Our Adoption Story-Part 2

I should go back a little now and tell explain that by the time these two children came to live with us, we already had our daughter-dd8. She was three at the time. My husband and I were both 24. (The girl was 2 and the boy was 14 months old.) Neither of us had ever dealt with the Department of Social Services, nor were we prepared for any other children. Sure, we had discussed becoming foster parents and how there were so many children who needed people to care about them, but we figured that would be YEARS down the road—like when our daughter was grown!

…..Ok, so after the children came to live with us, I took a day off of work to get them settled. Our daughter had a great daycare that she went to and it was also where we wanted these two children to go to because the staff were so good to our daughter and our family and they knew us—not to mention I could not add another stop to my morning commute because of time. After all the odds and ends were taken care of, we tried to go back to our daily routine—with two extra kids and a new apartment! When the kids came to live with us they had very little in the way of belongings. Most of what they did have had been purchased while they had been living with the other family member. Their car seats were atrocious! I was terrified to put them in my car—the straps were loose and could not be adjusted at all. We live in such a rural area we could not go right then and replace them-nor did we have the money to. At the time I was fortunate to work in a wonderful school full of compassionate people. They threw me a baby shower and provided lots of clothes, diapers, gift cards, and lots of other things that we needed. We used the gift cards that week to purchase the new car seats and immediately threw the other ones away!!

The day we replaced the car seats we dressed the children in a new outfit and headed out the door—we thought. The little girl got mad about something—I don’t remember what. The next thing we knew she flung herself backwards and started doing a variation of the crab walk with her hair sweeping the floor of the porch! Wow! I had never seen such a fit. I picked her up and put her into her crib. I told her she wasn’t coming out until she calmed down. I sat down with her and waited….About ten minutes later we immerged, ready to get into the car. Little did we know that was just the beginning of the “fits”…