Halloween Festivities and ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

We've been busy little bees this week. It's funny, when I take Sean and go out with my nieces and their kids I don't feel any older than "the other mothers" and THEN I remember there was a time when I changed "the other mothers" diapers and I feel old! Oh well. Catherine has told me several times she never expected to be raising kids the same age as her Aunt Carol and father. Life is a funny thing.

Steph and I took the kids to Gateway and learned the science of root beer. It was fun. While there a woman came up and said "you're Carol Cramer" and I said "well I was." I could tell she was excited to see me but I didn't recognize her. She kept saying "I'm Becky." Ah ha, she was a little neighbor girl from when we first moved to Centerville before AJ was born. She used to come over and help me with the boys. She was around 8 when I met her. When she turned 12 she used to baby sit. Her mom was a single mom with 5 kids by 5 dads. Becky and her sister Jen were the oldest and very responsible. I asked how everyone was. Now her mom is living at the homeless shelter, Victoria is on meth, Nicholas is living on the street, Christopher is an alcoholic and Jen is doing OK but in an abusive relationship. "Wow, Becky that's really sad." She said "but I'm doing good! I always knew I was going to be just like you and I am. I have three kids and a nice husband and someday I'm going to be a nurse." It was really sweet. I met her kids and they were cute. It was very touching to hear we had a positive influence on her life. We certainly weren't trying, she was just a cute little baby sitter.

And for the are you kidding me? I was talking to Jenny tonight making plans to take the girls trick or treating and she mentioned that Ryan is in jail (AGAIN). "Oh, I thought I'd told you" she said. Gee, I think I would have remembered that. Of course it wasn't his fault. They went to a haunted house and apparently he was drunk and disorderly. The not his fault part is the police computer showed he had an outstanding warrant that he has resolved. I told Jenny if there was an award for standing by her man she would get it. Of course she'd have to share it with all the women I meet at the battered women's shelter.

Garbage Dump of Adolescents

I visited the garbage dump of adolescents today, it was most unsettling. I went to the homeless clinic and had a little extra time before I was needed so I went to the “homeless youth resource center” on State Street to talk to girls about birth control. I had never been there before but I had read about it in the newspaper and had a picture in my mind of what it looked like. It was a pretty clear picture involving a large area with a pool table, computers, television, couches, washers, dryer and some cots. I don’t know where I got this fictional picture, apparently I made it up. Maybe I dreamed it. The actual center is in a dilapidated store front. I had to ask one of the dozen smoking kids standing out front how to get in. The entrance is a little side door next to a parking lot.

The use of the word “center” is a stretch. A more appropriate name would be the “homeless youth room.” It was maybe 650 square feet with a desk for staff, a TV, a couch, a bean bag chair a table and some shelves of food. There was a tiny office for an “employment counselor” and a very small kitchen. The atmosphere was depressing but the kids were heart wrenching. They are throw away kids. I am guessing at least some of them are last week’s foster kids. I was talking to one boy who was friendly but not very bright. It made me so sad because he reminded me of my Carter. It was so obvious this kid was totally clueless and he is on the streets fending for his self. If Carter had been raised in foster care he would be somewhere like that. When Carter was a teenager I took him to a psychiatrist who told me “this is the kind of kid who ends up homeless.” I was so insulted and knew then and there we would make sure Carter had his own place. The chips are stacked so high against these kids who don’t have any parental advocacy. They are the product of our foster care system, drug addicted parents and the children of the thirty year old homeless group sleeping on the river banks. As I was getting in my car I looked at two girls and a boy leaning against the wall looking dirty and lost and I had this visual of Kylie and Brie and Sean standing there in eleven years. It gave me heart palpitations.

I don’t want to downplay the efforts of the staff at the center. They were awesome and it was obvious they care but honestly, that facility is the best the state has to offer for a group of kids that has already been given the shaft. They had a note on the wall “trade your dirty socks for clean before you leave today.” (If anyone wants to do a sock collection project I know where to send them!)

After my depressing and unsuccessful visit to the center I went and did an H1N1 clinic at the “Sanctuary.” The Sanctuary is a shelter for battered women. It is gorgeous. The facility is clean, new, the residents pleasant and the staff great to work with. I sure wish the kids had something like that. I do wonder about the name Sanctuary. I always thought of a sanctuary as something for animals not humans. But, hey as nice as it is they can call it whatever they want.

Two miracles in one day

Sean when we first got him hanging out in the punch bowl.

Sean today sleeping in the cart at Costco. People kept stopping and asking did you bring that body pillow or did you buy it. I bought it! It was the cheapest, most comfortable thing I could find for him to sleep on in Costco. He was tired out from court and gymnastics.

It's been almost two years since Sean came into our lives. Longer if you consider I knew his mother while she was pregnant with him. Today at 8 a.m. Judge Kay in Bountiful second district court signed the order that Sean is legally and permanently ours. The guardianship is permanent unless the parents petition to have him returned. As part of the order to petition the court for his return they would need to be stable "both parents have lived in the same house for more than a year and maintained jobs for a year." In the two years I've known them they have lived in seven different places and have not had a job for more than three weeks. Though Jenny has been working at Burger King for almost two months which is quite remarkable.

