A Wonderful Young Man

Time seems to be going by so quickly.  I look at all our pictures from over the years and am in awe of how God has been so faithful in all things.  The miracles in our lives and how God brought each child into our home.  How far they have all come.  How old they are all getting!  I am amazed at it all.

As these middle children are hitting their upper teens it has been hard in some ways.  Hard to learn how to let them go a little more each year, to trust the Lord and all we have taught them.  I tend to like to hold tight to each of the children.  Protect them from  making mistakes and try to keep them close.  It is hard for me, to start handing over to them, the responsibility of making their own decisions and way in life.  I know many of them will always live with us because of their special needs but we still want them to become as independent as possible, have goals and dreams and strive to achieve them.

Zeke recently had a birthday and turned 17 years old.  He is the middle, middle.  :)  Over the last year, I have seen a huge shift in him, not only in appearance but in maturity and in the way he sees life.  He is making good choices.  He does not get upset as easily and if he does, gets over it much quicker.  He is much more relaxed in who he is and in interacting with his siblings.  Having autism makes social situations harder for him, to participate and navigate.  He is more confident lately.  I have seen him, volunteering to participate, in going on outings when invited. (especially if there is going to be food!) Or at least responding when talked to and not just standing far away from everyone else in crowds.  I have also seen him start to tease his siblings in a joking way to make them laugh, especially with Carolyn and Elizabeth. These are all huge for him.

I don't know why it is so hard for me to see them growing up, when I also see that God is doing such a work in them and they are maturing into such nice young people.  It is all God and again I am just so amazed.  Truly, they are my friends as well as siblings much of the time.  We get along well.

Zeke has grown into a quiet, kind young man.  He is helpful and always does his best at what he is asked to do.  He loves going to the work program he is enrolled in at school and every place he has worked, loves having him work there.  In his spare time he makes movies for Tim and I for our movie night.  Short 10 minute movies using his wooden railway or stop animation with legos.  He enjoys food and loves animals.  He has a little therapy/companion dog that is always in his arms when he is home.  It even sleeps with him and helps keep him calm.  He has had this little dog since it was six weeks old and it will be 14 years old in a few months.  Most of our pictures of him growing up have this little dog in his arms.

Zeke wanted to eat at home for his birthday meal.  He wanted his dad to grill out and for me to make home made mac-cheese.  He wanted my sister to make home made cheesecake with blueberries for his cake.  He loved it! My sister and her family also took him to the lego store.  He had a ball!

Zeke came to be our son because of a God given dream.  He has been through so much but has been such a good son and brother to his family.  He is a very kind and gentle soul and we have been very blessed to be chosen to raise him.  He is becoming a wonderful young man.  We love you!  Happy Birthday Zeke!

I pray God is with you now and always.  That He will have His mighty hand of protection upon you and lead you in the path He chooses for you.   That He will have a heart towards you as you have a heart towards Him.

Isaiah 41:10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.

Love, Dad, mom, Stephen, Antonio, William, Carolyn, Elizabeth, Billy, Timothy, Kinsley and Anna-Kate

The Brothers Birthdays!

Billy and Timothy are a year apart and on the calendar each year, have birthdays exactly a month and a day apart.

These boys have come so very far, since they came to us as foster children, many years ago.

They came from a situation of severe neglect and abuse, where they were exposed to drugs and saw violence daily in the first formative months and years of their lives.

Without faith in God and His daily help and support, the job set before us would be insurmountable.  We have been blessed with so many children, with so many different needs, all needing attention in different ways, every moment of every day.   I more than rely on God.  He really does carry me.  I am in constant prayer and in His hand.  We are so blessed and content and the joy and peace we have every day, does not come from our surroundings, what we are dealing with or goes on.  Every day has hard but good things, progress and moments of joy too.  Our joy and strength comes from God and we feel it and live in it.  The children do well.  We literally see miracles all the time...any progress and healing is only through Him. 

Only God can heal this sort of insult and change ingrained behaviors and hearts.  Not just in the children but in any of us.  We still have very hard days and behavior issues that have not been conquered but they have overcome so much in their young lives and I am so blessed to have these two in our family as our sons.

Billy is such a bright and active boy.  He is moving every moment and his mind is always going, thinking and sometimes plotting.  :) 

His first instinct is to lash out at others but true compassion is rising up in him and his heart is starting to show a tender and loving side to it.  I still can not trust him to be around or play with the other children unsupervised but he can now play with them for short spells without hurting anyone.  He still destroys toys if not supervised but is doing so much better playing appropriately with them.  He is such a joy to teach and is a literal brain sponge in all areas of learning...especially science, geography and social studies.  He would let me read to him all day if I had the time and voice for it.  I am starting him on piano lessons this month.  When I take him places and spend one on one time with him, he is well behaved and does well now, praise be to God!  He wanted to go out to eat at a local restaurant buffet, for his birthday.  He has now crossed over into being a growing boy with an appetite to go with it!  I let him go up and pick what he wanted for the first time.  I always have made his plates with balanced meals from off the bar, in the past.  He actually did not do to badly with his food choices.

