So if you have been following me you can see I took a year off. I certainly didn’t mean, to but it just sort of snuck up on me. Work has been interesting, I’ve had some ups and some downs with my boss and I am happy to say that I just have 4 days left to work with her and I am off on Maternity leave for a year!!! My daughter will be born no later than March 26th, that is when we have the scheduled C-Section booked if needed.
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| We found out for sure on January 14th but they told us back in November that they weren’t 100% sure but thought it was a girl. |
So much has happened in the last year. GJ started a job in December of 2013 but quit in March as the expectations of the 80 hour work weeks did not quite fit into our family dynamics.
Family Vacation
We took a family trip to Disney World right after he quit to sort of celebrate and the timing was very good. When we came back we got a family dog from a new friend and she (the dog) had 10 puppies in April. Our autistic son started Intensive Behavioural Intervention (IBI) on March 17th, right after we got back from Disney. He has made such great progress that over the Christmas Holidays his IBI coordinator told us that at his next 6 month evaluation in April, they are going to recommend that he be discharged from the program. The discharge process takes another 6 months so by October this year he will be as far as they can take him in this program, which should put him at a 6 year old level, he’ll be 5 then. He really has come a long way. We can actually have a conversation now and he talks and says sentences in context and plays with other children age appropriately. The transformation is nothing short of amazing. Since he has about 8 months left, I can’t wait to see how he is in the fall.
Puppy Adventure
In April we not only got 10 new puppies, we also got our first foster care placement since we got our son 3 years earlier. We got a brother and sister sibling group. The brother was 6 and the sister was 4. At the time mine were 3 and 4 and my older son turned 5 during their time here. So I had a 3 year old, a 4 year old, a 5 year old and a 6 year old. Lets just say we felt a bit busy. The girl was very aggressive and on several occasions she hurt my sons so it wasn’t a great fit for our family and she would have needed a lot of therapy. They ended up going to a grandmother after about 6-7 weeks.
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| Bailey and her 10 puppies! |
The Garden
The summer came and went, the garden came and went. I didn’t get to spend nearly the amount of time I wanted to in it and the harvest was weak except for the potatoes which we just finished cooking this week. We got a nice flock of chickens this year, some we bought and some we bred. One of the bunch we bought were meat chickens so we got to try our hands at slaughtering. It turned out not to be too bad and we just found out that we can get a free rental of a chicken plucker nearby, that will speed things up a lot. The plucking takes the longest, so a machine will save both of our backs.
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| Seeds started with grow lights |
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| We had 3 of these gigantic pumpkins, this was the lightest one to bring into the house. |
New Arrivals
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| These are the chicks and ducks that we bought. We made an incubator underneath but it didn’t work so we had to buy a commercial one. |
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| The commercial one yielded us 27 chicks and two ducks a week later. |
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| Our first two ducks that we bred ourselves. |
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| Here are the chicks! I needed to help the damp looking one out of the shell as it was taking way too long. |
Surprise!
When July rolled around I suspected I was pregnant weeks before I could actually do a test. I drove my two boys to NS to visit my parents, 16 hours away, by myself, leaving GJ home to continue renovations upstairs without us in the way and that is where I took the test. I didn’t tell anyone the results until I told GJ when I got home. Considering we did IVF for the oldest and we adopted the youngest, this baby is a complete miracle, coming into this world to our family all on her own steam, a complete gift from God!
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| The car ride wasn’t too bad, I didn’t have to leave one of them on the side of the road LOL! |
More Renovations
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| This closet was 9 feet long and 4 feet wide, GJ made it smaller so that the room would be bigger. |
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| Now we just need to sand down the floor. |
School Days
Of course we had our foreign students too. We had our Chinese student for the second term of High school until June, and then our Japanese student for two weeks in the summer after I got back from my NS trip, then we had a Spanish student and two columbian students each staying about 30 days from September 1st till November 30th and we also did relief for one Chinese student for 2.5 months this fall. GJ’s dad came to visit the day that we had our first ultrasound, boy wasn’t he surprised when Willem blurted out that we were going to have a baby!
