know if they’re good but yeesh. After that ridiculousness I sure hope they are!
The icing on this cake is that the County wants to cut the rate of pay we get for Sprout. She’s getting a special rate now because of her complex medical issues but now they’re saying she’s “normal” enough to get the regular rate of pay which is about half of what we are getting.
Sprout has so many medical appointments that I could not work even if I were healthy. She’s had 4 medical appointments this month with specialists, plus the day-worth of calls and e-mails I spent getting her set up with yet MORE providers. I could happily pull out all my hair in frustration and anger if I think about it too much. We will be fighting it. Wish us luck.
Yesterday I saw my gastroenterologist for the first time since he did my colonoscopy last August. It was an interesting appointment. It’s been an interesting ride at his practice.
It’s been a series of issues in his office that has kept me from seeing the actual gastroenterologist for so long. His office cancelled and rescheduled two appointments and shuffled me off on an NP before I actually saw the man himself. Normally I don’t mind Nurse Practitioners. In fact, I almost always see the NP at my rheumatologist’s office and I freaking adore her. But this gastro NP was dismissive, condescending, and told me to do the exact opposite of what I should be doing for my condition. I hated her.
I’d switch to another gastroenterologist except I had a horrible experience with an MD at the only other practice in town, and I’m not “allowed” to see any other MD in that practice because I saw that one dude once. I’m apparently his property until death. So I’m stuck with the gastroenterologist I saw yesterday.
Mind you, I liked the man himself. He took the time necessary and listened and believed me and seems smart. I just don’t like all the shuffling they’ve done and I hate one of his NPs.
ANYwho, I was informed that the MD had found I have ulcerative colitis when he did my colonoscopy. LAST AUGUST. Why didn’t anyone in his practice tell me I had UC or treat me for it before now? Gah! I’ve been struggling with my GI symptoms for many, many years – like 15+ years. I’m delighted to have a Dx that explains the symptoms and a plan of treatment.
The doc prescribed Mesalamine, which is a non-steroidal anti inflammatory that stays focused on the digestive tract. I know at least one person with UC who has taken that med for years and it works great for him so I have high hopes. I’m to stay away from other NSAIDs because they can rip up the digestive tract of someone with UC quite nicely. That kind of stinks since Advil is my go-to for foot and ankle pain during my recovery but I’ll happily part with it if it will help. And I’m to start a rotation of probiotics.
So, let’s see. In the last year-ish, I’ve been diagnosed with:
Psoriatic Arthritis
Fibromyalgia
Ulcerative Colitis
Plus of course ADHD and Autism.
Oof. That is a LOT to take in in one year.
But no freaking wonder I’m struggling with horrific fatigue, and pain, and intestinal issues. Fibromyalgia, PsA, and UC can all cause all three! I’m so damn tired my fatigue has disease layers! I’d heard autoimmune diseases run in packs, and I guess they aren’t kidding. I really didn’t expect to get diagnosed with two of them in one year.
I am so excited to start Mesalamine for the UC and Enbrel for the PsA this month. I have high hopes of improved quality of life right now.
So here’s a toast to figuring out what’s wrong, and to Pharma for figuring out how to treat my new diagnoses! Cheers! 🍻
When we first became foster parents, Seth and I started a foster care clothing closet. We would just set aside clothing we got for our kids that they didn’t like, or that didn’t fit anymore. We figured it would make sense to hold onto all that clothing for future foster kids. We also got some donations from a few friends and family.
How clothing $ works from the agency
If you’re wondering how clothing works for foster parents, our agency, which is the county we live in, gives out clothing vouchers when kids first come into care. You’ll get a voucher for a hundred or two hundred dollars for Burlington Coat Factory, which is a discount clothing store. I like that the vouchers are for that store because you can get kids brand name stuff, and for the older ones it really matters if things are all from Walmart versus bearing a Nike logo. Their peers notice.
After that first voucher though, you’re on your own. They calculate a dollar or two into your check for each day the child is with you for clothing. It’s not nearly enough. Therefore having a clothing closet on hand is important.
It’s also important to have a clothing closet because kids often come with what’s on their backs and nothing else, and you need things for them ASAP, not 3 hours down the road when you can get them to Target. Having a variety of clothing (girly girl? Not girly at all?) for kids old enough to have an opinion about what they wear helps make them feel comfortable. And pjs at the very least are a must because kids often come late in the day after a court has had time to hear their case.
Our Monster Closet
Over time, our little closet grew and grew. We started swapping sizes with friends who were also foster parents. Oh, you need 3T? I’ve got 3T in abundance but I have no 18 months. Let’s swap!