He wanted his favorite super hero on his cake this year and of course my sister made a little boy so very happy with a wonderfully made cake! and oh so delicious too!  Thank you Aunt "S"!

I love this son of ours so much and am so grateful and thankful to have him in our lives!

Our second birthday was Timmy's!!!  He is such a sweet, cuddly little guy most of the time.

He has autism and marches to his own drum and learns at his own pace but is definitely progressing!  His emotions are stuck at an 18 month old level and he gets upset easily because he wants his way and does not always understand the flow of things.  He likes routine and functions very well in it!   He is not tantruming at all anymore and can calm down so much quicker than in the past!  Praise God!  He loves dinosaurs and robots right now.

He is an animal lover and has a ton of stuffed animals he sleeps with.  Or rather they all sleep on top of him because he piles them all on top of him when he goes to sleep at night.  He likes the weight on him because of his sensory issues.  He still wears AFO leg braces but has learned to put them on himself now which is a huge blessing and help every day to my routine.  I try to keep schooling light and fun for him or he shuts down and will not focus.  He is learning to write and every time he rights a letter with a space in it like the space in the letter "O" or lower case "e" he puts a smiley face in that little space.  It takes him a long time to write anything because of his artistic add-ons.  :)  Actually he draws and colors very well.  It is one of his great talents.  He also loves animals from in the ocean like sharks, crabs and octopuses.  On his cake this year he wanted my sister to put a red octopus on it.  He specified for it not to look like a cartoon one but a real red octopus.  My poor sister.  The requests my kids make!  But...true to her artistic form she pulled off a very red, real octopus cake! 

So cool and cute!  The suckers and boarder are mini m and m's!  Making one little boy very happy on his birthday!  Thanks again Aunt "S"!

He has come so far in behavior, awareness, learning and bonding.  He is a sweetie that is going to do so well in life.  He loves the Lord and it is precious to hear his little prayers.  He blesses my heart daily!  We are so blessed in the family God has built for us...so blessed.

May God have His mighty hand on our two youngest sons.  May He heal the hurts, fill in the holes and help them.  May they both find Him at a young age and live for Him their whole lives.  May they be greatly blessed and used of Him as they live and grow in Him!

John 1:16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.

Love, Dad, mom, Stephen, Antonio, William, Carolyn, Zeke, Elizabeth, Kinsley and Anna-Kate

Our Youngest Turns Three!

The last but not least, in our girls "four birthdays in three weeks" run, is Anna-Kates!

I have rarely done a post on her before.  She just turned three!!!  She is our youngest and...I always try to cherish each day with our youngest because I wonder if they will be the last child God adds to our home.  So each birthday Anna-Kate has, I feel that little tinge in my heart, that I am loosing the feeling of ever having a baby in our home again.  Don't get me wrong...I love every stage our children go through as they grow and it is always a miracle before our eyes, to see God move mountains in behaviors and health.  I love seeing each child bloom into the person He wants them to be...but I do love babies and all that entails.  So as my dearest baby Anna-Kate is growing,  I feel I might be saying goodbye to having babies around me anymore.

We got a call from DFCS over three years ago, telling us that Billy and Timmy's biological mom was pregnant again and still unstable and heavily doing drugs.  They wanted to know if we wanted the baby when it was born, to try to keep the siblings together.  That, the new baby, like the boys, had been exposed from conception to heavy drug use.  The boys have a lot of issues from this and the neglect and abuse they suffered before coming here.  Tim and I prayed about it.  Our lives were so very busy.  Every day was so hard.  From my older special needs children to Antonio's constant and physically demanding care, to several of our children's very hard daily behavior issues.  I mean, I had a 1,2 and 3 year old at the time!  So we prayed and told DFCS, that when the baby was born, we would take her on trial for 2 weeks and see if she fit into our home well.  That day a friend sent me a link, on my computer, to watch the trailer for the movie "The Drop Box".  I watched it and felt I had to watch the whole movie immediately.  Tim and I watched it that weekend.  I cried off and on through the whole movie.  I was convicted to the core.  It is a real life story, of a man and his wife, that put a drop box in their' home in South Korea.  He is a pastor and so many people left babies on his door step, that often he would not find them until they had died the next morning.  He put the box in his home, so he could get to them immediately and take them in and care for them.  He and his wife care tirelessly for their own special needs son and these special needs children, finding them placement and keeping many of the hardest to place children and raising them.  I cried and cried... how on earth could Tim and I tell DFCS we would try a child for two weeks to see if they fit in our home?  That we might say no after two weeks because it made our lives harder?  How selfish of us.  God does not receive us into the Kingdom of God and boot us out after two weeks, if we have challenges or don't get everything perfectly right from the start.  I told Tim we needed to make a commitment to this baby no matter what the drugs did to her.  No matter what!  He agreed, she was our daughter and we would love her and take her, no matter what.  So that is just what we did. 

