Where in the World Are Our Kids?

You’re still here!

Let’s see if I can sum up the last 2 months . . .

We have now been home from the Congo for 10 months. Our kids are both now speaking in sentences, with Palmer completely comprehensible. Addie speaks with enthusiasm, although we’re never quite sure about what.

Addie finished educational testing. She now qualifies for speech and occupational therapy and will get an IEP. They say that they are still a little baffled by her because she has mastered more advanced skills for which she doesn’t have the basics. (She can hop on one leg for over a minute, but she cannot stand on one leg. This sort of thing happens academically too.) She has completely caught up with her gross motor skills. If you had seen her try to run or climb stairs in the first month she was home, you realize how miraculous this is. We hope to make similar progress in other areas, but it’s beginning to look like Addie is always going to need some extra help.

Palmer finished out the school year with a top award from the school: The Triple A Achiever for the overall school — academics, attitude, and attendance. He won a huge giant green frog stuffed animal. He still is behind his classmates, but his teacher recognized that his effort to try to catch up was remarkable. The first day after school ended, he begged to continue to work on schoolwork. So we’re working through some online learning programs with both of them, and have enrolled them both in a summer academic enrichment camp. Today was their first day, and they loved it.

Part of me wrestles with how much the kids have to do and work at. Not only the last year of school, when they both skipped a grade, but the 6 and 8 years prior to that when no one introduced them to numbers, or read them bedtime stories, or made sure their toys weren’t tainted with lead. They didn’t get the benefit of learning the language they are being educated in until they got to America. There are a million snuggly, enriched, carefully crafted moments that our kids missed out on. They have to make up for lost time. They have told us so many stories that make me shudder — and they don’t even know that all kids didn’t grow up the way they did. So sometimes they struggle with sitting still, or recognizing social cues, or trusting us as parents. I’m thankful for all the people in their lives who give them the extra grace that they missed out on the first 6 and 8 years of their lives.

I’ve now received my third injection of Xolair. I still have the same yucky cough, but my fever is better. My cough almost went away in the last few weeks, and then I had a bad weekend and it’s back. They say I should start noticing a difference in how I feel after month 3. I’m still waiting for the $10,000 worth of treatment to kick in. Most of the time, I feel okay. Some of the time I feel plain awful, and I still get random infections. Case in point: on Addie’s 7th birthday, I woke up with a raging case of bacterial conjunctivitis. I’ve never seen anything like it. My eye was swollen shut and goopy, fever, nausea, vomiting. But a little girl only turns 7 once. (Well, actually that might not be the case for Addie, ahem.) Anyway, so I pretended to be well for an hour that evening  because I didn’t have the energy to actually make any food, and we went to a dark Rainforest Café Restaurant and ordered the VOLCANO! for dessert. On the way back to the car, Addie asked me why my eye was gross. Because I like to do things really special for your birthday, Addie, like get a facially mutilating infection and appear in public. Isn’t that what every 7 year old girl wants for her birthday?

Addie and Palmer were presented for dedication in church at the end of April. While we’ve always recognized them as God’s children, we had to wait for a time for our kids to trust us enough to allow us to present them in front of the church. Given some of the things they have experienced in the past, this was pretty scary for them, but they did great! My parents flew out from Oregon, and my Aunt Nettie came down from Kentucky, making it all the more special.

Both kids played Upward soccer this spring and both did very well. Addie was quite good, in spite of the fact that she really only learned to run less than a year ago. Palmer excels at soccer, and now that he actually comprehends the rules of the game, he has been able to combine his skills with strategy and is a force to be reckoned with on the field.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this academic testing, award-winning, injection-receiving, relatives- having-in, soccer-playing, and infection-getting, I was promoted to the Director of our PA Program. I still have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, what an honor! On the other hand, I’m drowning in work. We’ve had three and a half administrative faculty leave this year due to illness, retirement, family issues, etc. and I have a enormous task of taking on much of their jobs, delegating when I can, but most of it just has to be done by me. In the past fourish weeks, I have filmed a baccalaureate video, redesigned and edited the student handbook, coordinating a hooding ceremony, said good-bye to two employees, hired a new faculty member, helped coordinate our program’s first ever-indoor graduation because the outdoor one got rained out, took 11 students to an awesome conference in Atlanta about serving the poor through healthcare and debriefed them, written a magazine article, reworked our ACLS/PALS courses with a new team of instructors from out-of-state, conducted a two day orientation for new PA students who just started classes last week and managed the process of getting them started in a new Program, took part in alumni board meeting, negotiated a new position for our Program and the clinic for which I hope to be hiring soon, helped work on a neighborhood restoration project, staff a 12 week class exclusively with guest lecturers and an overseeing adjunct, continued to see patients in the clinic, negotiated several contracts for student software purchases, finished putting together and submitting a 116 page accreditation document with 28 supporting documents, and many other things that fill the spaces in between. And we are just getting started on the busiest time of year. Things are hard now, but they are going to be oh so good when we can catch up, adjust to the changes, and move forward with confidence that this is exactly what God had in mind. I know it seems a little crazy — to me too– but God has spoken to me about not wasting a vision, and how many examples scripture holds of God calling the weak and unsure so that only He would be glorified. I’m excited to see where God is leading. And slightly overwhelmed.