It’s unreal how much clothing you can accumulate when you’ve had 14 kids through your home in 6 years. We always sent kids on to their next home with a fully stocked wardrobe, whether they were going to their next foster home if they were an emergency placement, or especially if they were going back to family. Sometimes I’d go out and get a wardrobe for a kid just to go home with if they were close to growing out of the size they were in and we didn’t have the next size on hand. Clothing is expensive and we want families to be successful with kids coming back home, we don’t want the kids to add any more than necessary to the family’s financial strain.
Anyway, we ultimately wound up with an entire wall of attic eave closets filled with kids’ clothing folded and organized into old diaper boxes labeled with size and season. How much clothing is that, you ask?
The leaning tower of clothing. Laundry on top, garbage on bottom.
Well, I now know how much. Since we are not going to be taking long-term foster placements and are only going to be doing respite placements (respite kids come with their own clothing), we don’t need our clothing closet anymore. So on a whim I decided to tackle the damn thing to make some space in our attic.
A tiny portion of the processed clothing.
It’s taken us 3 days so far and will take at least one more. It’s resulted in three massive loads of laundry, 7 boxes and a giant bag of clothing plus 4 boxes of shoes sold to our local Once Upon a Child, 17 boxes of clothing so far for donation to our church clothing closet, and two 45 gallon trash bags full to the brim. And once all that laundry gets processed a second time, I’m sure we’ll have more to donate and sell and trash.
Leaning tower, take 2
Mystery of the day: why does baby clothing only show puke stains after it sits for a while? I hate those creeping yellow stains that ruin lovely clothing. Sigh. Anyway.
I’m being super picky about what’s going out to the church clothing closet. I’ve seen some of the stuff that gets donated, and while some of it is beautiful, some of it is pretty ratty too. My philosophy is that if I would not put my kid in it, I should not give it to some kid from a lower income family to wear. They deserve nice things. So if it’s pilled or stained or looking worn it’s not going on for more use – I figure it’s served its time. Even so, we still had 17 boxes so far for the church.
I can’t really venture into the attic to peruse the now open space because I’m still on crutches, which is a bummer. But I swear I heard the attic floor joists groan in relief when the 28th box got lifted out of the eave!
Other stuff
I’m not stopping with clothing, either. Our church also participates in an organization called RESTART that helps families transitioning to new residences out of domestic violence situations, lost their apartment to fire or condemnation, etc. In essence, it helps folks who are starting fresh and in need of basically all the stuff one needs to fill a house with necessities.
We also have in our attic two toddler beds, one toddler bed mattress, and a twin bed. We don’t need new permutations. We’ve got Sprout in the cutest little house bed, and Kiddo in a twin bed with a trundle. If we take respites they’ll be under 2 because that’s what we have room for now – a pack and play only. So three beds are leaving our attic and going to RESTART today.
Getting rid of stuff is SUCH A RELIEF. Hooray for more space! I want to be able to walk through my attic and use it! It’s also a joy to be able to give stuff to folks who need it. I don’t believe in altruism – frankly givers get a thrill, a little dopamine rush in return.
The news right now is pretty grim. It always is but it seems exceptionally so right now. The worst parts for me are the stories that evidence discrimination, hatred, fear, and control: the racism-driven massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY; anti-trans laws being proposed and passed across the country, especially those targeting kids; anti-gay laws; book and textbook bans; anti-choice laws being proposed in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade; and so on.
It’s hard not to want to crawl into a corner and hide. Very hard.
In search of something uplifting this morning, I watched Abby Wambach’s commencement speech at Loyola Marymount University, and she reminded me of the fundamental principle that keeps me going, got me into foster care, and is going to drive me to continue my activism.
Here’s the thing. No one of us can right the world’s ills. All we can do is what we can do. I loved Abby’s reference to this quote:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief… You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
The Talmud
I’m one of those sensitive folks who feels bodily overwhelm at the news. I can’t fix it all. It doesn’t even feel like I can fix one tiny bit of it. I went for years feeling like I was drowning in the sorrow and grief and misery of the world, and it affected me physically and emotionally and mentally.
Then one day I reached a point where I realized that I had things backwards. I didn’t need to fix everything, I just needed to give all I could give. If I was giving of my time and energy and money to the fullest extent possible, at least I could rest in the comfort of knowing I was doing what I could to right the world. It would never be enough to fix all the world’s problems but I would be doing my part.
