Small Victories

Well, we have had our two beautiful sweet children for just over 24 hours and let me say it's been a wondrous, joyful, sad, sweet, surprising and exhausting very long 24 hours. Possibly the longest 24 hours of my adult life, and that's including my first night on call during the 1st week in July as an intern on the Cardiac Care Unit where my patients had sick hearts and kidneys.

Where do I begin? We can start with the exhausting and sad aspects: Madelyn misses her "mama" and cries for her a lot, particularly when she is tired. She has attached herself to Joel and less to me. It does not help that I am not as physically available because Isaac (almost 16 months to the day), as it turns out, is a huge Mama's Boy. He is missing his foster family too but cannot articulate it, instead he is very clingy and has wanted to be held almost constantly, preferentially by me, but will take Joel if given no choice. I HAD to shower this morning (finally!) and he cried with Joel for a few minutes but calmed down after a few minutes.

During the "turnover" at the agency with the foster parents, it was confirmed that both slept with their respective mothers at night, no cribs. This was not a surprise and I had gleaned that from our first visit in July. I was just hoping that something got lost in translation and I had misunderstood. Nope, I had, in fact, not. So a surprise is that for his afternoon nap yesterday, night time and both naps today, Isaac has accepted the crib. It takes nearly rocking him (this is hard when there is no rocker in our hotel! My kingdom for a rocking chair!!) to sleep, then sneaking him into the crib. All the books say this won't fly because when he awakes he will be somewhere different from when he fell asleep and wake up crying and won't be able to go back to sleep. The surprise is that he self soothed with his thumb and blanket when he would awoke at night. He slept for 8 hours, halleluiah! He started waking up and going back to sleep after about 6 hours, then I felt guilty because he had a terribly stinky full diaper when I finally got him up this morning.

Madelyn is not going for the crib, that much is clear. Her first night, she slept wildly, thrashing about in her sleep. I am so glad we got a king sized bed last year. We will work on getting her to her own bed once she gets more adjusted to us and begins to forget that she is missing her foster mother, that may take weeks or months, time will tell.

A big surprise happened this morning. Clearly the children have been trained to sit in high chairs at restaurants. We all went down for our first family breakfast at the hotel buffet. We put them in the high chairs, and they were pretty happy and did great. Joel and I were surprised, no, shocked, that we actually got to eat this morning. That was not expected. Small victories, we'll take them when we can.

We haven't been kicked out of the hotel (yet) so hopefully we will get through this week. I am hoping these walls are very thick. Nonetheless, Joel and I talked about how relieved we are because these kids are so sweet and cute and smart. Perhaps we are now sounding like parents, huh? I guess we feel like we can say this without bragging because up till now, we have had nothing to do with how they have turned out so far. We know now we are so blessed.

By the way, thanks friends for keeping up with us and all your words of support. Madelyn has awakened from her nap, so time is up. More later.