Ken just finished up his second year of Upward Sports. Last year, Ken worked 5 nights a week. This year, he worked 4. That’s in addition to working Saturdays and Sundays. Trying to balance that much work on the part of both of us has been exhausting. Ken and I almost never have a day off together, and barely have any evenings together. Those projects like: cleaning the basement, taking the kids to a museum as a family, sorting the junk mail, visiting friends who live out of town, or spending a day lounging in pajamas never happen. Add to the equation two new kids with some very unique needs, my illness and work challenges, and we are just . . . broken. It’s hard enough to do everything if both of us had “normal” jobs, but with nearly opposite schedules we needed a change. As God-honoring as both our jobs are, I don’t believe that God is honored when our fragile family is being stretched so thin. Yes, our kids are resilient, but haven’t they also had to deal with more then their fair share already? So Ken asked to take a salary cut and go part-time. And fortunately, the church said yes. It was a very painful — and costly — decision. Honestly, had it been me (the wife) going part-time, I don’t think it would have been as controversial, but I have benefits and salary that could absorb Ken going part-time. The opposite wasn’t true. We needed a new plan to make our family function more healthfully. So we’re tightening our belts and giving Ken working part-time a try.

So that’s the latest from our family, and a bit of an explanation of why we’ve been silent. I haven’t had a Saturday off since April, and my evenings have been packed as well, and I’m just starting a new semester. I hope that one day, things will slow down for us, but for now, we are continuing to trust in God’s guidance for our lives personally, and as a family.

Here are some photo highlights from the last 2 months . . .

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Adoption of older children is always challenging. Adopting older children from another culture results in some frankly bizarre situations. Lately, our kids came home with a very exciting story about how at school, they were told to put their heads down and put their hands over their heads. “It was a tomato drill!” they exclaimed.

Much of our children’s history is still a mystery to us. Stories are slowly coming, but the difference between truth and fiction is hard to discern, especially knowing their deep desire to protect their past. The clouded memories of childhood are fading quickly into a mixture of wishful thinking of how things should have been and denial of what really happened.

What were they like as infants? Where did that scar come from? How can they come with the same history and have such different capabilities, nutritional status, and memories? What happened to them before they landed at the doorstep of an orphanage in Kinshasa?

We will likely never really know.

As we’ve been getting to know our kids from a completely different culture, I’ve appreciated that there are so many wonderful things that their culture has instilled in them. There’s always a fear of taking a child out of another culture that they will lose some important sense of self, the values of their culture, etc. But at the same time, leaving children in orphanages in third world countries just for the sake of “maintaining their culture” is hardly the answer either. There must be a careful balance of maintaining the best parts of their culture with the nurturing only a family can provide.

Here are some of the things I appreciate and want to preserve about my children’s culture:

1. Their appreciation for “real” food. When given a choice between a french fry and fresh fruit, the kids will typically pick fresh fruit every time. They LOVE water and milk. They never leave the table without drinking every drop. Every grain of rice is cleaned off a plate. Meat– and especially fish–is a real treat.  They didn’t really like candy very much when they came to America — they much preferred meat or bread. We didn’t offer them candy often, but they would refuse it more often than not. This is in stark contrast to what happens today in their new American lives. Almost every day, they come home with candy or candy-like treats. Do I take candy from my children? Heavens, yes! We didn’t even participate in Halloween, and we didn’t give them candy for Christmas or Valentine’s day, but we still have a never-ended supply of candy in a jar on our counter that we’ve confiscated from them. We find bags of candy stashed away in their toy drawers, in their backpacks, and stuffed around their car seats. They actually do like candy now, and I feel like the Candy Police trying to preserve their appreciation for real foods.  It seems like Americans give candy to kids for every occasion, and especially as a reward for good behavior. We should not wonder why children are developing Type II diabetes. We started giving it to them when sugar replaced love and praise.

