Language is Tricky for a Two-Year-Old

One of the joys of parenting age two is observing them get the hang of this crazy language called English. Here are a few of Tiny’s attempts to master English that resulted in unintentional hilarity.

I call this one “Homonyms are hard” 

Tiny holds up the letter U from her alphabet puzzle. 

Me: “It’s a U”

Tiny: “Me?”

*****

Enunciation is crucial with a two-year-old. 

Seth: “Here, help me with Kiddo’s sheets.”

Tiny: “Baaa.”

Seth: “What? I need help putting Kiddo’s clean sheets on her bed. Are you going to help with the sheets?”

Tiny: “BAAA!”

Seth, comprehension dawning: “Ooooooh, sheeTs, not sheeP.”

Tiny: “Oooooh!”

*****

And sometimes she gets language exactly right all on her own. 

Seth came home one day with a delicious looking chocolate cake, and Tiny exclaimed: “Look Mommy! It’s a Happy!”

Yes, my dear. That is *exactly* what that is. 

Therapy Pets

In addition to being foster parents, Seth and I have a variety of critters. At present we have one dog, four cats, and one kitten (whom we affectionately refer to as Le Shittén because her antics are something else). They all play a role with the kids, particularly the dogs.

The current dog Phoebe, aka “Beans,” is an absolute mutt. She’s a Heinz 57 shelter special. We even did genetic testing on her out of sheer curiosity because we couldn’t identify a single breed in her, and it turns out she is German Shepherd, Rottweiler, Shar-Pei, bulldog, bull terrier, Bedlington terrier, Chinese crested(!), and dachshund. There’s a mix for you. Some of those combinations defy the imagination. 

Beans

For a while we had two dogs, and the other one, Simon, aka “Slimy,” was a purebred Bassett hound. He was absolutely awful. He was the single most stubborn creature ever to have walked the earth, and took willfulness to new heights (pardon the height pun for the Basset hound). We had originally rescued him and his littermate sister from the Humane Society. She was nearly as awful as he was and together they were truly a force to be reckoned with. 

I’m going to say something really terrible here but please try not to judge me for it: for years I didn’t really like Simon. Simon and Lucy were so bad, and they had never really bonded with us, only each other. They were never able to be house trained. They were destructive, maniacal, poop eating beasts who did a lot of damage to our property. I grew to like Lucy, who was at least really affectionate, but really struggled to find any common ground with Simon. When Lucy died of pancreatic cancer at age 3, we adopted Beans because Simon couldn’t function as an only dog. So we muddled along, with my adoring Beans and only tolerating Simon to the best of my ability. Man did that dog try my patience.

Then we became foster parents, and Simon got his chance to shine. 

Simon absolutely loved children. Adored them. To his dying day he never really had much use for adults, but man did he love kids. He was patient beyond anything I could imagine. Beans is insanely patient too, but Simon was something else. He was made to be a therapy dog for kids in need.

Simon in his happy place, being squished by a kid

I’ve already described how, when Kiddo came to us, she was a hot mess. There were days when she could acccept affection from no one other than Simon the Basset hound. It was to him she turned when she couldn’t stop crying. It was with him that she really learned to play and be silly. It was to him that she snuggled up at night when she felt sad and lonely. The two of them were absolutely and utterly inseparable. She would fall asleep on top of him, and he never minded being squished because she was His Kid.

Simon and His Kid

When Brother was with us briefly, he was very aggressive toward the dogs. Both dogs got kicked, hard, and Beans had a knife held to her throat. Yet neither dog has ever reacted out of anger or fear toward any child. Somehow they knew that Brother was a child and that he was troubled, and they just endured it all. I know not all dogs would have behaved as our two did, and no dog should be subjected to mistreatment from anyone, but glory be, our two dogs were saints about it all. I’ve always been a dog person, but never fully appreciated their merits until I became a foster parent and I saw what they could put up with and how much healing they could do just by being themselves. 

Kiddo and Slimy being goofy

Losing Simon at age 14 – which is an extraordinarily old age for a Basset hound – was unbelievably gut wrenching. It wasn’t hard because I would miss him, it was hard because I knew it was going to absolutely shatter Kiddo‘s heart when he died. 