As I have spent the last 18 months working on my thesis: Health care bias against the homeless I have done a ton of research on poverty. The one ongoing theme of poverty is that those who are in generational poverty don't get out. The only real chance for escape is through a mentor. Honestly, I have mentored Jenny for two years and nothing has changed. I feel like I am banging my head against a brick wall. Well, Don says some things have changed, we have Sean, the Jensen's have Ryder and Jenny has an Implanon and won't get pregnant for at least three years. I have had some success in that aspect but none as far as changing their mind set about priorities, cleanliness, or parenting skills. Heck Ryan spent July, August and part of September in jail for domestic violence and ten days after getting out of jail he beat Jenny. I'm just not feeling the BIG change. According to the literature even those with excellent mentors only raise from poverty to middle class about two percent of the time. Ryder and Sean will be my 2%. (I didn't do any research on adoption so taking credit for Ryder and Sean's future success is probably cheating. But what the heck!)

What does guardianship mean to us? It means Sean can be on our health and dental insurance. We can enroll him in school, make medical decisions, take him on trips. More importantly it means I don't have to stay up at night worrying the DCFS is going to take him while he is visiting his parents and not let me have him back. It also means that his parents can't move away and take him with them. It really means more than can I express. It is such a tremendous relief. I really wondered if this day would ever come and it did. YIPPEE! We are very thankful to have a sense of stability in our relationship with Sean. It means I have control over when he visits his family. He still visits regularly as he has a close relationship with his sisters but visits are at agreed upon times.

What does it mean for Sean? It means he can sleep in his own bed, grow up in the same house. Go to gymnastics, swimming, play soccer and do all the normal things middle class kids do. It means he doesn't have to be exposed to domestic violence or visit anyone in jail. It means fruits and vegetables and a table to eat dinner at. It means books and the library and a tremendous vocabulary. (Sean wanted some of my pudding, he didn't ask for a bite he said "I want to share")

What does it mean for Jenny and Ryan? It means that while we are legal guardians they are still his parents. They can see him. We can not leave the state without letting them know where we are going and we can't move out of state. It means he still has the last name Vestal. Jenny has had so many losses in her life that this is way that she can give Sean a good life without having to cut all ties. Jenny has given up custody of two sons already. Damien was taken by the state and she placed Ryder for adoption at birth. I think the thought of totally severing ties with another son is too much for her and this arrangement gives her some power. I'm not sure what it means to Ryan but I am grateful to Ryan because he was the one who was willing to sign over custody. Jenny would have never agreed if Ryan had not been 100% supportive.

I still worry about the girls and Jenny for that matter. She called me Wed night in tears. She was walking home from Burger King and her shoes fell apart on her feet. She didn't have any more shoes to wear to work. Don dropped her off a pair of mine and mom's shoes to wear to work the next day. Can you imagine? Most of us live in a world with closets full of shoes we don't wear. I feel bad but it also says something about decisions. There is money for beer, and pierced ears and fast food but not for shoes. I don't know how they are going to make rent in November, yet they always seem to survive.

Special note of thanks to my niece/attorney Catherine and her husband/attorney Kyle. I don't know if this would have happened without them. I owe them an enormous amount of gratitude. I think to repay them I will go on a Disney cruise with them in 2011!

Second miracle of the day. Don's sister Darci is responding to the treatment for her melanoma. Her latest test showed no new tumors and the tumors she has had shrunk. That is fabulous news.

Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes

Don, Sean and I were at the library yesterday and I found this book, Ten Little fingers and Ten Little Toes. At first glance, I was like hey, Sean was born with eleven fingers and ten toes and October only has seven fingers and ten toes, not every little baby has ten fingers and ten toes. The illustrations were so cute that I checked it out anyway. Sean and I read it and it has a really great rhythm. After every baby has ten fingers and ten toes line I would say EXCEPT SEAN he had eleven fingers, because he's special and we would laugh. We had a lot of fun reading it. For some reason I had the urge to send the author a note. Don't ask me why, I don't know, I am just strange. I found her website and sent her a note telling her how Sean and I read the book and really liked it but made adaptations because he was born with eleven fingers. I really didn't expect to get a response but tonight she sent this email. It made me laugh and I wanted to share it. Now I will have to buy a copy of the book and save the email for Sean.

Dear Carol

Thank you so much for your funny, gracious email about Sean and his set of extraordinary fingers. My darling husband was terribly concerned when I wrote TEN LITTLE FINGERS AND TEN LITTLE TOES that there would be children who didn't have that number of digits and I told him gently that on this occasion I had to go with the majority and hope that the others wouldn't mind. He nearly had a fit when he read your message. He's very tenderhearted. I pointed out that you are an exquisite example of 'not minding' and making the book very special anyway. Thank you so much.

In Adelaide where I live, my favourite children's bookseller, James Williams of Pegi Williams Bookshop has only one hand, having been a thalidomide baby. My message for him inside that book was quite something! He loved it. Thank God the world is full of understanding people with a sense of humour.

