Then, I asked our friend who is a social worker with A- county about breastfeeding foster kids.  Apparently, it requires a court order. At that time, we were still pretty far off from entering the matching process, so I let go of it.  We finished our PRIDE classes  and I had a renewed motivation to start pumping (but are still a few months from entering matching).  I figured, I would never regret trying to see if I can produce milk, even if we don’t have a kid that will breastfeed.  And the way that we are talking about setting our criteria, there is a good possibility that we would be able to get the court order to allow breastfeeding.

A lactation consultant had told me that if you produce milk once, it is always easier the second time.  Starting now would be an initial indicator of what I would be capable of later and would help me determine whether I would need to use drugs to lactate.

So, I began to pump on a regular schedule, every 2-3 hours.  My nipples hurt and cracked, but I was producing drops from the very beginning. I came down with a case of the swine flu a few days after I started pumping and I just couldn’t handle it anymore. First I cut down on how often I was pumping and as my symptoms got worse, I had to cut it out entirely. At the peak of my pumping, which may have been on the 2nd or third day, I got about 7 drops from my left breast (which seems to be slightly larger and more productive.

About a month later, I started again and immediately had an even bigger production, about 11 drops.  Part of what I had read was that pumping never works as good as a baby and looking at photos of babies and fantasizing about them may help stimulate the oxytocin required for let down.  I bought Sleeping Beauties which was filled with large, glossy photos of sleeping newborns.  I would spend the 20 minutes pumping starting at that.  But over the course of a few days, pumping regularly, I got less and less until I wasn’t producing anything. Had it been saving up over the month that I had stopped? Why did it get to be less and not more?

Although it seems that some people are able to induce lactation without meds (the primary being domperidone), the vast majority are only able to produce miniscule amounts. It may be in part the difference of those who have lactated previously.  One thing is agreed at the forums at adoption.com, it is much easier and much more likely to work with meds.

So again, I have put this process on temporary hold.  I will likely wait until we are matched then pursue meds if it makes sense at that time.

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The magic tripod that allows me to maintain a highly productive lifestyle collapsed. Some Exercise, Decent Diet and Stress Management (are the three legs) stopped happening. I KNEW it was a mistake, but I scheduled two big events on the same weekend. I cooked for the anarchist cafe AND organized and held a big meeting for a new project that I am launching. And of course, the former exposed me to a whole lot of germs in black hoodies.

So, it is sort of a case of hard-to-prevent bad timing, but even before that, there were too many commitments with not enough fun. Even some of the things that used to be fun turned into areas of stress and obligation for me.  I did start dropping some things before I got sick, but there are some things that I just couldn’t budge without a crisis. Meanwhile, Zombie mom posted about her own work-a-holic nature, which made me raise my eyebrow, but it is easy for me to deny this since I don’t have just one “job” and most of my projects don’t pay money.

This all fits in with a parenting article that I read recently about the importance of unstructured family time. In particular, parenting in the last decade faces critiques for not providing enough outlets for children to entertain themselves and, in turn, has limited their initiative in  creative play.  What is best for kids developmentally (and maybe for people in general?) is having more unstructured family time, where you are just chilling out and someone says, “Hey, let’s play Monopoly” or “I am gonna build a cabin out of these Lincoln Logs” or “Wow, mom, the fridge is really dirty! Can I clean it?”  Of course, this is about not having your self and your kids in too many commitments.  I really don’t wan to be a mom that ignores her family because she has to work all the time or a soccer mom that lives and breathes to drive her kid to the next activity. Not to mention, that I want to MODEL myself as an adult that takes care of herself, making time for my own dental appointments and taking time to sit in the sun with a book and a cup of tea every once in a while.

A while back, my therapist gave me a great tool to frame this all in.  It is sort of a zen approach, where I think of all the activities that I participate in without obligation and as something that I am choosing to do right now, not necessarily forever.  Both setting my commitments up that way (with actual or potential end dates), but also giving myself the opportunity to change my mind about things as I go feels ridiculously revolutionary.

Being sick for a month also gave me a clean start. When I had to put everything on hold to vomit and lie shivering in bed, it was a reality check that I COULD do that.  My clients love me and they waited for me, I am not so poor that I can’t miss some work time every once in a while.  It was sort of like hitting a reset button. My diet cleaned up, my routines disappeared, and gee golly, the world didn’t freakin stop and my life actually didn’t change that much. Oh, I did lose 5 pounds.

So the upshot is cool new projects that will hopefully move my career in a good direction and a break (and exodus?) from the projects that aren’t serving me.  A renewed intention to focus on my career, both serving my clients and also moving my work in a direction that will be sustainable for me on a longer term.