A painting I did of Simon in pastels back when I had time to do things like paint

She still carries around a favorite stuffed animal, which is a Basset hound named Slimy, everywhere she goes. She has photos of her Slimy up in her room, and has a portrait I once painted of him on her wall. She talks about him. She misses him terribly. Thank heavens she still has Beans whom she has bonded with a lot more since Slimy‘s death, but no one will ever replace that short, stubborn, long-eared dog in her heart. 

Pippin and Mouse

Now, I don’t want to short change the cats here. I think by nature most cats are less tolerant of kids’ antics than dogs, but we have some pretty extraordinary cats. Le Shittén in particular seems to have endless patience with them. She tolerates being picked up and hauled around, squished and kissed. Our obese fluffy tiger cat Pippin is really good with the kids too, and particularly bonded with Mouse who was more cat person than dog person. She used to squeal with delight when he’d enter the room, and he’d give us “you’re lucky I love her” looks as she squeezed him round the middle with her hugs. 

Tiny and her kitten

Honestly, our foster parenting journey would be very different if it weren’t for the pets. I’m grateful for the fun, playfulness, snuggles, and patience our critters exude every day.

Our “Speciality” in Kids with Medical Issues

I mentioned in an earlier blog that Seth and I specialize in kids with medical issues. Here’s the story of how that came about and some of the kids we’ve had with medical issues. 

It started gradually with kid I shall call Gronckle (for his resemblance to the dragons in How to Train Your Dragon – fattest cutest thing ever). He was about seven months old and was generally healthy except for being an ongoing MRSA carrier with occasional outbreaks, and having a really severe case of eczema. 

Gronckle’s adorableness

We eventually figured out that he was reacting badly to the proteins in dairy, and needed a hypoallergenic formula. It took us a damn long time to convince the doctors at the clinic we take the kids to that foods could have anything to do with eczema. I lost all patience with the doctor and got snippy which never gets me anywhere. Seth, on the other hand, remained patient and calm and ultimately succeeded, over the course of several visits, in convincing the doctor to write a script for the hypoallergenic formula so Medicaid would pay for it rather than our paying for it out of pocket. (We were spending $80 per week on hypoallergenic formula at that point, and it wasn’t financially sustainable for us.) 

Gronckle’s first steps

The whole experience managed to gain us the respect of the particular doctor involved. In our county we are required to take foster kids to a particular clinic that has a couple of doctors and couple of nurse practitioners. It is explicitly for foster kids and prevents us from having to try to find pediatricians who will take Medicaid. At first I was frustrated with the set up but have come to recognize that it is a gem, and I wish other counties would do the same. So the fact that we had earned the respect of one of the two doctors there was rather significant.

After Gronckle went home to his grandmother, we got Mouse. I’m not sure how we wound up with Mouse, but it’s one of those things that makes me almost believe in divine intervention. We needed her as much as she needed us. 

She was four months old, exceptionally tiny, and exceptionally fragile. She had sustained a head injury from falling off the couch onto a hard tile floor, and had developed subdural and subarachnoid hematomas. Thank God she was so young because her fontanel had not yet closed, so that her head just grew bigger to accommodate the blood and fluids under the surface of her skull, rather than putting too much pressure on her brain. 

That said, at the time we didn’t know how much brain damage, if any, Mouse had sustained. She was significantly developmentally delayed. And she was a very very sick little baby. She couldn’t keep down food, and was deemed failure to thrive because she couldn’t gain weight. She would wake up every two hours in the night for food, but then vomit most of it back up. Her cry was so weak we could hardly hear her (hence the nickname “Mouse’). Her head kept growing and growing and we were so worried that she would need a shunt placed in her head because the fluids around the injury site were not breaking up and draining, but rather were increasing. The number of medical appointments she had was absolutely staggering. She was seeing 2 to 3 specialists per week. 

And for three months we seemed to make no progress. She stayed 12.5 pounds, couldn’t gain weight, couldn’t lift her head, and wasn’t developing. 