Loads of love to you both and especially to the divine Sean,

Mem Fox xxx

Language Acquisition

Watching Sean learn to communicate has been fascinating. I am not sure why it is so much more fascinating then watching Alex and AJ learn to speak. I know with Alex I was so busy dealing with Carter that I couldn’t sit back and enjoy either of their development. With A.J. I spent a lot of time worrying about how his speech was developing and if it was normal. I think because I am older, have more life experience and have learned to appreciate normal growth and development that I stand in awe at the miracle of speech development. Watching Sean learn to communicate also causes me to reflect on my father’s Alzheimer’s as I watched him lose the ability to communicate. As my dad lost his abilities I always thought how much it was like being a baby in reverse. One day you have a skill, the next day you don’t as opposed to one day you don’t have a skill, the next day you do.

Yesterday Sean got really mad at me because he wanted a bottle and I said no. He clinched his fist put them down by his side, turned red and yelled at me “NAA FIN.” He kept yelling it over and over. I said “Sean, I know you’re really mad but I don’t understand what you are saying.” He said even louder “NOT FEND!” Ah ha, I understood, he was telling me I was not his friend! The ultimate non four lettered insult given by his sisters. I was just amazed that he had the concept that when someone made you mad you could (hopefully) retaliate by telling them you were not their friend. How did he learn that? How did he learn that? I know he hears it from his sisters but that he can turn around and use it in an appropriate situation is awesome.

Carter at four

Speech just comes so easy to Sean. He can understand concepts such as, back in a minute, dads at work, let’s read a book, you are making me sad, or you are being naughty. These are not sentences involving nouns, they are verbs and adjectives. He loves to read books and he gets talked to a lot but we don't sit down and "teach" him to talk. I guess to some parents this is normal but I think back to Carter. Carter didn’t learn to communicate verbally until he was four plus years old. He had a few words as a toddler, mama, dada, baba. I remember hearing other kids talking and thinking they were all gifted and Carter was just normal. We read books to Carter, took him to the children't museum, did all the "good" parent things, surely we thought, he would be fine. The pediatrician never said anything and Carter was my first so I really didn’t think there was anything wrong and I certainly didn’t want to believe there was anything wrong. I knew he was hard to take care of and did things differently but everyone is a little different. Heck, if my doctor wasn’t going to tell me there was something wrong why look for trouble. I would tell the doctor that Carter didn't eat and had long tantrums but she never said much. After Alex was born and was talking better than Carter I could not deny that Carter had serious speech delay and was not developing normally. Carter had echolalia and by the time he was four he could repeat what people said but had no comprehension. I took Carter and had him tested at Duke and UNC. UNC diagnosed the autism and put him in a special preschool. Teaching Carter to communicate involved four hours of speech preschool three days a week, individual speech sessions two days a week and an hour of speech every afternoon at home. If I taught him the word shoe he could not apply it to anything other than the shoe I showed him so for every word I would have to have a virtual plethora of visual aids. If I wanted to teach him a word like tree, I would have to show him a tree, a picture of a tree, a toy tree. So it was for every noun. We had baskets full of toys and cards (and m&m’s for rewards). We had baskets of soft things, hard things, scratchy things, hot things, cold things….. Every single word or concept literally involved hours of teaching. It was exhausting.

When all this was happening we lived in an old mobile home in a trailer park in North Carolina. Now some people may say there are nice trailer parks. Well, this wasn’t one of them. There was a pack of pit bulls running around the park barking. My ex decided had had enough and went outside with a gun (yes, he had a gun, we were living in a trailer park what do you expect) and he shot into this pack of dogs. Holy crap, he shot one and killed it while Carter was watching. (We later saw a picture of the dog at a country store “Have you seen Skippy?” We felt bad so we drove by the address on the poster and were going to tell them their dog got hit, we weren’t going to say by what. The double wide where Skippy had lived had confederate flags for curtains and KKK spray painted on their mail box. We decided to just let the Skippy be MIA). At speech the next day they had Carter and another little boy named Eric playing a game. One would pull an item out of a box hold it up and the other child would say what the item was used for. I was standing outside the room behind a one way mirror with a couple of medical students observing. Eric pulled out a toy gun; Carter looked at it and said “shoot doggie.” The medical student said “what did he say?” I said, “I don’t know, I didn’t hear him.” His first correct response!

Carter can definitely communicate now but he still doesn’t get nuances, sarcasm or inflection. Those are really hard things to teach. Watching Sean just soak everything up like a sponge is fun. How can something be so incredibly hard for one person and easy for another? I remember asking a psychiatrist what he thought Carter’s future would hold and he said while he couldn’t predict the future we needed to understand that Carter would never be able to live on his own or have a regular job. Ha, ha doctor, you were wrong. When I get frustrated with Carter I have to take a step back and remember how far he comes. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he had not gotten all the speech therapy and hours of work.

Kids are amazing!

These pictures have nothing to do with my blog. Sean had gymnastics today then we went to Chuck e Cheese with Catherine and her boys Sean had fun. Catherine and I both decided that one hour and 15 minutes at Chuck e Cheese seemed like a lot longer. That place is so noisy. The kids had fun and would have stayed longer.