We got the call to come and pick her up at the hospital when she was less than 48 hours old.   She was such a beautiful little thing.

I am so grateful that God had so thourally and heavily convicted my heart to embrace her, as life did get very hard.  It was not her fault at all, as her mom had used a cocktail of drugs so heavily that she just had so many major issues, bless her little heart. 

She cried a lot for hours on end with anxiety and nerves. This lasted about the first two years slowly becoming less and less.  She cried inconsolably, more than any child we had ever had.  She was born with a head full of hair but pulled her hair out and rocked her body back and forth, from the time she was born.  She only had hair on the top of her head till she was almost two, as she could not reach there.  She does not rock or pull hair anymore... just has nervousness and tantrums.  She only let me, hold her and feed her for months on end.  She was and still is, very developmentally behind in all areas.  She forgot how to latch onto her bottle in between every single feed for eight straight months!  Every feed took a very long time, as she was hungry but could not remember how to nurse/latch and we would have to work at it untill she finally latched and ate.  No one was allowed to come near me when I was feeding her because if she lost her latch it was a mess all over again or she would give up and not eat.  (Try that with a house full of kids!)  Don't get me wrong, we had moments throughout the day of sweetness and naps, when she was calm but she would blow at anytime and had no self calming skills to bring her back to quiet and happy.  I held her a lot.  She was and is a complicated little love.

As she grew she needed PT, OT and feeding therapy.  

With all of her neediness and crying, plus, all the other children's care and struggles in our home, I did not garden for two years.  I could only do the basics and necessities of keeping up our home and farm.  A whole nights sleep was a rarity and life was blessed but hard.

It was good, I was content and happy but we lived for a good three year season of our lives from the time Billy and Timmy came, till sometime this past year, in a very hard season in our lives.  A worth wile season but a season of great personal sacrifice from us all.

I was spread thin but God held me up and things got done.  I am just feeling now, over the last year, that things have hit a slow and more peaceful season in our lives now...as Anna-Kate has turned a corner in some of her issues and Timmy and Elizabeth as well in some of their behaviors.

Our days are still hard but not as full in many ways.  I am gardening again and cooking different  more creative meals...not our survival casseroles and easy throw together type meals.  Tim and I are trying to reconnect and I am finally getting good sleep and that makes such a difference in all of our lives.

She is so beautiful and looks like a little angel at times but...

unfortunately, about 70 percent of the time, she is like this.  We lovingly call her crabby but cute.  :)

She is way behind her peers but we just pray, love on her and encourage her and let her grow and such at her own pace.  We don't push her as it makes her anxious.

  She does not have the malicious type anger and meaness in her from neglect or abuse that the boys have issues with as we got her from birth.  She is very bonded to Tim and myself but still is not overly loving with anyone else in the home.  William is still working very hard to make a bond with her.  She loves him if he is eating something she likes but usually won't bother with him otherwise.

She tries hard to be good and please us but she is stuck in toddler mode and wants what she wants, when she wants it and tantrums if the smallest thing does not please her.  She is also very behind in her ability to communicate so that complicates things as well. 

Throwing a nice tantrum on the beach last summer while on vacation.  :)

So pleased with her turkey on her dress for Thanksgiving.

She has always been a very light sleeper and cries easily.  We try not to let her fall asleep during the day so she will sleep better at night.   Her behavior is much worse if her sleep is disturbed, she will be a crab the rest of the day, so when she falls asleep, we leave her totally alone till she wakes up.

She is very bonded to me but is a daddies girl through and through.  She prefers him unless tired, hungry or hurting.

Our precious girl loves dolls and pretend.  Cooking with fake food and having tea parties with all her dolls and stufties.  She loves her family and feels safe with us and loved.  Those eyes and curls....how can anyone say no to that face...Daddy has trouble there sometimes.  :)  Can you guess who she is into?  My dad put the ears in her birthday bag with a little stuff Minnie.  She loved it!  It is also what she wanted on her cake so Aunt "S" made one little girls dream cake. 