We decided, based on Seth’s instincts, to try the special formula we had used on Gronckle on Mouse in case by some bizarre coincidence her vomiting was food intolerance related rather than caused by her head injury. 

And lo and behold, it worked! She slowly started to gain weight, she started to lose some of the lethargy and pallor, and the projectile vomiting ceased. And it turned out that time was what was needed to heal her head injury, because eventually the fluid stopped accumulating at the injury site and started to break up. With a lot of physical therapy, she began to be able to hold up her big head. She started hitting developmental milestones one after another after another. 

This is the guy who said he didn’t know what to do with babies

By the time she left us to go home, Mouse was fully healed and was a giggly happy goofy little two-year-old, albeit still with a big head. She was on target for everything developmentally, and had hardly any specialist appointments anymore because everything was healing the way it was supposed to.

Mouse close to the time she went home

And this time, it was the other doctor at the clinic whose respect we had earned.

I can’t tell the story of Mouse without also telling the story of Seth and his nursing school journey. One of the many times that Mouse was in the hospital while she was in our care, he looked around at the exceptional nursing care we were receiving, and thought to himself “if I were going to be a nurse this is the kind of nurse I would want to be.”  Within a few days it had translated into “that’s what I want to do – I want to be that kind of nurse.“ And just like that Seth gave up his career in the printing industry, applied to nursing school, and began his journey to a career in nursing. He has one semester left and is determined to go either into pediatric ICU, or labor and delivery. I laugh at the latter because this is the guy who said, before we got Mouse, that he had no idea what to do with a baby. Mouse changed everything for Seth. 

Mouse helping Seth study for nursing school

After Mouse, we got the twins, who came to us with severe second-degree burns from a bath that was way too hot. And after the twins, we got Tiny, who is a severe case of failure to thrive, has significant heart issues, we suspect has dwarfism, and has congenital skeletal deformities. 

In short, we have developed a reputation of being the folks who will take the kids with major medical issues, and heal them. The woman at the county who works in placement knows that we will always take the medical cases and duly calls us when they come up. The doctors at the clinic take us seriously when we express concerns or make suggestions.  And we absolutely love what we do.

Fingers crossed our kids continue to thrive. 

Why I’m a Foster Parent

I have wanted to be a foster parent for as long as I can remember knowing what foster parents are. I never felt a strong urge to have my own biological children, I wanted to be a safe place for kids who needed one. I remember learning what a foster parent is when I was a kid, and I was like Zing! That’s it! I’m going to do that someday!

Life, of course, got in the way. I went to college, studied abroad, came back, got my undergrad degree (shout out to Colby College!), worked in undergraduate admissions (shout out to the Payson Hall crew at St Lawrence University!), went to law school at Cornell, got married, and started working at a law firm in my home town of Syracuse NY. All of that felt like the “next thing” I was supposed to do at each step of the way. 

One day I realized I’d been working as an adult in a career for quite a while, and I didn’t know what my next step “should” be. 

Throughout much of that litany of steps I took in my life, I’ve struggled with depression. Whenever I looked at life on this planet I got overwhelmed. I’ve always been a painfully sensitive person, and life is a thorny thing. I’m the little kid who got terribly upset when a caterpillar died, the adult who felt every injustice in the world viscerally. 

It dawned on me all at once one day that while I couldn’t fix every injustice in the world, I could do something to make the world better. It was time to do that something and become a foster parent. No time was going to feel “right” for doing it. We just needed to dive in while we were young enough to keep up with kids. 

God bless my loving husband, who went along with this whole plan with an open heart and tremendous willingness. We had talked about becoming foster parents since we had met – like within the first month – and he’s always agreed it was a plan he was on board with. 

He was the manager at a bike shop in Canton, NY when we met. A bike shop in a tiny town attracted a bunch of teenage boys who didn’t have anyplace better to be, and Seth had found himself “adopting” the kids from not-so-great families who needed an adult to care. He’d take an interest in their school work, listen when they needed an ear, teach them how to calculate a tip at a diner or get a car loan. We made a hell of a lot of pancakes to feed hungry teenage boys on Saturday mornings in those days. 

