Thank You Letter to Placement Part Deux

My Dear Tenille,

Two years ago tomorrow you called me. Do you remember it like I do? You may not have it etched in memory in quite the fine detail that I do, but every second of the conversation is still in my brain - recorded in high quality content for posterity (hopefully - ha ha). We had been working toward this phone call for several months - ever since we found out that Liam's mom was pregnant again - but even so my husband and I weren't ready when it came! We had so much on our plates already with two rambunctious boys - but Bethanie and Karen and Diana were slowly working on us, getting us ready for the ultimate time when we would have to make a decision that would change the face of our family in a profound way.

That time came two years ago tomorrow. You called me to let me know that Elie had made her arrival in this world and that if everything went well with the hospital and her tests we would be clear to take her home the next day. That was such an emotional day. That phone call. Making that decision. I was so scared that by saying yes I was going to ultimately ruin the dynamics of my family because we were already so stretched with all of Liam's medical appointments and our hectic and crazy work schedules. But in the back of my mind I knew it was the right decision. I knew Elie belonged with us and with her brother.

So the next day Warren and I went to pick her up from the hospital to take her home. What had been a chaotic few months during the pregnancy was raised to new levels at the hospital as it ended up requiring security and two nurses herding us out a back entrance to my car due to the commotion going on on the labor and delivery floor with the biological mother. Maybe it's because her arrival was so insane, or maybe it's because she's a girl and just a little more relaxed and easy going than the boys are, but she has been by far and away the easiest child we've ever parented!

She was such a little peanut when she came to us - a mere five pounds and an extra ten ounces. But she was perfect. She fit right in to the Rosenberg clan immediately - and my husband and both of our sons were just as smitten with her as I was! These last two years have been hectic, crazy, insanely crazy and have gone by so quickly! I cannot believe my baby turns two tomorrow!!! Two!!! When did that happen??? I have watched her grow from such a little peanut into such a well... she's still a little, petite peanut, but she's also such a big girl too!

She is kind and caring and loves to play with her baby dolls, her brother's trains, purses, and dinosaurs. She loves to wear hats and headbands, and really loves bows though she still doesn't have enough hair to pull them off yet (much to my chagrin). She's sassy and independent and totally rules the house with her little shenanigans, and I'm quite sure that she's stolen the heart of every single person who has ever met her. She loves music - all kinds - though I'm trying very hard to cultivate an appreciation of all things 80's related and U2 and Yo Yo Ma (not necessarily in that order though).

I love watching her move - she still has a funny little side-to-side gait as she runs and her short little legs are still a bit bowed - but it makes me smile every time I see her running towards me to jump into my arms to give me a hug and a kiss. She wiggles all the time whether she's dancing or just impatient to get to the next cool thing, and she has the absolute best laugh ever! And she gives the best hugs too! I cannot even begin to tell you how much I simply love this little girl to pieces!!!

She came to us unconventionally for sure, but she was meant to be part of my family and I cannot imagine my life without her.

So thank you, Tenille! Thank you for making that crazy, emotional phone call! Thank you for giving me my girl, my munchkin, my mini-me, my heart! She has made my life richer in so many ways!

From the bottom of my heart, I thank you!!

Heather

Thank you to Placement - a letter I get to write each year

This is a letter I write each year to thank the man who placed Warren with me. It's a little different each year, but I cannot even begin to say how grateful I am for that telephone call five years ago!!!

Hi Steve,

Can you believe it's been five years since you called me to tell me Warren had been born? Well... technically... I'm two days early writing this email this year, but given that it's munchkin's birthday this weekend and the Purim Carnival, I won't be near a computer, and I wouldn't let this anniversary go by without expressing my eternal gratitude to you.