It made her day!  Even though she did not understand it was her birthday or how old she was turning she did understand she was going to have her Minnie cake and it made her day!  Thank you sister!

My littlest Princess is a blessing to our home.  I can not imagine our home or life with out her here with us.  She is worth the work, effort like any child God blesses anyone with and she is our daughter through and through.

May the Lord God in Heaven have His hand on your always.  Healing, leading and guiding you my sweet girl...as you live and grow in Him.

Isaiah 60: 1-2  "Arise, shine; for your light has come, And the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. "For behold, darkness will cover the earth And deep darkness the peoples; But the LORD will rise upon you And His glory will appear upon you.

Love, Daddy, mommy, Stephen, Antonio, William, Carolyn, Zeke, Elizabeth, Billy, Timmy and Kinsley 

Happy Birthday Sweet Girl!!!

In my last blog post I shared how all four of our girls have their birthdays within three weeks time!  Elizabeth's birthday was first and then Carolyn's.  The next one that took place was Kinsley's.  I have not done a post on just Kinsley in a very long time.

Kinsley just turned four years old!  I can't believe that four years have flown by since God blessed us with this child, to raise for Him.

When she came to our home she could not see, could not purposefully move any part of her body or co-ordinate the two halves of her body.  She had the lowest muscle tone of any child I have ever had in our home.  So low, that her joints luxed in and out of position while dressing and bathing, as the muscles help hold everything in place and the tone was just not strong enough.  As the doctors appointments piled up, so did the diagnosis.  She is considered medically fragile and special needs.  Hypoplasia of the corpus callosum (missing part of the brain that bridges the two halves) with this diagnosis comes a slew of endocrine issues to be treated and monitored for and issues using the two halves of her body together as the bridge that sends messages between the two halves of the brain is not all there.  Optic nerve Hypoplasia (missing some of her optic nerves in both eyes)  Hypotonic Cerebral Palsy. (low muscle tone)  We prayed over her, loved her and worked hard with her and God began His work.

Slowly she started to respond to light and dark.

Then movement that was back lighted.  Then tracking objects.  Then smiling in return of a smile.

Then purposely using her vision.  Her vision is not normal but she does see, Glory to God!  She has tunnel vision and if not looking exactly straight forward has double vision.  She has no peripheral vision but can see praise God!.

When she came she could not even lift her arms.  Holding her was like holding a bag of rice.  Very cuddly but no muscles.  We were told to go ahead and put another wheel chair tie down in our bus as she would never be able to walk.  We had to pattern her, over and over, how to roll over.  Trying to teach different parts of her brain to make the connections for communication because of the missing parts of the corpus callosum.  We prayed and patterned her body movements for every milestone she needed to make.  Over and over we prayed, worked and practiced and over and over she hit those milestones little by little!

Because of her low muscle tone she also had swallowing issues but over came them as well.  She still aspirates on liquids if drinking from a cup by tipping her head back...But protects her airway well if tucking her head down and using a straw to self regulate the amount of fluid she takes in and swallows.  She can also manage using a sippy cup with a control valve just fine.  The miracles just slowly blossomed as she grew and today...even though those diagnosis are still there, you would hardly see or notice unless spending time with her.  God has really done a huge work in her body and life.  All the glory to Him!

Kinsley has always been such a blessing to our home.  All of the children are...but some of our children are just hard.   Every day hard.  Hard behaviors, hard to take care of, hard to home school, big time hard.  God gives me grace and sprinkles in a few very laid back, compliant easier children in the mix of our home.

Kinsley is one of those children.  I can count on her to be reliable in behavior and temperament.

She is so cuddly and loving.  Always a kind word for people and hug.

She is super smart and mature, a sweet and gentle soul.

I can trust her to have full run of the house without getting into things or damaging anything.

Many of our children can not have that privilege.  She is so helpful and loves to organize and be with me doing what I am doing.

She is creative and loves books, dance, art and pretending.  She is also a bit opinionated and tries to keep everyone and thing in order or what she feels is order.

So that is something we have to work on. Helping her be flexible in all things in life.

She wanted a certain dog cartoon character on her cake and my sister once again did a wonderful job blessing Kinsley with a perfect cake!  Thanks sister!

One of Gods greatest gifts to me is the children He has blessed us with!  Kinsley is a treasure to our home, little Miss Sunshine! We need all the sunshine we can get!  :)

Kinsley, Happy Birthday sweet girl.  May God do a mighty work in your life!  May you always serve and live for Him, all the days of your life.

Proverbs 20:7 The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.

Love,

Dad, mom, Stephen, Antonio, William, Carolyn, Zeke, Elizabeth, Billy, Timothy and Anna-Kate