More importantly, was the not-so-gentle reminder to take care of myself. Oh, and hang out with my dogs more, who seem to be magical converters of stress and obligation into joyful, frolicky runs, furry-soft cuddles and long lazy nights of sleep.

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Inevitable emotions came up around the holidays.  In making plans for Thanksgiving, I had a phone conversation that made my mom cry.  I am glad that my mom cries, I sort of like to cry.  But, it is not easy to have my mom cry, especially on the other end of the phone, especially with grief that has come through my channels.  Hanging out with other kids and having a more empty house both led to comparisons of  last year, when our lives were filled with beginnings, chaos and hope.

We had made it our goal for the last half of 2009 to spend time with kids that we know.  This ended up happening a lot, especially for J-, with trips to the zoo, the science museum, the movies and circus and childcare.  It was a real treat to hang out with kids that had some combination of being thoughtful, articulate, minding, having emotional control, and being able to process information that they were taking in.  At first, it was hard for me to relax around them. I was just expecting at any minute for them to lose it and to have to deal with some sort of big confrontation.  It was also validating and sad to see how developmentally behind T-7 really is.

The end of the year was punctuated by the fact that we would be re-entering the system in January (which we have).  We decided that we would be working directly through A- County and are halfway through the PRIDE classes. We will still have a logistically tedious licensing process ahead of us over the next few months, with CPR, fingerprinting, TB tests and references to deal with. Since we theoretically could be matched again in the summer,  it is time to clean up loose ends that have accumulated over the last year.

So, the beginning of the year has thus far been characterized by work.  My massage practice is the busiest that it has ever been, plus I am playing music 1-2 times per week and have a few new projects that I am starting.  J- decided to teach intersession at his university because we are paying off some preschool debt.  And, we have decided to make it a goal for our year to save the big bucks for a new roof.  Before we matched with the girls, we had tried to knock out any projects on the house that we would want done for a while.  I can’t say that we forgot about the roof, but it wasn’t really a realistic project at the time.  I am grateful that it has been holding up thus far in this weeks storm!

Other projects are happening in all parts of our lives.  Initially, we settled back into a few ofthe routines that we had pre-kid. Now, we are filling the time up with other things.  We are still considering a timeline and criteria for our next placement, but we will likely be licensed again by the summer.  Until then, we are going to make the most of a kid-free lifestyle.

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I went to a zine reading the other night by my friend artnoose.  Ker-bloom! #81 was actually sub-titled Artnoose and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very Bad Year.  She writes

My Inner Nietzsche berates me and says that those with power are the ones with the will to power. It ridicules my resentment because it says I can’t be angry at wolves for eating sheep. I hate the Inner Nietzsche; I think it’s a jerk.

Okay, well it is true that you can’t be angry at wolves for eating sheep, but that doesn’t make it suck any less for the sheep, right?  I think we are in just such a predicament, with the terms of our liveliehoods being so far from our choosing.  It is hard to not lose integrity, compromise or get screwed sometimes.

Of course on the most immediate level, my year was defined by 0ur adoption disruption, which J- and I agree is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.  The first months of the year, we spent attaching to T-4 and getting further distanced and discouraged by T-7. The end of the year was spent in recovery. One of the contributing factors to our decision was my mom getting diagnosed with breast cancer.

She has spent the year fighting it through western medical treatment, chemo, radiation etc.  It is not that simple of a story, of course.  She actually had breast cancer  many years ago, which she successfully fought and this new case emerged in the scar tissue of her masectomy. She noticed it some time ago and her doctors reassured her it was nothing. Time passed and eventually, she found a doctor to biopsy. Unfortunately, it had reached stage 2. Additionally, our go0d friend N-’s mom has been near death several times from leukemia. She and my friend  Anandi , who also has breast cancer are both uninsured.

Tristan Anderson got shot in the head by a teargas canister in March and fighting, literally on the edge of life for the rest of the year.  Tristan is not  close friend of mine, but he is a close friend of friends and is a long-time acquaintance. The good news is that it sounds like the setbacks to his healing are behind him and although he has sustain serious cosmetic and cerebral damage, his is finally accomplishing some recovery.

My friends, the hikers were detained in Iran at the end of July.  And still detained. I think of them daily and hope that their spirits are strong. I have so many feelings about this, but there are just too many words to open them here.

I have had many friends experiencing nasty and tragic breakups, the most public of which is zombie mom.