That experience made Seth interested in fostering teens, which was an interest I shared. Even when we started foster parenting classes we planned to foster teens. But life has its twists, and since both Seth and I worked full time, we couldn’t take teens because at the time they couldn’t be left home alone in the afternoon after school. We had to take kids who were young enough to go to daycare after school. Thus, once we were certified, we took in Kiddo and Brother, who were 4 and 6. 

Being a foster parent hasn’t solved my depression, but it has helped tremendously. I need to be a foster parent. When we took a month-long break one time after a kid had gone on to some pretty terrible circumstances, I struggled. I felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe, and I was drowning in the unhappiness of the world. I need to spend my days feeling like I am doing something to right some wrongs in this crazy world, no matter if it’s just being good to one kid in need at a time. 

It’s something meaningful. It’s changing a life. Making it better. Even for the littlest kids who won’t remember having lived with us we have built healthy neural pathways in their little brains that can serve them well their whole lives. 

That? That Matters. 

I don’t know how long I will be a foster parent. I suspect Seth will peter out before I do, but at some point we will be too old to keep up with little kids and will switch to bigger kids or will switch teens. And at some point we’ll be too old to keep up with teens too. I don’t want to be in the position where a child comes to us who needs a forever home and we don’t want to adopt because we would be 85 at the kid’s high school graduation. So time will put its own limitations on our foster parenting.

For now, though, I can’t imagine not doing it. It can be an insanely frustrating and emotionally taxing gig full of drama and heartbreak. The system is fairly broken and causes us more angst than I can express. But every heartbreak, every frustration is for a really damn good cause. 

Each child’s life and wellbeing matters. And for now, we will keep doing everything we can for each little life we are blessed to share time with. 

Being Hated by the Parents

Not all our foster parenting stories involve friendships between us and the kids’ parents. Seth and I pride ourselves on working really hard to have good relationships with parents of kids who are in our care, but it isn’t always possible for a whole variety of reasons.

One very young mom was always fine with us when we interacted with her at the courthouse, but that’s where our interactions stopped because she had a history of violent aggression toward others, and a boyfriend who had said some pretty threatening things about us in a courthouse hallway that were overheard by guards who warned us, and escorted said mom and boyfriend off the premises before we were allowed to leave the waiting room. God bless those guards. 

She couldn’t keep a regular phone number so we weren’t able to send her updates about her little guy via text, which is something we like to do. So all we could do was sit next to her in the waiting room outside the courtroom and show her pictures and videos of her son then. We didn’t have to worry about our relationship with her when her son went home because he didn’t go back to her, he went to his paternal grandmother, with whom we had a good relationship despite there being a language barrier. 

Burning off some twin toddler energy.

Another time, for nine months, Seth and I had two-year-old twins, who here shall be referred to as PB and Jelly. They were the cutest little things, and Godawful. Seriously. They had bonded with each other but were not really ever able to bond with Seth and me which is a hard thing that I’ll talk about in another blog post. 

PB, the boy, was fairly decent most of the time, thank goodness. We think he may be on the autism spectrum, which presented its own set of issues in the form of difficulty communicating. 

Jelly on the other hand, was something else. Our daycare provider at the time referred to her as being “spicy.” And spicy she was! She was saucy, talked back, deliberately did the opposite of what we asked her to do, and was a menace to property. Both of them were extremely high energy and bounced around off furniture and toys like little pinballs. They could trash the playroom in 15 seconds flat. Doctors visits with both of them together reduced me to the verge of tears. 

They kept us on our TOES man!

Jelly in an outfit of her choosing, in full spicy mode.

Their parents had a grand total of seven children ages four and under. Only one set of twins. Yes that is technically possible. Everyone involved in the case pulled out a calendar as soon as they heard those numbers! Two of the kids were preemies and that helps with the math but it’s still pretty staggering.

Seth and I tried so hard to have a good relationship with PB&J’s parents. From the start they hated us. They hated that PB&J called us mommy and daddy on their own initiative, and we couldn’t convince them to call us Holly and Seth. I totally understand how that could be extremely hard for a parent to deal with. Dad hated that I used a particular type of band in Jelly‘s hair when I cornrowed or twisted it. (Way more on haircare in another blog sometime in the future). Dad hated that the kids came to visits in fleece jackets rather than heavy winter coats (it was because you’re not supposed to put heavy winter coats in car seats but he didn’t really believe that). I think they hated that we are white. They hated that we weren’t family members. They hated that at 2 1/2 their kids weren’t potty trained yet. 