Both of our boys started school this year, one in Senior Kindergarten and the other in Junior Kindergarten, in two different schools this year but hopefully next year they can be in the same school if my youngest no longer requires an EA
Fostering
The fall rolled around and Thanksgiving brought us our next foster placement, a 3 day old baby boy on the Monday of Thanksgiving. That was pretty exciting and our boys just loved this little baby boy, good practise for what is to come. He stayed with us for 8 weeks and then went back to his mother. During the time that we had this little guy we got an emergency placement of a baby girl for 3 days. That was when we first got to experience a bad social worker and her bad attitude/behaviour since we left Ottawa (there was a bad one there too).
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| My pilots for Halloween! |
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| The belly started to pop! |
That brings us to December and my favourite time of the year. We spent a pretty quiet Christmas at home this year, I actually took a week off which is rare as I usually work over Christmas. Just after we opened our last 12 days of Christmas gifts we got a call that weekend to take two babies, a 14 month old boy and a 2.5 year old boy, brothers. And that brings us to two weeks ago today.
We got the call around 9:00PM saying that the police were called and these brothers needed a place to stay. We still had a crib set up in our room from the newborn and we had to scramble to set up the other one and get a room ready, but we love excitement in this house! CAS didn’t have the necessary car seats so they asked us to drive to the house but park a few houses down. I forgot to bring blankets or anything when we left the house and when I asked the worker if the kids were dressed to come out, she said right now they were just in diapers and anything they put on them would need to be washed, including the kids themselves. I found out later that the house was probably very cluttered, like hoarder style and cat faeces was probably on the floor. Granted the two boys didn’t look filthy but I gave the the older one a bath that night and GJ took the younger one to the ER with what looked like swelling on his hands a feet.
They did blood work in the ER and said his runny nose was a viral infection. Later that week when we went to the doctor with them the blood work results showed malnourishment. The baby was quite big, obese really for his age. He weighed 28 lbs. From the children’s behaviour it appears that they have a “bad” relationship with food. They cry and scream to be fed even when you are holding a spoonful of food right in front of them. We are trying really hard to not respond to bad behaviour, like screaming for food, and instead trying to give them the appropriate signs (sign language) and words to express their food needs at the table, like more, all done etc. Then we give them lots of praise when they repeat the sign or say the words “more” or “all done”.
It is very interesting, and sad, to see the kind of damage that can be inflicted on children so young by poor parenting and nurturing skills. In the two weeks that they have been here the older one has learned to say a few words to communicate, when they arrived he only knew how to say “bad boy”. The older boy is also testing limits and is violent towards the younger boy and to my boys but since he is only 2.5, I think with the proper nurturing he can be trained to be a normal little boy.
There are also some serious attachment issues and physical love and care was definitely lacking from our observations. The older one loves to be hugged and will snuggle right into your neck. From the escape artist like talent of the older one and their need to “know” exactly where you are if you are out of sight, we think that they have spent a lot of time on their own under some sort of confinement like a baby gate or crib.
I was very surprised to see him in the kitchen on Sunday morning when I woke up, as he made no noise coming down the stairs and I am a very light sleeper. He climbed out of his crib so the next night we put a pressure gate at his door to make sure he didn’t wander around the house at night but he broke through it. So then we put a gate at the top of the stairs and also one of those doorknob childproof things on his door. So far that seems to work. We were told he was found on the street one day in his diaper last summer. We have chains on the top of our outside doors (we had those already for our autistic son) to make sure he doesn’t get out of our house.
It is so funny because our boys wouldn’t ever grab a rolled up bag of flour from the island or eggs from the counter and try to make their own breakfast LOL, well maybe the older one was just wondering what happens if you throw flour on a black dog and needed to know what was under the egg shell. Our house is looking a little like Fort Knox with all of the gates that we have out now just to keep them from getting into stuff that could hurt them or make a complete mess.
We have also had to remove most of the toys from the play room as they were just too overwhelming for them. They would dump out every bin of toys onto the floor and then had no where to walk. I guess their mom’s place was quite small so we moved the furniture to the sides of the walls to give them lots of room to run and just a few toys to “learn” how to play.
So as I started out this blog saying that I only have 4 days left to work, that is good as there are lots of things at home to keep me busy and it will help to give GJ, the stay-at-home dad, a bit of a break and help him to finish off those other renovations he started back in the fall.