I kinda hate to even mention it in the same context as these other things, but Obama sure has turned out to be a big disappointment to the far left on many counts. (I never really believed it to begin with, but I am sad for the folks that had such high hopes.)  While in 2008, people were getting pregnant with Obama babies all over the place, this year has been.

Good Riddance!

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As she talked so…efficiently, it led me to imagine how many times she has probably told this story. I remember choosing my therapist, in part because I knew that I wouldn’t have to explain the entire story from start. It seemed tortuous to talk to a new therapist after having had 5 therapists and 4 social workers involved along the way. Did I have to prove, yet again to someone else that we had all the bases covered?

I think there is also a part of telling the story at this point that is a little defensive. Although it can be sugar-coated and responsibility shifted, two children were failed. An intention and a dream was failed. It is not uncommon and it is completely “justifiable”. Nonetheless, it does merit a backstory.

J- and I have probably been more public in the last few months and we have been in the position of telling people about the disruption who hadn’t heard. We are often greeted by these people with looks of either excitement, ready to inquire about the girls or that they can tell something is wrong… they are not seeing what they were expecting to see. Although the way that I tell the story has become a little robotic, each time remains difficult. I am still baffled by the fact that there are no “right” answers. I am still angry that I ended up with a kid that all the books in the world could not help me better understand or support. How can this be conveyed on a curbside encounter? Luckily, people are surprisingly aware of adoption issues, so sometimes it can. Most of the time, we just try to focus on the ways that we are moving on and plan to try again.

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We just passed the one year anniversary of having matched, visited and had the girls move in with us.  Last year, Halloween was the first weekend that the girls were here to stay and we took them trick-or-treating for their first time.  I had a blast, we went up to Temescal where the merchants were giving out treats, hosting music and crafts and generally entertaining adults and children alike.  It was the first time that we shared in a ritual, publicly as parents, with other parents and kids.

It was hard not to think about this year as I talked with my friends about what their kids were up to.  We had about 30 kids come to the door, but our street was too quiet.  75% of the houses had their lights off, so many children ignored our block to stay on bigger or more lit up streets.  I did have fun, but I wished that I were in Temescal.

About a week ago, we got a call from A- County letting us know that the P.R.I.D.E. classes will be offered in January. This fits nicely with J-’s winter break, so we expect to take them in order to get back in the process.  Yes, we do basically have to start from scratch…I know, I know…we were perfectly qualified a year ago to get kids from multiple counties, but now suddenly, things are different. Don’t get me started.  But honestly we don’t mind, this does feel like the right path for us, as winding and rocky as it has been.

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T-4 showed us that it isn’t all a horror show.  It is possible for an older kid to succeed with a new family.  She endeared us to the wondrous age of 4.  She taught us that kids are resilient and regression is surmountable and demonstrated with an amazing amount of development within 6 months.  She gave me joy in the intertwining of our lives. I loved seeing her drink up her surroundings and experience life by my side.

We understood the fear taking older children and we were scared of behavioral problems.  We were assured that it didn’t have to be so bad.  I am sure it is possible to find older children in the system that don’t have major behavioral problems, but we haven’t met them.  We have heard of kids with less extreme problems than T-7, but I have yet to hear about one that did not have violent tantrums for less than a period of 6 months after placement. We thought this level of problems were the exception and not the rule.

Now we know that social workers cannot be trusted to know, or to say.  We are now the people that we heard about before, the ones who disrupted, who had such an awful experience that they couldn’t finalize the adoption. We And now all of our friends of friends will hear about us if they consider an older child… The reputation comes from a real place.  And now, we are scared, too.

Since the disruption, I have been softening (and getting attached) to the idea of a younger child.  Preventing a kid from experiencing neglect by getting them young is something we can totally get on board with.  We understand what a hard age 6 and 7 are and what a hard spot T-7 was when she moved in.  I look back at my very different levels of patience and understanding with T-7 and T-4 and I see my own need for bonding and interdependence to build a positive relationship with my child.

We are preparing to start over with completely reorganized or criteria around a future adoption.  We plan to stay local, consider children ages 0-4 and only parent one child.  I am humbled and sad, but also more confident and strong.

I know that any kind of parenting is the hardest thing that any of us can do, it triggers all the crap from our parents and our own inadequacies. I see from my friends, and know in my heart, that no matter how easy or tough my kid is, I am going to have days that I loathe my life.  But I also know that I miss being a mom just about every day.

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I am not a huge traveler, but a combination of factors has made the call of a few places that I have always wanted to go too loud to ignore.  The fact that J- and I will likely be parents again sometime during the next year and will not be able to travel for while after that, cheap air prices and an accumulation of flyer miles has me doing my small-town-girl version of jetsetting for the next few months.