What they really hated is that we were raising their two beloved children. And there’s nothing Seth and I could do about that. 

Before the kids were set to return home I went out and bought Jelly a whole new size 3T wardrobe because she was just outgrowing her 2T stuff. I bought her absolutely beautiful things. It’s still rankles to this day that dad complained that he didn’t like the clothes I bought because there weren’t enough jeans and too many pairs of leggings. I could’ve sent the kid home with the scant 2T wardrobe that still fit but did them the courtesy of making sure they would not need to buy anything for her in the immediate future. Sigh. It’s funny what gets to me and what doesn’t. That one does. 

There was lots of drama with this family. Originally the kids were split into three homes, the twins to us, three kids to a family member, and two kids to another foster home. At some point the family member and the other foster mom got into a disagreement with mom, CPS calls were made by all involved, and the kids were abruptly removed from the relative and the other foster home. The twins however stayed with us, because when all of that went down I had enough wherewithal to steer clear of the whole dispute. 

There’s no point in my criticizing a child’s parent. It’s the county’s job to make sure the parents do what they need to in order to get their kids back. It’s my job to be courteous and kind, as understanding as possible, and to help them, not hinder them. Arguments aren’t going to advance anything. 

Are there times when I have tattled on a bio parent to a caseworker when I find out something that’s concerning? Yes indeed. Did I confront the parents about it myself? No I absolutely did not. 

In the end, the best possible thing that Seth and I can do is try to have a good relationship with bio parents. We have never ever ever said anything bad about a bio parent in front of a child. In fact we tell the kids all the good things about their parents that we can possibly think of. Kids need to know we aren’t competition for their affections, that we are a team with their parents whenever it is possible. 

One of the most gracious things Kiddo’s mom ever did was tell Kiddo that she was allowed to love us. That single act set us up as a team to help raise Kiddo cooperatively. It’s still extraordinary to me that Kiddo’s mom was able to set aside her own emotions and liberate her child that way. 

But when it doesn’t work that way? All we can do is grin and bear it and be the bigger people. More than once with PB&J’s parents I found myself muttering under my breath Michelle Obamas edict: “When they go low, we go high.” 

In the end, PB&J went back to their parents where they are very well loved and are surrounded by a zillion active siblings at all times. Is it ideal? Probably not. But PB&J are loved and Seth and I are no longer in their lives, and that’s OK. Foster care did what it was supposed to, and gave their parents time to figure out some important issues together so that they could parent their kids better. And in the end it doesn’t matter at all that PB&J’s parents didn’t like us.

Kiddo

I hardly know where to begin with a blog about Kiddo, so I guess I will begin at the beginning. 

I will warn you now this is likely to be a long blog post because there are five years of history and they’ve been jam packed with drama. But I think it’s crucial that I tell this story for readers to understand the type of foster parents we are. There won’t be a ton of humor in it because it’s not a story that lends itself to comedy. It’s tragedy at the start, and raging success at the end. 

I want people to know there CAN be raging successes in foster care.

Kiddo is our first foster kid. She is the apple of my eye, my “first born” so to speak, the center of my universe. I love that kid beyond what I thought was humanly possible. 

Kiddo came to us when she had just turned four, together with her brother who was six. 

Brother‘s story is one for another blog, or perhaps is one that I shouldn’t tell at all because it’s his story. Suffice it to say that Brother was too mentally ill to stay with us for very long because we could not keep him safe, or his sister safe with him there. The county removed him from our care at our request after 18 long, exhausting, soul shattering days, because he needed institutional level care for a while. 

Remember, he was just Six. Years. Old. With big gorgeous liquid brown eyes and curly brown hair, a sweet warm smile, and a hug that could break your heart. But we couldn’t keep him safe, and no one else was safe with him here either. 