I looked around and recognized my privileges. I’m white, was raised middle class, am well educated, was well employed. My husband and I owned a 3-bedroom home for just the two of us and our pets. We had lots of time and energy and love to give. I had always deeply cared about kids who are in need of help because of family problems, and my husband did too. We’d long talked about being foster parents. Why not just dive in? There was never going to be a “right” moment – life is too crazy for things to be “perfect” for such a huge undertaking.
There was one thing I was sure of: being foster parents was going to use up my spare time, energy, love, and house space. Those were the things I had to give. So I needed to give them.
I have not regretted becoming foster parents for an instant. Not. An. Instant. Not when our first kids were with us and the boy was a danger to himself and others at 6 years old. Not when a kid would get triggered and scream for hours. Not when kids I loved like my own had to go back home. No regrets.
Part of the reason I had no regrets is that I had gone into foster care wanting to give as much of myself as humanly possible so that I was doing all I could to help the world be a better place. Some days foster care has taken more than I intended from me, but never so much I could not handle it with a great parenting partner and a good therapist.
Now that we are tapering off being foster parents in that we are no longer going to take long term placements, I need to take up some other activities to use up all I have to give. Mind you, I’m still parenting one special needs kid who has a zillion medical appointments (Sprout), and half a challenging kid (Kiddo is here every weekend), so I don’t have tons of time and energy leftover, and I have no money leftover. But every time I’m overwhelmed by the world’s grief, I eventually come back to the place where I can assess my privileges and decide how to give of them to the greatest extent possible. Right now I have some time available because I’m not working, so I’m adding in some advocacy around kinship guardianship becoming an option for foster parents.
I’m not going to abandon the work because I feel despair and grief. I’m going to double down on doing what I can, using the privileges I happen to have. I’ll keep writing about foster care’s disparities. I’ll keep advocating for the kids who are with us and for kinship options that help preserve families a little bit more. And I’ll keep loving on these two kids as best I can. I’ll donate what little cash I can scrape together to organizations doing good work. Once I can walk again I’ll march, and I’m going to look into becoming a legal observer for marches. And I’ll always keep looking for other ways I can give of myself so I don’t drown in the world’s grief.
I’m in the midst of a three-day conference put together annually by Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York (AFFCNY). It’s so damn good.
There’s so much good info in this conference, but this morning a set of statistics slapped me across the face. I’ve previously mentioned that Black kids are over represented in foster care, but didn’t have the statistics to back it up at the time I made my post.
Black children represent 15% of the population, however, they represent 39% of the foster care population.
Just sit with that set of numbers for a frigging minute.
White children represent 48% of the population, however, they only represent 26% of the foster care population.
Hispanic or Latino children represent 25% of the population, they represent 26% of the foster care population.
So much goes into those statistics but racism is at the heart of it. Economic disparity is playing a massive role and that’s wrapped up in generations of institutional racism. The term “neglect” is so broad and ill defined that it often encompasses folks who are just poor, not intentionally neglecting their kids, and who would do better with more resources. So why aren’t we helping Black families financially so they can stay together, when that costs less than removing kids and putting them in foster care? Why are we drug testing new Black moms at birth without consent disproportionately to new white moms? Why are we so quick to remove Black kids from their families?
Here’s the breakdown of the 14 kids who have been placed with us. It mirrors the statistics I listed above but is even more marked:
Black – 8
White – 4
Hispanic – 1
Asian – 1
I’m not going to try to solve all the world’s ills here in this post. There are so many things that need to change and there are incredible people working on making those changes. Some of them have spoken at this AFFCNY conference and they’re AMAZEBALLS.
I think it’s important to talk about these statistics though because knowing about the disparity is the first step to changing it.
And now you know.
Since we aren’t going to continue to take long-term foster care placements, I need to find new avenues to create change. I think I’m going to focus first on creating kinship opportunities for foster parents who are in the position we are in: wanting to preserve the child’s family unit but needing to have the child stay with the foster parents for the child’s safety and well-being.
After all, if biological families are being separated and the kids placed in foster care at disproportionate rates, then let’s work on preserving family bonds as much as we can. However we can. Statistics show how much better kids do with biological family in their lives, culturally, racial identity-wise, mental health wise. I think my first activist steps will be to work on ways to make that happen legally.
Other folks are already working on things at the other end: decreasing the rate at which Black kids enter the foster care system, and increasing rates of kinship care rather than placement with strangers. Both are critical to addressing the racial disparities.
If we hack at this from all directions, you know who is going to benefit?
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