Five years ago this Sunday I was sitting on a conference call with my boss right beside me when I saw the placement phone number come up on my cell phone caller ID. It had been nearly four months since Evan and I had a child in our home. We had just returned from two weeks of back to back Jimmy Buffett concerts. But when that phone number flashed across my caller ID I knew it meant something important. I quickly dashed an email off to everyone in placement saying do not call another family... I'm calling right back as soon as I get off this conference call!

I remember every.single.moment. of that ten minute wait! I remember thinking how heart broken I would be if because I was stuck on a business call I couldn't answer the phone. But you waited for me. You waited for me! Do you know how different my life would be right now if you hadn't? I'm good at playing the "what if" game, but this is one time when I refuse to play it. My life is perfect. It is perfect because of this little boy who will turn five on Sunday.

Don't get me wrong. There are moments when I could pull my hair out. There are moments when I've had to call in reinforcements and put myself in a time out (ask my aunt... she'll confirm this). There are moments where at the end of the day I've put all the munchkins to bed and told my husband that I have to go out for an hour of quiet with no kids and no husband just to get over the crazy of that day.

But over all, things are perfect, because to me this perfectly crazy life is exactly what I am meant to have. I love when Warren comes into my room at 5 AM to snuggle up for the last few minutes before we have to get the day started (even if he does kind of have dragon breath first thing in the morning). I love that he peppers me with about five zillion questions in the 30 minutes it takes for us to get dressed, brush our teeth, get our shoes on and get to school (even if some of those questions are really hard to answer - I have no idea how this kid got to be so dadgum smart, but he really comes up with some humdingers). I love that he is hyper and fidgety and sometimes a little crazy during taekwondo (even though he does sometimes have to sit in timeout). And I love that he makes me read him "The Book With No Pictures" nine times a night (even though he has it memorized and can recite it himself). And I love singing Laila Tov to him right before bed (even though I can't carry a tune in a hand basket). I love that he smells like wet dog after he's been playing really hard. I love that his hair is crazy and looks slightly like Albert Einstein's hair. I love that his voice sounds like one of the Lollipop Guild Kids. I love that he has a "collection" of stuff under his pillow - like matchbox cars, books, snappy bracelets, and action figures. I love that he gets so excited when we get to go out for snooshis (sushi) because he gets to eat with chopsticks. But most of all, I love that he calls me mommy. When he puts his arms around my neck and whispers that I am the best mommy he has ever had, my whole world melts away and there is only him.

I know you guys love the work you do or you wouldn't do it. And I know you have some days where it gets really hard. But at the other end of the phone, you're changing the world. One kid at a time. One mom at a time. You made my life perfect. Just like Rachel did when she called me with Liam and Tenille did when she called me with Elie. So while this seems like so not enough, I will tell you thank you again! Thank you for my perfect little wild boy whom I love so much! I will tell you this every year until my dying day, because my life would be so meaningless without this little munchkin in it. ​ ​

Love,

Heather Rosenberg

A good weekend

I love weekends - but let's face it, most people do. They're the time I get to be away from my desk and with my family, and they're the time I get to use my creative brain to try new things out (like recipes, crafts, new techniques for getting my kids to listen to me?)... While I didn't do any significant crafting projects this weekend, I did try some new things out with the kiddos - notably practicing not repeating myself over and over again. I didn't have a ton of success, but I did have a lot less frustrations than on a "regular" weekend which means I am likely to try this experiment out a little longer to see if it's an anomaly or if it's truly working.
Let me back up a few frames though and talk about the day leading up to the weekend and why this is such a big step for me. If you know my family, you know that we've been working through some behavior issues with my oldest son. This child is incredibly smart, observant, crafty, and strong spirited. This combination will likely be a huge blessing for him when he gets older but for now is an incredibly difficult combination to parent. If you clearly establish the authority pattern with him from the onset and remain consistent with absolutely no chinks in the armor, he does much better. Unfortunately, I did not realize this as he was growing up and was much more of a laid back parent. I was not consistent in the application of the rules and was incredibly lenient in the application of corrective actions as well (a mistake I promise I am no longer making). The reasons behind my parenting folly are the subject of a future post, but for now we'll focus on the present.
Anyway - so we had some testing done with the school system because his preschool teacher had expressed some concerns also several months ago and we got all of the results back this past Thursday. I went to that appointment with a great deal of trepidation because I was quite certain the feedback was going to be all gloom and doom - especially given that the last few weeks have been quite challenging, behavior-wise. But we got in and as the psychology intern was going through all of the results, it quickly became apparent that we were likely not dealing with a major issue but rather one that with the consistent application of positive parenting techniques would likely disappear as our child grew and matured - that while his executive function was not fully matured as of now, that it likely would mature over the next few years and that he would gain more and more ability to exercise control over his temper and reactions to various stimuli. It was like a huge weight was being lifted from my shoulders!
I left that meeting on cloud nine. Seriously.
So I went to the grocery store to get the few items I still needed to finish up making lunches for the kids lunch boxes that day and went home and made a bazillion little heart shaped PB&J sandwiches. Yes. I was so excited I made PB&Js!

