One Year Ago Today We Met Matteo

One year ago, Chris and I were anxiously waiting to meet Matteo for the first time. What should have been a three-hour car ride from his hometown of Fuyang to Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui, was slowed down by a very rare snowfall. Just when we were wondering how much longer we were going to need to wait, one of the bravest little boys we've ever met walked through that door and into our lives. Our hearts haven't been the same since.

Read about our first day with Matteo.

January 26, 2015 in Hefei, Anhui

One year later home in Minnesota

Secrets Versus Surprises

Have you ever thought about the difference in definition between a "surprise" and a "secret"? I never gave it any thought until we had a speaker from the Jacob Wetterling Foundation speak at our ECFE class about how to keep our children safe.

A surprise is something we keep secret for a short time, but it is something good and something we will eventually tell.  It's inclusive and meant to make someone feel good. A secret is something you never intend to tell someone, whether because you're ashamed, don't have anyone you can trust or were told you couldn't tell. It can be used to isolate, manipulate or shame. 

Think about these two scenarios. 

The kids pick out a present for their dad's birthday and their mom tells them they have to keep it a surprise. They are so proud of what they picked out for him and excitedly wrap it. 

Your child loves going over his classmate's house because there's everything there he doesn't have at home or isn't allowed to have - all the cool toys, junk food for snacks and as much TV as they want to watch.  His friend's older brother bosses the younger kids around and acts in a way that makes your child uncomfortable.  The brother told your child that if he tells on him, he won't be allowed to come over anymore.    

The first scenario is positive and the children feel happy, excited and proud of themselves. In the other scenario the child feels guilty and icky. 

This is the difference between the two words that the Jacob Wetterling Foundation wanted us parents to understand and make sure our children understood too. If kids learn that it's not right for someone to ask them to keep a secret and that they can trust their parents to share anything, they are less vulnerable to anyone who doesn't have their best interests in mind, whether that's a friend who wants them to do something they shouldn't do or an adult who wants to harm them.

Since that ECFE class, I have been intentional about the vocabulary I use with my children.  I never ask them to keep a secret.  I ask them to help me keep a surprise and make it clear that we will eventually tell the person. 

A friend of Chris' had a teachable moment about secrets. Because the parents leave so early for work, they had hired a nanny to come over for a few hours in the morning to get their elementary-aged children up, fed and on the bus to school. One morning the nanny lost track of time and the kids missed their bus.  The nanny had also let them play on the iPad, which is against the rules in their household in the morning and probably contributed to them not paying attention to the time.  These two instances wouldn't have upset Chris' friend so much.  We all lose track of time and maybe the kids were behaving so well that the nanny thought it would be okay to reward with them with a bit of pre-school day screen time. What upset her so much and ultimately led her to fire the nanny was that the nanny asked the kids to not tell their parents that they had missed the bus and that they had been allowed to play on the iPad. She had asked them to keep a secret from their parents. (It also didn't help the nanny's case that when the parents tried to talk to her about why they were upset, the nanny did not handle the conversation professionally.) Secrets are a no-no in their family. 

Because the secret was not about harm done to the children, it may seem like a relatively minor secret. However, kids should never be taught to keep secrets from the people who love them most. After Chris' friend fired the nanny, she and her husband sat down with the kids and talked about what had happened and why they don't keep secrets in their family. In my opinion, the inconvenience of being without morning childcare is worth it to reinforce the importance of children feeling comfortable with always telling their parents the truth.

Cold Weather Tricks

All the years I've lived in Minnesota, I thought it was urban lore that when it gets cold enough, you can throw water in the air and it freezes. Low and behold, it's true!  And it doesn't have to even be that cold.  Just -5 degrees Fahrenheit or colder.  Since we're in the midst of Minnesota's annual mid-January cold snap and the highs this weekend stayed in the negative digits, it was about time I test out this phenomenon. 

The kids were so excited to go outside and we even dragged Celina out with us. She was brave enough to come to Minnesota, and because of that, I think she should be able to go home with some cool stories of Minnesota's infamous winter weather.  So we gave her the honor of throwing the cup of bowling water into the air. 

Winter Fun in Minnesota

Chris was able to explain to the kids the science behind why only boiling water freezes instantly, but I'll let a climatologist explain on my behalf: Cold Weather Experiments to Try.

37th Birthday

Some years I'm not interested in celebrating my birthday and then this year, I thought, what the heck, I'm going to roll with it if folks want to make a big deal out of turning 37.

My day started with four little ones wanting to make a REALLY big deal about their mom's birthday. They had no idea how old I was turning, but they sure were excited to show me the HUGE birthday card they had made for me.

