Our new placements have arrived! S and B joined our family at 4:15 yesterday afternoon. S is a very advanced and talkative little girl. She seems like she's 4.5 yrs old going on 10! She loves her baby brother, B. Unfortunately, she is old enough to realize some of the reasons why she is in care. As I was doing a bedtime routine with her last night of reading a few books and then tucking her in, she sat and talked to me about how she okay being here with us for a while. She recognizes that her parents have things they need to work on before she can go back home. She talked about how her parents always argue and how she doesn't like that. It seems like in just the few short hours we've had with her, that she is settling in alright, but it broke my heart to hear her coming to terms with possibly being here for a while. It's different having an older child in our home that can reason through such things and one who has to come to terms with it. When we had X, he seemed to just go with the flow... with S it will be more of an adjustment I think.
B is almost 15 months old. What is funny about that actually goes back to when we first took J in. When J joined our family, we had X and C still. C was 5.5mths old and J was 3.5mths old. After having essentially twins, where one was a little more advanced and they were on different eating and sleeping schedules, we said that from there on out, we would like the kids to be at least six months apart. Well... B is 15mths and J is 9mths... how perfect :) B is able to stand on his own and take one or two steps. He seems to be saying words to identify things. It sounded like he sort of said cat and dog when looking at the appropriate animal. He also said a few more things, but I've forgotten what they were now. We are still trying to figure out his bedtime routine. I think last night he fell asleep mostly out of pure exhaustion... and he had also had shots earlier in the day, so he may have been not feeling good as well. But it seemed more like he was just tired and ready for bed.
So back to the wide awake at 6am thing... We currently have the boys in separate rooms. I was scared last night that if one woke up, it'd wake the other. And not wanting to deal with that on the first night, and also wanting to see how good of a sleeper B was, we put J in our room for the night. Well, it went well until 4:15 when J woke up. Tim gave him a bottle and changed his diaper, then I rocked him back to sleep and put him down. Then laid in bed for two hours... It is so unlike me to have this happen. Normally I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. And especially since we didn't get to bed until midnight. I just have so much running through my head with S and B now in our home. Things we need to get for them in the morning, things I want to do with them in the spring and summer, thinking about the future, thinking about toys, thinking about how to help S be a kid, thinking about the little we know of their background, thinking about how to introduce her to God, thinking about how she may react to church on Sunday... and so on...
Hopefully I can either take a nap later today or still be wide awake for class tonight. I welcome any prayers on our behalf... for good sleep, for good transitions, for Tim tonight as he puts them to bed on his own, for me teaching tonight on little sleep, for this weekend when Tim works.
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