I also have a theory that some places are going down.  The economy, the environment…they may be irreversibly changed and I want to see them now:

Glacier National Park

Well, okay, in this case, it isn’t actually MY theory that Glacier National Park is going down, it is pretty well supported scientifically that the glaciers are melting.  And even the most conservative folks are now pretty much on board with this.

Actually, it looks like I missed the heyday of seeing the glaciers of Montana.  Even my parents did.  Still, I have had several reports from friends over the years that this is one of the best places that they have seen and it has long been on my list of places to see.

Enter my caching friend Binky del Mar, who moved to northern Idaho not too long ago.  Binky is one of my few female caching partners and I love that about her.  It takes a special kind of lady to cache. One that is comfortable on her hands and knees, looking under dumpsters. One that is more interested in 1) finding the cache and 2) the story she will be able to tell later than 1) how difficult it is or 2) how dirty and gross it is.

Visiting Binky is the perfect opportunity to head up to this great area and visit 2 states that are new for me.  Binky and I are going on a caching extravaganza between Spokane, WA, Sandpoint, ID and Glacier National Park, MT for 4 days.

Las Vegas, The Strip

It is a bit ridiculous

that I from California and have never been to Las Vegas.  I can’t even tell you how many times that I have been to Reno.  Because I don’t know, I’m not sure that I would be able to count.  Being from Sacramento, that is what we did…we went to Reno.

The draw of Las Vegas has grown in the last 10 years as it has become more upscale and I have become well, uh…more upscale.  Hearing about the art, architecture and shows, seeing Anthony Bourdain’s pleasure while eating at Buchon were all part of the draw. The lights and fireworks and the fake Venice and Paris. I know, it’s kitschy, but it’s fun!  Not to mention that they have caches, like every other place on the map. And it is yet a whole other state that I can add to my “states cached” map.

I began looking at air/hotel packages and seeing deals because I just needed a getaway and didn’t want to deal with a long flight or drive.  Then, I heard about the decline in business there and realized that I have no faith that the economy will get better any time soon, and places like swanky Vegas hotels are going to be some of the first to go down, bigtime.  After a few months of looking, I decided to take the plunge and prices had dropped. I couldn’t imagine them going lower.

Vegas is so overdeveloped, with no solid basis for the economy of decadence, other than some weekend traffic from LA.  I know that Vegas will always be there, but in what condition?  Already many of the more “family-friendly” attractions have disappeared, what will go next?  When will it sink below the level of seediness that it was when I was a child? I am imagining a ghost town of these posh hotels, turned vacant, hauntingly empty, guarded and almost post-apocalyptic.

So, this is how my few months of somewhat opulent splurging has come about. I want to get it while the getting is good.

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On one side, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended no screen time for children under two with little research to back it up.  On the other, we have seen an increase in television shows that value education and development.

She divides parents into two categories, the “whatevers” and the “worriers”. She sees that these often fall along lines of class and privilege. While most of her own inquiries are done in the middle and upper-middle class, she does visit the homes of poor and immigrant families. She sees that in poorer families may not have as much flexibility to keep their children away from media since they often share smaller spaces and may rely on the television for cultural connections.

Research on baby videos (such as Baby Einstein) that are marketed as products that will help your baby’s brain develop is just beginning, following strong market demand that led Disney and Sesame to create their own products.

So far, what they have learned it that small amounts of screen time will probably not help with brain development for children under two.  At that age, babies do not have the perception skills to interpret what they are seeing.  The author says that they will probably get more out of watching a parent fold laundry and much more out of being spoken to.  But it probably won’t hurt them, either and for some parents, it may be the only way to safely occupy their children to make dinner or take a shower.  What they may be negatively affected by is background television.  In this case, the active engagement of parents tends to decrease and also the children will simply hear less because of the background noise.  Because of these two factors, children’s learning opportunities are greatly reduced.

For older children, some television shows and video games fare better as tools to build learning, reasoning and social skills.  Most interesting findings, in my opinion are that the age appropriateness of a show has as much to do with structure as it does content. Those of us that have nostalgia for Sesame Street and the Muppet Show will be disappointed to hear that children 3-5 respond the most positively to a short show with a linear, structured and interactive plotline. Some of the shows mentioned are Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales and Blues Clues.

Additionally, she warns parents to be wary of anything that contains violence.  There is some evidence that children who see violence are less cooperative.  Surprisingly, even violence that results in resolution is problematic.

“…they came to realize that the “be nice, be good” messages at the end of some children’s programs were not getting through to young viewers.  The resolution was drowned out by the usually more-engaging scenes of conflict that drove the plot.”