I went nuts, I know. Then I was on cloud nine for the rest of the weekend because all of the suddent, it appeared that if we made some minor course corrections to our own parenting techniques we'd be looking at a much different picture. So I wrote down a few things I'd gotten from our meeting and implemented them. What do you know, they worked!

So the weekend was actually much smoother than many I've had in the past. I give you photo evidence below:

We spend a good amount of the day at the Florida Museum of Natural History on Saturday for Children's Day. Thats' where we met Olaf and got our face painted. We did a little archaeology, got to lay down in a dug out canoe, got chased by an American Mastodon, and even got to learn how to hulahoop!

All in all, it was a fun weekend... we'll definitely try this a little longer to see if we continue to get awesome behavior!

A little more fun with photos

Aside from the fact that someone really needs to teach me how to use this stupid computer, I really enjoy trying to figure out HTML. Now if only I could figure out an easier way to get my photos to line up prettier...
After looking at these photos, you're going to think I only ever dress my children in red, but I don't! Honest!

This is Warren chasing me with his remote control helicopter. I managed to pluck it right out of the sky with my bare hands before he plowed it into my face! He thought that was pretty cool!

This is Liam at Momo's pizza last weekend. Momo's serves pizza slices as big as your head. He ate the whole dadgum thing! I swaer, if he had better balance and coordination I'd be convinced he was going to be a linebacker. But alas, he's a little uncorrdinated thing!

This is Liam doing some sensory play on day that was way too cold to be outside playing on the playset. He's doing so much better with sensory play and is really starting to blossom with his oral motor stuff too. I love the progress he's making!

This one is him playing with some playdoh while I was getting dinner ready. I don't think he was exactly happy with the texture and consistency of this one though.

This is another shot of Warren at Dorothy B Oven park a couple of weeks ago. We had fun that day - and I thought he looked super cute in this photo!

Fair warning - my husband got me a computer two years ago for my birthday and I still haven't learned how to use it. So these might not look great, but I thought you might like to see some photos of the munchkins as a break from all my ranting... I thought it would be nice for you to be able to appreciate the cuties I have to wrangle every day...

This is Elie. She is working on sensory play here since it was way too cold outside to go outside to do physical therapy.

Warren decided that snuggling in bed with me is way more fun than getting up to go to school. Who can refuse such a cutie?

This is a broccoli we grew in our backyard garden. It was delish! This is definitely one way to get your kids to eat their veggies!

Elie and I had an appointment at the doctor this day. She picked out her totally purple outfit to match her totally purple lunchbox, shoes and jacket. I promise, I don't do this. She does.

