The Davis Family

Doing schoolwork and posting blog photos this morning. Just a few more subjects left and it’s only 9am. That’s a snow day for you! Kids can’t wait to get ouside!

Daniel loves to go alllllllll over the house.

Carolyn coming into my bedroom one morning while I was sitting at my desk.

Anna at ballet

Barre time

Center work

Papa time in the morning

View from my bed.

I got excited and ordered most of NEXT YEAR’s schoolwork already.

This girl keeps us all laughing. She LOVES this pink, stretchy bag thingy. Sometimes she climbs inside. Sometimes she stuffs half the household items inside and drags it around.

Sweetly sleeping…. he does nap some days!

Physical therapy evaluation…. discovered this and I wish I could have captured his glee. He called it a “bath” and splashed and played with remarkable enthusiasm for almost an hour!

My dancer:

Daniel and Papa on a weekend morning:

Here I am with lots of random thoughts.

When disability gets to me and a soapbox rant
What my kids ages are

So I have a few things on my mind. One has to do with a failed outing the other day as it relates to disability. You see, I decided to pack up the kids and go to the local YMCA to tour it. I prepared a snack and a meal for each of the boys, changed their diapers, took Jordan to the bathroom, had the girls go to the bathroom and find their shoes, dressed the boys in something besides pajamas, had the girls grab a snack from the cupboard, planned to buy fast food for the girls’ and my lunch, packed a diaper bag, grabbed a water bottle and…. left.

The YMCA offers 2 hours of free child care each day so parents can exercise and socialize. I figured I could keep Jordan with me, maybe in his wheelchair, since I don’t think Jordan would stay settled for anybody else. (Besides – crying, autism meltdowns, physical aggression, and stripping naked probably are well beyond their ability to handle) I figure Daniel will absorb into a 2-4 year old class alright and Carolyn would be with him.

Then things started falling apart. First, Jordan started crying in the car. A lot crying. Autism meltdown crying and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Holding his hand didn’t help. Asking him to be quiet didn’t help. Playing his favorite music didn’t help. He was red in the face, screaming and ramming his head against the window. The girls are stressed by this, but did pretty good. Daniel did not. He kept yelling, “Jordan. Nooo!!” and crying. Any few minutes of Jordan not crying, Daniel was demanding toys that weren’t even in the car and raging (you know a good little toddler stomping, screaming fit) when we didn’t have it. Yeah. The boys were clearly experiencing really high stress. And I couldn’t fix it. And I was trying to drive.

We got there. Jordan continued to melt down even in his stroller. So I guess it wasn’t the car causing the problem.

It’s so emotionally hard to see the child you love in such emotional pain.

Jordan was in the wheelchair and Daniel was in my front carrier, sitting sideways in my oversized ergo. The girls took turns pushing Jordan with me and we trooped in, for better or worse. Daniel started fussing and asking for things he couldn’t have and Jordan eventually melted down. I fed Jordan lunch on the floor in the hall while the director told me that it’s against policy to go to exercise classes with children with you and she didn’t know if an exception could be made for us. We cut the tour short and I dug into my backup-feeding-tube-supplies and fed Daniel lunch while a wide-eyed employee handed me the YMCA booklet.

Y’all. I have practiced acceptance of limitations for years. I’ve been Jordan’s mommy for over six years. But this one kicked my butt for some reason. Maybe it’s because it’s new for me to not be able to take my kids somewhere on my own. Maybe it’s because I had gotten my hopes up too high for something that I knew ahead of time was outside our family’s natural sphere. But this I know: It is okay for me to grieve. It is okay for me to be sad about the things I have lost along with what my sons have lost. I don’t have to be a superhuman and just be rainbows and unicorns about everything. Because some things in life hurt.

The rest of that day were a deep, painful depression. The next day was fatigue and recovery. And as time goes on, I’m getting back to happy.

Happy’s a funny thing. Because life is full of suffering as well as pleasure. I don’t resent suffering, nor do I pursue pleasure to the exclusion of everything else.