Ultimately choosing the media in the family is really tricky, particularly if there are young children of varying ages.  A show that may benefit and be age appropriate for a 6 year-old will most likely not be for a 2 or 3 year-old. And in the end, it is parent interaction that is always going to benefit a child the most.

Although I have done my best to summarize many of Guernsey’s findings, I highly recommend this book for those interested.  The book provides an inroad to understanding how kids learn by looking at the ways they do and do not respond to screen time.

She delves deeply into the studies and describes them in minute details to help the reader picture exactly what is happening, which I found fascinating.  Additionally, she does a good job of incorporating her own experience and is very practical about using television as a respite.  She supports the studies through follow-up interviews to experts in an attempt to address the questions as thoroughly as possible.  Since the research really is relatively new, there are times that she hits a dead end because the findings are just not there yet.

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That being said, some children are more difficult to place than others because of their special needs may be even more special.  I have heard these cases described as “hard-to-place” children.  Actually, before the middle of last century, many kids were expected to live the rest of their lives in institutions. When I was quite young, I saw a television movie hosted by Henry Winkler (at the time I could call him nothing but The Fonz) about a family, the Debolts, that was campaigning to change all that by growing their family with many special needs kids and starting a non-profit in order to facilitate the placements.  So, by the end of the last century, the future of special needs kids looked very different.

Special needs pioneers changed adoption culture dramatically. Their vision of family defied the claim that adoptive kinship had to be invisible in order to be authentic, insisting instead on the purposeful and open inclusion of difference. This value, in turn, reflected an even broader shift in conceptions of national belonging and citizenship in the United States after World War II. Special needs adoptions symbolized the civil rights revolution within the adoption world. Their accomplishment was not only to offer more different kinds of families to more different kinds of children, but to openly welcome multiculturalism and multiracialism within the family well as within the history, demography, and politics of the country at large.

-Adoption History

The sector of private (non-profit) agencies doing adoptive and foster placements was booming.  Families were compensated at higher rates because they supposedly had better training.  The agencies, themselves are also paid a high rate because they are responsible (along with the county worker) to monitor the children in the home.

This created a self-reinforcing cycle that it became more appealing to foster through an agency since 1) you get more staff support and 2) you get more monthly income.  Additionally, working with agencies has been generally perceived as an easier and clearer road to adoption than working directly with the county.

Because of this, a scarcity of parents working directly with counties has emerged.  Placements have become more expensive because a higher percentage are happening through agencies and social services have been forced to cut costs elsewhere and reduce their own staff.

Unfortunately, in all of this, the kids are the victims.  Money is being spent to outsource when outsourcing is not necessary and is duplicating services being offered in-house.  This is a case where most policies of the welfare system make sense on a policy level, but when translated to the actual life of a child, there best interests are not always what unfolds.

Children sometimes moved from foster care to adoption. Because termination of parental rights was a lengthy process, most of these were (and are) special needs adoptions. Foster children were invariably older and had complex loyalties to natal and foster kin. Their histories of separation and trauma were associated with behavioral and health problems. These characteristics made them undesirable to many would-be parents, and that made their adoptions difficult and expensive to arrange. After midcentury, agencies invested scarce time and money recruiting parents for hard-to-place children. By the 1960s, a few turned in frustration to controversial solutions like transracial adoptions.

-Adoption History

A secondary ramification has been a gap in race and class between adoptive parents and foster parents, and I assert between agency parents and county parents.

Race as well as class marked the growing gap between foster care and adoption. During the postwar civil rights era, poor children of color, formerly denied many services, comprised more of the foster care caseload. Foster parents were somewhat better off economically than the children in their care, but they too were increasingly drawn from minority racial and ethnic communities. Foster parents were licensed and compensated by the state for the work they did, however meagerly, and had fewer legal protections than adoptive or birth parents. By definition, foster parents were not autonomous. They were expected to provide havens of safety and love for children at risk, but they were also responsible for keeping children in contact with relatives and agency workers. Adopters, on the other hand, were more affluent. They paid for the services they received, overwhelmingly preferred babies and young children whose racial identities matched their own, and were legally entitled to manage their families without supervision after court decrees were issued. Adoption spelled permanence, but the price of that permanence was the social obliteration of natal ties.

-Adoption History

My experience is clearly VERY limited, but this supports what I witnessed in the orientations that I attended.  At the county orientation, the room was primarily filled with people of color, immigrants and families of children in foster care that were trying to help them.  In the two agency orientations that I attended, families were of varying races, but primarily white and almost exclusively middle and upper middle class.

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