Mr. Adams took Warren under his wing before class to start teaching him how to sweep the floor! Yeah! I knew we loved Mr. Adams, but I didn't realize just how much I'd love him for teaching my child basic cleaning skills too! Warren usually doesn't get a pre-made yogurt. Normally I make them from the big tubs of plain greek yogurt I buy... today was a rare treat.
Okay - I confess. I am one of those moms who secretly loves the idea of her daughter wearing big bows and cute pigtails. So far those, my little munchkin has been lacking in the hair department. BUT!!! We finally got enough hair for a pony tail. It isn't much, but I'll take it!
These next few photos are of Liam and Elie playing at our friend Danny's house for Niegal's birthday party. They both LOVED the phony pony and Elie was booking it on teh tricycle! Go Elie Bean!
I had to bring Warren in to town for an appointment, so we stopped for a burger at Sonny's. He scarfed it down like no one's business - we also played a little at Dorothy B. Oven Park. He had a thing for trying to eat the candy canes and the snow flakes. Weird kid. I love him, but he's weird! :)

One more kiss, one more nibble, one more hug

I have those days where I hate dropping my kids off at school. I linger. I dawdle. I lollygag. I ask for just one more hug, one more nibble, one more kiss. I kiss their noses and stand in the doorway unsure of my ability to actually turn around and walk out of the building. I don’t know why they happen or what causes the anxiety inside my head to build up to such a crescendo that I almost can’t bear it, but it does happen, and I find myself turning around one last time to call their name. I sign “I Love You!” to them and blow a kiss before I finally leave to head to work. Usually, on those days, I fidget on the drive to work. I fret. I think about what happens if that Mack truck coming towards me blows a tire and flattens me. Will my kids remember me? Will they know I love them? Will Evan raise them to be kind, loving, happy, secure little people? I hate those days – bloody hate them with a passion, actually.

Most of our adult anxieties can be traced back to our childhood – something happens to us along the way that plants a seed of doubt about some aspect of our lives, and the right growing conditions allow that seed to grow into a full on adult-sized plant of doubt or anxiety that we then spend the rest of our lives trying to prune back or pluck out of existence. For me, abandonment was a prominent theme of in childhood – lack of stability, fighting between my parents and everyone else, my mom using me as a pawn with the rest of my family, my brother and sister being kidnapped, my mother’s inability to keep a job or house for any length of time, moving from school to school – all of these things shaped in me a lack of any sense of permanence. I either tried desperately to glom onto anyone who came into my life or I feigned indifference and an unwillingness to commit in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to eventually lose them.

So now, as an adult, I have things that I’m desperately in love with – my munchkins, my husband, what’s left of my family – and I’m still terrified of losing them, though my methods of coping aren’t the same as when I was eight or fifteen or twenty-five. I sometimes don’t feel like I deserve them; that I’m worthy of the unconditional love those little people give me each day or the affection my husband shows when he’s being a sweetie or the sense of belonging that comes from being a family. I feel sometimes like it’s this grand joke the universe is setting up giving me things that I am so fond of now; that the joke is that the rug will be pulled out from under me and I will lose them just as I did when I was a child. And it’s hard to go day by day thinking that way.

Everyday parenting decisions are so much more difficult when the internal argument for allowing my kids to do or not do something deals with the legacy I’m leaving in their little minds rather than is it the right thing for them to do developmentally. Having the conversations with my family about how I feel about this or that is so much more difficult when those conversations are tempered with all the icky feelings of things in the past – what happens if we start the conversation and something happens to us in the middle of it and the conversation is never completed? And don’t even ask me how interacting with a spouse that both makes me weak in the knees and want to kill him simultaneously is made more difficult when being afraid that the wrong fight at the wrong time will make our relationship come to a screeching halt.