I later found out that an outside agency had evaluated Kiddo and Brother to determine if they should go to the therapeutic level homes that agency has, and the woman who evaluated the kids determined that they were too difficult for her agency’s therapeutic level homes. Since the county legit didn’t know what to do with the kids, they sent them to brand new unsuspecting foster parents. Us! 

ZOMG. We got broken in fast. 

Once Brother left we were able to shift our attention to Kiddo, who had been largely silent when Brother was with us. She has even bigger liquid hazel eyes than her brother, and curly brown hair, but we didn’t see a real smile out of her for quite some time. 

After a hell of a lot of work at being goofy, over a number of weeks, Seth finally started to worm a genuine smile and laugh out of Kiddo. But she was a massive handful: defiant at times, at other times sobbing inconsolably for hours at a time while hiding under a piece of furniture, and manipulative in ways I didn’t know kids could learn. 

We had to fight to get the child therapy, which she so desperately needed. And beyond that Kiddo needed time. She needed to learn what safety felt like, she needed to learn what a consistent place to sleep felt like. She needed to experience bedtime stories and hugs and having her own safe bedroom space. She needed to catch up on years of inadequate sleep, and to experience having “stuff” of her own. She needed consistency, structure, consequences, rewards, and mostly just a hell of a lot of love and attention. 

We eventually got past the phase where she cried for hours under a table or behind a couch. We got past the phase where she would smash and destroy things out of anger she didn’t know what to do with. We got past her fear and into a zone where she could learn and catch up developmentally, all of which happened in the course of a year. 

Kiddo lived with us for a year and a half. At about the one year mark her father started to step up and agreed to have her come live with him. We graaaaaaaadually transitioned Kiddo to his home but honestly, it was doomed from the start. We all tried So Hard to get Dad ready to take her. The county made him take parenting classes and we helped coach him through Kiddo’s behaviors. Seth even at one point spent several hours repairing his car before a court date because he was required to have a working vehicle in order to have Kiddo come home. 

But her Dad wasn’t really prepared for the lifestyle changes being a full time parent required, and he wasn’t prepared to parent a difficult kid who could spot an opportunity to manipulate a mile away. 

During all of this, Kiddo’s Mom was working really freaking hard. I won’t tell too much of her story but she learned some really hard lessons the hard way, and came out the other side. At one point she realized she needed truly to commit to doing a tremendous amount of work in order to get her kids back, and commit she did. She took advantage of absolutely every class, every therapy session, every resource that could be made available to her. She requested extra services and completed them. She drove all over kingdom come to get to every appointment and meeting and service. She worked her ass off.

And it paid off. Eventually Mom was able to get Brother out of the institution that he was in, and start parenting him in a home environment. I don’t know how she does it but she has a gift with him and is doing an amazing job raising an insanely difficult child with a lot of very serious mental health issues. And after she had had Brother home for a while, she brought Kiddo home, too. 

Mom and Dad both recognized that kiddo was very genuinely and very significantly attached to Seth and me, and God bless them, they wanted us to stay in Kiddo’s life for the long haul. It’s been 3 1/2 years since Kiddo went to live with her dad, and throughout all of that time we have had her with us for at least one weekend a month, and currently she spends every other weekend with us. She still has her own room here in our house. This is HER house as much as it is ours. Last weekend she told me that we are not allowed to ever sell this house unless it’s to her when she’s a grown-up. This place, this little family, has become her rock.

Her Mom is absolutely thriving and I am overjoyed to say she has become a very good friend. She is now working full-time and in school full-time (making the Dean’s list!), while parenting the kids beautifully. She has learned how to ask for help when she needs it, and is there for me whenever I need a listening ear. We talk about what to do with the kids when they act out, coordinate holidays together, and Mom knows we have her back no matter what happens. 

Kiddo is thriving. She’s doing well in school and growing like a little weed. She’s still a handful, don’t get me wrong. But she knows how loved she is, and that is something every child should know.

This blog will be peppered with stories about Kiddo because she is genuinely funny as hell. The stuff she says and does makes us laugh a great deal, sometimes with her, sometimes at her. 

I can’t wait for my next Kiddo fix. 