I listened to a program on NPR some months ago, where a family was being interviewed. The family had three children, including a child with mild autism and a son more severely affected by autism. One of the peculiarities of this family is that they cannot close the bathroom door when the go to the bathroom or the brother freaks out. The man doing the interview kept angling his questions towards drawing out negative feelings and negative attitudes about living together with an autistic person. I could just slap the guy! NPR likes to put a lot of value on humanitarian ideals. I appreciate that. So since when does your brother experiencing a disability become something we should complain about? Aren’t all people intrinsically individual? Isn’t it our deep desire to be loved and accepted just as we are? How would we want to be thought of if we were the one “born that way?”

A better goal than the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of loving others as we love ourselves. That means we need to love and care for ourselves. And it means being willing to be together with our fellow humans in their suffering/weirdness/peculiarities/struggles/aspirations/success. It’s that empathy thing.

Okay – that’s all the soapbox for today.

I realized that I am running a home with a preteen, an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old, a toddler with trust issues, and an infant. Jordan is really like an infant right now… his emotions are unpredictable and there is crying for no reason and I have to drop things and go sit with him at any given time. Daniel has crises of identity on regular intervals and I have to drop everything and go sit with him for a bit. I give myself permission to consider myself awesome.

Two years ago, my heart loved this girl as her mother. Because of her, Daniel is my son. I recently learned that she was never adopted and my heart hurts. Will you pray for her and share this post in hopes her family sees her?

When I think of “orphans,” I think of her.

She didn’t ask to be left in an orphanage, but there she is. There she exists. She was born just two months before Daniel was, almost to the day. And Daniel is home and she was left behind.

And so I will share about her with great longing that she becomes part of a family. If it makes a difference, we will financially support her adoption process, though we are still recovering from Daniel’s adoption expenses. She is THAT valuable. What greater investment is there, than to invest in the life of a child?

I can guarantee you that she is not remotely meeting her potential or experiencing life as a little girl should.

Let me introduce to you, a gem of great price… “Kimmy.”

Two years ago, at age 3, she weighed just under 15 pounds and was 31″ tall…. the weight of an average 5-month-old and the height of a 16 month old. I have asked after her growth since, but do not know yet.

She has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. She clearly interacts with people when they make the attempt to interact with her and when she smiles, my heart swells. She also sits staring, in her own silent world a fair amount of the video. Poor baby.

I cannot name her location or share her name in a public location. But you can know that she is in a country dear to my heart and that she was born in 2013.

I do not intend to mislead you. Adoption is not an easy process, nor is parenting a child long neglected. But there is beauty in love.

Please share my beautiful love, Kimmy, and pray for her to find a family!

Total adoption cost with one person traveling from the west coast is about $25K.
MSRP on a new Ford F250 is about $33K.

I’d rather take out a loan to redeem a life than to drive a fancy new car.

Adoption details:
There is a tax credit that will get you up to $13K back if you have loans to pay off. (We traveled with 3 people each trip and the cost was about $31K.)
The entire process will likely take 10-15 months.
There are two trips required, one for about a week and one for 1-2 weeks.
Only one parent need travel and there are very few limitations to adopting from this country.
Minimum USCIS income is required (125% of US poverty level).

Please feel free to email me with more questions at davis.adopt@gmail.com

Differences in the kids learning:

Anna: Quick to decode words/read. Difficulty reading phonetically. Reads very quickly. Reading comprehension is average and recall is low (like her mother). Spelling is a challenge. Reads huge volumes of fun chapter books. Oral reading is engaging and inflection is intuitive, but enunciation is difficult.

Maggie: Difficulty (at first) understanding how vowels have multiple sounds. Reads average/slow pace. Patient with long stories. Impressive reading comprehension and recall. Intuitive speller. Oral reading is good with mostly clear speech.

Carolyn: Consistent, logical, phonetic decoding of words. Much faster reading when words are in context. Reading comprehension is good. Oral reading is monotone. Spelling… to be determined.

It’s fascinating to me how all their particular styles of learning/understanding/knowing are shown in their reading alone.

Anna loves the action of the story and flies through them with confidence. Slowing down to notice details, enunciate clearly or track what she read/where on the page was that… not her forte. If she could maintain her clarity of speech, we’d all listen to her for a long time since she carries the story with her voice. Just don’t ask her to spell stuff or remember details.

