A Week, Briefly (#7)

It has been a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

It is the second of it's kind this week.

I'm seriously irritable, annoyed, and in no mood to be the mom.

My kids can feel it.

I see it in their eyes.

Something's gotta give, and it's going to have to be me.

What can I give?

While I think I'll remember the week as a whole.

Making pictures with the garden mulch . . .
 

"Painting" with water--probably my favorite toddler/preschool activity ever.
 

Little Sister is beginning to walk.  Every other hour someone calls, "Mom [Little Sister] just took a step!"  and picks her up to cover her with kisses and tell her she's marvelous.  What a blessing it is for our babies to have so many cheerleaders.

Baymax is more and more mobile each day.  His army crawl is alarmingly fast, and he's sure trying to get/keep his belly off the ground.  He's just waaaaay too chubby to hold that much weight up yet. :)

We had 3 days of preschool this week.  We sing a gathering song ("Here We Are Together"), sing some silly movement songs, have a MindUp lesson, and close by singing "I Am a Child of God."  The kids like it a lot.  This week we reviewed the functions of the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex; we practiced counting to 10 to have time to think before we explode; we used stick puppets to talk about emotions; we read Sometimes I'm Bombaloo as a springboard for talking about losing and finding our tempers.

The afternoons have been quite warm and summery, so we've spent as much time out of doors as possible.
 Nature Angel, Little Princess and I had one math/art session about the number 8 this week.

We had two whole family art sessions this week exploring color.  One day we played with two shades of yellow and another day we explored one shade of dark blue.  We tied them into our history and geography lessons by talking about the organization of light and dark during the creation.

We painted outside after an afternoon of water play . . .
 



Dad and the babies hung out together while the rest of us painted.
 


Next week we'll use both light and dark on the same page.

As for our Family School, it was a history week.  We began with the council in heaven and traveled through time to the dispensation of Noah.  My personal highlight of the week was listening to Little Princess tell the story of Noah.  Her older sisters were actually open-mouthed in wonder as they listened to the details she remembered from the Bible.

Little Princess's beeswax sculpture of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Nature Angel's tree--complete with Adam and Eve each holding a piece of the fruit.
The big girls all did 4 days of math assignments.

Rose Red worked her way through sections 2 and 3 of her LifePac science book 901.  She also worked hard at reading the 8 chapters her Communications 110 teacher assigned the class to read.  She finished 3 chapters (including written summaries) of her supplemental history reading.

That's about it for academics, but the life lessons have been grueling.  The kids had the opportunity to meet their biological grandmother and see her sister, their great-aunt, who lives in town.  Both women tried to get custody of these precious ones, and both were turned down by their respective state children's divisions.  I don't know why.  Those details are not for me to know.

I do know they are lovely, gracious women who treated our whole family with respect and consideration.  I hope I did the same in return.

Goodness knows I tried!

We have a picture of the children with these two fine family members, and someday it will be a tremendous blessing to them.

For now, though, it is a nightmare.

All 4 of them reacted badly after the fact--screaming, crying, tantruming, whining, breaking things, kicking, hitting, spitting, urinating, name calling, etc., etc., etc..

Though I know that regression is a normal part of healing, I am mentally and physically exhausted, and I'm struggling terribly to keep any sort of perspective.

(What I really want to do is curl up under the covers and not come out.)

I guess I'm kind of hiding while I write this post . . . what I ought to do is go get the Uno cards and play a game with the kids.

I'm off . . .

***************
PS   We just found out that my sister's husband has cancer . . . he's a wonderful daddy of 6 and the love of my sister's life.  They have an appointment with an oncologist next week to find out what's what.  For now they're shell-shocked, and the rest of the family is wondering what on earth we can do to help.

Comments

  1. Those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days are going around! You are not alone. I am praying for you!

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  2. Hi I just want to give you some encouragement. God bless. I have my good and bad days, too

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  3. I am so sorry about your brother-in-law. Prayers for his family and the doctors. And prayers for your confused little ones and for you. You are an inspiration to me. Tantruming means they feel somewhat safe in their new environment, yes? It will ease with time. I love the painting. I know you have angels surrounding you to inspire and help.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow, Anne - what a week for you. I am praying constantly for you and your sweet family, and also for your brother-in-law.

    As I think I've told you, I have a friend who adopted four foster children just like you, and I have heard almost exactly the same stories from her. She told me that some days when her husband came home, she would just collapse in his arms, crying. Several years later, though, all of those children are doing spectacularly well, and I bet yours will be too. You are doing such an awesome job, and you are in inspiration to me.

    I wondered if it would be possible for me to email you privately? You can email me first so that you don't have to post your email on your site - dianablogs at cox dot net. But if you don't give out your contact info to random people on the web, I totally understand that. :)

    Have a wonderful night!
    Diana

    ReplyDelete

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