2. Their lack of dependence on technology. Our kids do not play video games. Out of a moment of desperation, Ken showed Palmer how to play Angry Birds shortly before Christmas, and it became immediately apparent that video games were not a good thing for our kids. The addictive and absorptive nature of technology was unhealthy and unnecessary.

While there are some very good learning apps, I’m sure, I teach the first generation to be raised on technology-dependent education, and I can see the pitfalls. There have been some very interesting studies about how technology-dependent learners can learn more, but they think less. They can memorize lots of bits of information, but truly struggle when trying to put it all together. They have never had a college lecture without Powerpoint, so they have a hard time teaching themselves capture significant information, draw diagrams, pull information out of textbooks. But this is how real-life critical-thinking occurs. It’s not linear and spoon-fed.

I want my kids to learn to read real books, have real conversations, play board games, make forts in the living room, ride bicycles, and play hide and seek. They have an amazing ability to entertain themselves without technology “stuff.” I like that their culture has given them imaginations and a strong desire for physical exercise every day. To introduce them to the “stuff” of the technological world seems contradictory to what we are trying to accomplish in establishing bonds as a family. They haven’t had technology before, so they do not have a sense of what they are missing. And I’m thankful for that. They will have plenty of time to gain computer skills. Wii controller skills are even further down on the list.

3. Their dependence on God to provide. This one probably scares me the most. Let’s be honest, in our culture, we don’t “need” God much. We know where our next 7 days worth of food are coming from. Even the homeless and jobless population in our city can get 3 free meals a day, 7 days a week. Contrast this to the culture where our kids come from where parents and children alternated days eating. That’s right. Not everyone could eat every day, so they switched off. Kids eat one day, parents eat the next. And not three meals a day. One meal every other day. This was NORMAL for the culture. Their homes were collections of refuse strapped together that would hopefully keep the rain out. Every drop of water was a gift. Clean water was a treasure. Running water, unimaginable. Shoes were worn until they disintegrated. They slept in the same clothes they played in. They shared a bed with 5 other children. They sang worship songs without a full band and coordinating Powerpoint with reflective backgrounds.

We bought our kids some $2.95 shoes at Children’s Place a couple of weeks ago, and Palmer brought them home, looked in his closet and said, “Mommy, I have too many shoes.” So together, we chose shoes from his closet that he could give to children who don’t have any.  Oh, how I always want him to remind me that we have more than enough.

In our culture, I think we often have to create need for God because we have so much. Too much. I continually find myself asking: what am I doing that would be impossible to do without reliance upon God? I always want there to be an immediate answer. In America, during the season of Lent, we identify with our Lord’s suffering by giving up things like fast food, forks, and Facebook. Our children come from a culture where dependence on God doesn’t have to be so manufactured.

4. Their love for work. They love to spread mulch. Cleaning the bathroom? Better than watching cartoons. They bicker over who gets to vacuum. There is crying if one child gets to do a chore, but the other does not have a comparable one to do. Sometimes I run out of chores for them to do. I know that child labor is a real problem in the Congo, but that very strong work ethic is amazing. I’m very torn about this. They know the satisfaction of working until their muscles are sore and they collapse into sleep out of exhaustion rather than boredom. They are much better behaved when they are busily productive in the life of our family.

And no, you may not borrow them to clean your house.

At first, I wanted to undo much of what our kids had experienced: too much deprivation, too much work, not enough fun. But I’ve come to realize that they are in some ways very blessed to have had the experiences that they have had. They appreciate good food, because they know what it is like to be hungry. They like to work, because they have been too malnourished to have the energy. They know what it’s like to praise God out of poverty rather than excess. They value trust because they know how much it hurts when promises are broken.

I worry that giving them the excesses of American culture will promote spiritual poverty.

My children are living Beatitudes. They are beauty from ashes. They are resilient in ways that they shouldn’t have to be. They have brought just as much to our family as we have brought to theirs. And we are thankful for the culture they carry with them and how they teach us more about Him every day. Thank you, Lord, for bringing Third World Kids into our First World Family.

Palmer did this matching game all by himself!

Addie practiced writing her numbers. She’s getting good!