My adult life has been a series of missed opportunities to set right the craziness of my past. My dad died last year, and though I hadn’t spoken to him since I was in my late teens, there was a profound sense of loss that came with that phone call. I don’t have many memories of my dad – and the ones that I do have are really a mixed bag of sweet and sour – but like most other humans, I’ve been conditioned to feel like a dad matters. His death closed a door that, while in reality had been closed since I was a very young child, had remained open in my mind – always with the possibility of the fairytale ending that so often happens in sappy romantic comedies. Reconnecting with my sister(s) has kind of been the same way – on the one hand, my relationship with Amy is so full of promise and possibility because each of us has come so far in overcoming the crappy childhoods we had but we are forever tied by a sad shared thread that connects us to so much pain and bitterness too. How do you create a relationship that’s full of the sweet when it’s born of such bitter? I don’t know, but I’d like to think she and I will figure it out along the way. My aunt passed this weekend, and though I’ve only had one conversation with her in my adult life, my child’s mind still remembers her laughing and calling me honeybun, and so it feels painful to know that there will never be the opportunity to figure out the whys and whats behind the isolation in that relationship. It’s a weird, complex feeling to know that there was a reason behind so many of these people leaving my life over the years that was beyond my control – one that brings with it so much guilt over what my devotions and attachments should be when the understanding is so far beyond my grasp.

And for the rest of my family who has scattered through time because of pain and torment created by my parents – how do I fix that? How to I set right what someone else broke? Is it even possible to fix something I had no control over being broken? Is there a way to take all of the fragmented memories of a child’s mind and sew them up into a quilt of comfort in adulthood – one that will protect against the bitter cold of fear of abandonment? I don’t know. And that makes me feel so helpless at times. My friends and mothers-in-law have commented so often that I stay so busy and I’m always doing something with the kids. My aunt says I don’t know how to be still – and she’s right – and they’re right. I am and I don’t. I have no idea how to be comfortable in my own skin or in my own headspace so I stay busy.

I hope that the things I do with my children will keep them from feeling disjointed and uncomfortable when they’re my age, and that they will figure out they’re truly, deeply loved. I hope the one more kiss and one more nibble and one more hug rituals will allow them to never feel the fear of losing someone they love without knowing whether that person would have gone to the ends of the Earth and back for them. I hope that my scattered family will realize the memories they have in my head are too few and far between, but are mostly sweet and poignant and that I want more of them. I hope my husband will know that I love him beyond words even though I really seem like I’m fussing at him more often than not. I hope that the anxious days will eventually be fewer and farther between – or that my coping mechanisms will be easier to employ. But most of all, I hope that no one else ever has to have a missed opportunity to tell someone they love exactly how they feel.

Have I mentioned I hate giving speeches???

Hi! My name is Heather Rosenberg and I’ve been a foster parent for a little over five years now and an adoptive parent for going on three. I’ve been on our board for almost four years now, two of them as the vice president and a year and a half as a general board member. While I was trying to come up with witty and important things to tell you all about why I wanted to run again for an office of the association the only thing that kept really coming into my brain was how much I’ve hated elections ever since I was in middle school which is odd considering I eventually went on to do my graduate work in Applied American Politics and Policy and studied elections. You see, there comes a point in the history of every association where growing pains start to develop – and suddenly the status quo is no longer working. The increasing needs of the members of the association begin to take on a life of their own and start to push the direction of the association in directions no one really foresaw in the beginning – this is normal – it’s a real phenomenon in body of research on associations.

We’re at that point in our own association – and this is actually a great point to be at when you look at how things go from here! We’re no longer the tiny association trying to get by with a handful of people showing up at random meetings. Now we have a dedicated group of parents who come each month and a contingent of new families who are added at the graduation of each MAPP class – and they come to us excited about this journey and excited about the idea of making a difference in the lives of the kids who come into our homes. We have some pretty awesome relationships developed with our partner agencies and we’re looked to by other community partners for information about things our families need to support the kids in care. This is an awesome place to be – full of promise and potential. But the next two years are critical for our association in that we have to harness the momentum and energy we have in this room right now to help solidify the association as the go to place for information, resources and help on all the issues our families face. In order to accomplish this, we need to be more organized than we have in the past which means we can’t just fly completely by the seat of our pants anymore.