Forever Twos

Photo by Lydia Johnson

Forever Twos

We have been parenting two-year-olds for 3 1/2 years. 

Most parents get to get THROUGH the two-year-old stage and into the threenage stage and then the eff you fours and then come out the other side with kids who can wipe their own butts and not have a meltdown about having taken off their own sock. But we just keep having two-year-olds. 

My husband and I are foster parents. That doesn’t explain why the stars aligned to give us two-year-olds for three years, it just explains the mechanics of how it’s even possible to spend three plus years with this charming, literal, neurotic stage of childhood without having had four kids of our own. 

If you don’t have a good sense of humor, two-year-olds can drown you in frustration, poop, and uneaten food that they specifically asked for. Two-year-olds could exasperate Mother Theresa in a heartbeat. It’s a proven fact.*

But there’s a lot of humor associated with raising two-year-olds too. And frankly any age kids. That’s the one thing I didn’t expect about parenting. I expected the vomit, tears, untied shoes, picky eating, hair-pulling frustration, but I didn’t expect the sheer joyous hilarity of kids. 

Right now we have a “good one.” Truly, as much as any two-and-a-half-year-old can be a good kid, this one is, aside from the occasional (daily) mischief like the photos below. Tiny is whip smart, funny as hell, and understands way more than we sometimes want her to. 

Tiny has been with us since April. She came to us because she was failure to thrive and Seth (who is in nursing school) and I specialize in kids with medical issues. She spoke not a word of English in April, and now is talking circles around our expectations on a daily basis. She’s terrified of frogs (“water ribbits”), is addicted to Shopkins, loves to stand on things to be taller (she’s called “Tiny” on here for a reason) and sing into things like a microphone. She has more shoes than I do and changes them multiple times a day. I could go on and on endlessly about her charms.

So often people hopefully ask me if we will get to “keep” this one, especially because it’s apparent I’m head over heels in love with this little sprout. But remember when I mentioned Tiny understands more than we sometimes want her to? Yeah, here’s the thing. She has a Mama, two older sisters, and two older brothers whom she loves fiercely. She talks about them and has pretend phone calls with them many times a day. She carries around a laminated photo of them, and tells anyone who will listen what their names are. She sobs inconsolably after real phone calls and visits. She loves her family and knows they are where she “belongs.”

She loves us pretty fiercely too. After all, when she came to us she was a sick, sick baby who was clinging to life out of sheer cussed determination. She’s come out the other side as a healthy thriving little creature who spends her days learning the alphabet already, dancing her own special dance, and generally being a happy silly well-loved little being. There’s tons of adoring attention in our house, and all the kinds of stimulation she needs. She is happy here. But she belongs elsewhere and she’s painfully aware of that. She’s Asian and comes from a rich cultural heritage my husband and I can try to teach her a bit about, but can’t recreate for her. She is already missing out on speaking the language her family speaks at home because try as I might, her language’s alphabet alone eludes me.

I don’t know what will happen with this case. Foster care is maddening in that you never know what will happen in the “system” and the courts. Her Mama has a lot on her plate and I don’t know if she can do all she needs to to get her beloved baby back. If she doesn’t, it will be a tragedy that Tiny will feel her whole life, even while growing up with us in a happy healthy home. If her Mama does get her back, Tiny will miss us for a long time and will miss out on some important opportunities in life. There’s no “right” answer, although I think going home is probably the right-er option so long as it can happen safely. My god, the heartbreak we will go through!

So what can we do while we wait to see what will happen? We try to focus on the now, where Tiny is currently bossing Seth as he rebuilds our upstairs bathroom, while doing her little classic Tiny dance. We pull out our hair over potty training frustrations, read her bilingual books in English, teach her colors (her favorite is purple), and love on her while we can.

In short, we focus on enjoying age two for a blessed little while longer.

*My husband informs me Mother Theresa never actually said any such thing, but I don’t believe it. If she didn’t say it loudly enough for it to be recorded for posterity, I’ll swear she muttered it under her breath.

Pretty two-year-old wall art…
The culprit, according to Tiny.
I love that she’s even holding out his paw that he allegedly drew with.
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