Maggie is more deeply interested in all the details of a story, noting names, remembering order of events and retelling stories with enthusiasm. If you want just the story and get the the point, do not ask Maggie. She will share all the details – every one – and her ideas and imagination about the series of events as well. She’s got the details and enthusiasm down and thankfully her spelling can keep up more or less.

Carolyn is all business. She will decode, understand and even laugh sometimes at the right places. She has always been an ordered, determined child. But breaking her voice from monotone when she reads is not a natural skill for her by a long shot.

Children are fascinating. People are.

Words Daniel knows or is learning:

Eat
Drink
Tiger/Rawr!
Eyes
Ears
Nose
Chin
Cheek
Mouth
Teeth
Neck
Chest
Tummy
Legs
Feet
Knee
Learning arms and hands and ankles and hair
I think he knows all our names. He doesn’t “call” us, so I’m not positive, but sometimes he identifies who he’s commenting on and he will repeat the names when we practice.
Daniel and Danny
All done
Ow-ow-ow-ow
Tube and “Tube on” or “Tube off” (for putting his tube on for mealtime)
Cord
In
Out
On
Off
Light
Downstairs (for requesting to go up or down stairs)
Down (as in, “Put me down.”)
Uh-oh!
Oh no!
Help!
Thank you
All done
Bath
Lay down
Change diaper (he thinks this is one word)
Scratch (learned that when his incisions were healing)
No-no!
“Jordan!”
Shirt
Pants
Socks
“I love you”
“Brush your teeth” (thinks this is one word)
Words he’s learning: bottom, back, floor, wall, head, shhhhh, what?, this!, more?…

Words I need to teach him: Radio, music, book, couch, car, doctor, home, outside, inside…

Daniel is healing nicely from his bilateral orchiopexy and his gtube placement. His bruising and scabbing is almost gone and he’s pain free except when I mess with the gtube to put the feeding extension/tube on and off. All those doctor appointments and the surgery were a big scare for him and his “honeymoon” period wore off as fear reared its ugly head. He is having trouble sleeping during the night and remaining calm during the day. He’s not constantly upset, but you can both see and hear when he’s wearing thin. His posture becomes tense, his voice raises in pitch and volume, he demands to have all the things and stops playing creatively and then rages and cries when his demands are not met. To my eyes and my heart, it is clearly a sort of acute emotional pain and it is difficult to have no immediate way to take away the hurt. We just keep staying nearby and meeting his physical needs, praying and singing and waiting with him through it.

Jordan is doing okay. We’re trialing a new medication to see if it helps him (Risperadone). I don’t know if I’m noticing any difference, but the dose is very low, so we’ll take it slow and see. When he melts down, he hasn’t stayed in meltdown for long periods of time, so perhaps that’s part of it working? He’s a healthy, curious kid and I hope he’ll be able to engage and spend more time with us (as opposed to being alone and rocking or being destructive) again soon. He seems to really cycle between months of nice and months of hard.

The girls are doing well – growing and learning and being themselves. Each of them has their own strengths and challenges and I’m honored to be in the front row as they are growing. They need both the same amount of support as the boys and far less. It’s hard to explain. Some things just aren’t apples to apples. Anna is excited to be learning the dances she’ll be performing in her ballet recital in June. Maggie is busy reading chapter books and inventing stuff with cardboard or balloons or blankets. Carolyn is a confident five-year-old who recently had her first sleepover with a friend, “because she’s big now.”

That’s all for now. My yawns are too big to continue. Let me find a few pictures.

Getting Daniel up on his feet for a minute.

The peely stuff is a bandage, not his skin.

Autism and Christmas = Automatic hand dryer!

Breakfast this day needed a towel and a whole new set of clothes. Oops!

Not my favorite place to be.

At her sleepover, doing a wax hand dip!

This is us.

Short hair = darling and also manageable.

Long hair = tangles!

First time in a salon!

Siblings.

Daniel loves playing with the filters!

Coming out from under anesthesia.

Im going to miss his darling crooked feet after they are straightened! This is at a recent physical therapy appointment.