As an association there are things we should be doing to help our families. We should have meetings – we do this monthly right now and offer two hours of training – but we should also have opportunities to gather for support and rejoicing and fellowship and friendship – we’ve not done a great job of this recently and we need to fix that. We also need to develop avenues of support that transcend physical meetings – it’s great that we come together once a month to meet, but what happens when you get a placement in the middle of the night and you need help meeting the needs of that new child or children? Having a strong network in place of families who can step in to help fulfill immediate needs is a critical function of our kind of association – we should be developing this avenue of support for our families and helping to facilitate strong relationships between families so that there’s never a family who has to say no to placement because they don’t have the right resources available when placement calls.

We should have a strong network of people who can help with individual case work needs for those times when the system breaks down - because we all know this happens on occasion. We’ve seen that happen recently with the Medicaid MMA rollout, or with some changes at the ELC offices, or even when wonky things happen with your individual cases. When those kinds of things happen, there should be people at the association who can help get the system moving again. And the biggest issue of all for me personally, is the association should have a strong voice when dealing with legislation and rule making that governs the practice of child welfare – we should be the first folks the legislature, cabinet, governor and agencies try to tap into when considering changes to how we handle kids in care because we are the people who deal with the end results of everything they tinker with and we’re right here in the capital city with easy access to the people in charge.

The thing all of these things have in common is they all take teamwork and partnerships to happen. No one in this room can make all of this happen alone – we need a commitment to tapping into the strengths of each of our members to build an association that is healthy, strong, vibrant and able to make each of our individual voices so much louder. We have to be able to ask for help from our members and partners and then be able to accept the help offered – otherwise this won’t work. Whoever wins the election tonight for each of these positions needs to be ready with a framework for what they want to accomplish and how they want to accomplish it.

Mine is that I want to get a good grip on our finances – to figure out what money we have, what monies we have coming in and then develop a strategy to increase the grants and donations we have gotten in the past to get some permanent office space where our association can live and where we can run our resources out of. I want to hold our officers accountable for our monies and to know at any point what our financial picture looks like.

I would like to fix our presence on the internet to show that we are an association that supports our families so that anytime a potential foster family or adoptive family looks for information in our area we are the first thing they see – we should be helping drive recruitment and retention of excellent families.

I would like to increase the number of tangible resources we can access for our families by developing a series of in-kind partnerships with various community resources. Need a babysitter? Need a haircut for your kids? Need supplies or clothes or help furnishing a room for a new child? We should have someone we can recommend – and we should even have someone who will help keep the costs as low as possible. There are tons of resources in our community that we simply have not tapped into because we weren’t organized enough to do it. There are tons of people who would help our kids if we just asked them to – I want to ask them to.

I want to set up a group of our families who can help mentor new families as they come into the system – we had this approved with BBCBC two years ago and then it fell through the cracks – we shouldn’t have let them drop this project. I want to help hold the agencies accountable to our membership and to our kids and not let projects that have so much possibility to help our families be dropped again - like the mentor project.

I want to have a committee that actively works on issues in front of the legislature or agencies. Did you know that two years ago the adoptions lobbyists got a small insertion in a bill that now makes it mandatory for the agency to advise families of the ability to do a private adoption rather than go through a TPR? Even if that child has been in s stable placement for two years? Yep. We let that one in because no one was watching. Same thing for the changes to the Rilya Wilson act last year – if we had had a more concerted voice talking to our legislators explaining to them how the changes would impact how we put our kids into childcare, maybe the outcome would have been slightly different.

I want to tap into you guys to find out what things you all need and then figure out a way to make those things happen. Parents night out? We’ve done that and parents and kids loved it. Activities for the kids? Let’s make it happen. Support groups for our kids? I think it would be a great idea. But this can’t be the Heather Rosenberg show – this has to be the every family show. I have to have your commitment that you will use your voices to help drive this association so that we can achieve so much more than what we’ve done so far. This first step of that promise is to use your voice to elect me tonight.