I immediately knew that the green prints were Matteo's!

I had seen evidence the day before that the kids had been painting, (the evidence included green paint matted in Matteo's hair) but I assumed they had just decided to raid our art supplies and have some fun.  I had no idea that Celina had helped the kids make hand prints in the shape of a big heart on a homemade birthday card. 

The card wasn't the only surprise.  Celina had a gift for me - my very own selfie stick!  I'm still not certain whether her gift was in seriousness or in jest, but either way, she knows I love to take pictures and I complain I'm rarely in any of them. I've always made fun of my au pair's generation for being obsesses with selfies, but looks like they got the last laugh. 

 St. Paul has a fun little ice skating rink right downtown and I managed to talk some co-workers into a lunchtime skate. 

I capped off my birthday by going out with friends. I wasn't sure what kind of turnout to expect on a snowy, Wednesday night right after the holidays, but it was a nice surprise to see so many friends make it out.  The highlights of the evening included finding out that a good friend of mine is going to be a dad, and being able to celebrate with two others with the same birthday, my good friend Joanna and my sister-in-law, Danielle.  

Birthday triplets!

Since Chris was out of town on my business on my birthday, he took me out for dinner in Minneapolis over the weekend. We left early so we could take a walk around Lake of the Isles, one of my favorite lakes in Minneapolis, and this is where we failed as Minnesotans.  We didn't dress warmly enough!  The air temperature was -1 with a windchill of -9 and when I saw people walking in snow pants, face masks and ski goggles, I knew we were under-dressed. We tried anyway, walked for 10 minutes and gave up.  The ironic part of being out on such a cold day is that the ice rink on the lake and warming house were shut down due to insufficient ice.  We've had a near record-breaking warm winter until now and our lakes have only recently frozen over.  Too cold to walk and no opportunity to ice skate, we retreated to our car and headed instead to dinner where we enjoyed a four-course meal that was, get this, uninterrupted.  That in itself was a wonderful, wonderful birthday gift.

Please Don't Say All Kids Do That

Please don't say "all kids do that" to adoptive and foster families...
By Shannon Dingle

Children cry. Children have meltdowns. Children sometimes push or shove or hit. Kids act out from time to time. Some kids shut down when disciplined or even simply when an adult talks directly to them at all.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Many behaviors or responses are common for kids.

But behavior is always a form of communication. Who we are, where we’ve been, and what we want others to know all direct our responses. While all children act out or shut down or lose tempers or cry from time to time, what each one is communicating with that behavior might be different.

While all children display certain behaviors, not all children have lost their parents to death or abandonment or addiction or disease. Not all children have been uprooted from the home or country or familiar voices in the womb to live out the rest of their days in a different home and maybe a different country and with a different mother. Not all children have witnessed or experienced abuse or neglect or malnutrition. Not all kids have permanent structural changes to their brains due to early childhood trauma. Not all kids have learned that adults aren’t always trustworthy, home isn’t always safe, and family isn’t always forever.

Some of my kids have, though. And some other kids who have been adopted or are in foster care have too.

I have two daughters turning 8 soon and two sons who’ll be 6 in March. For each pairing, one arrived via birth from my womb and one joined our family by adoption after years of life experience before us (almost 7 years for our daughter and 4.5 years for our son). Sometimes our kids act out in similar ways, but I know their behavioral responses aren’t coming from the same place.

For example, my friends recently adopted a preschooler. They already had another son less than a year older than their new addition, so they’ve parented a two year old boy before. They’re familiar with those things that all kids do. But like any good parents, they know their kids. They know that when one son is clingy at Sunday school drop-off, it’s just age-appropriate separation anxiety that will resolve not long after they’re out of sight. Likewise, they know that when their other son does the same, he’s acting from a genuine fear based on a history in which other caregivers left and never came back. It looks the same, but it’s not the same.

I get the temptation to say “all kids do that.” Truly, I do. But when foster or adoptive parents like me hear that, it feels dismissive to the real grief, pain, and trauma our kids have experienced and how that history still influences their actions today. Usually when someone tells another parent “all kids do that,” the words are meant to be helpful, to soothe our nerves or encourage us in the midst of a hard parenting moment. But that’s not what your words do. Instead those words invalidate what we know to be true and minimize the extra layer of thinking that parenting kids from hard places requires.

Finally, every adoptive and foster parent has different ground rules about how much we can or will share about the children in our homes. You might not know our children’s trauma or circumstances, because you don’t need to. You don’t need to know the details of their personal pain to understand that when our kids cry or yell or fight or melt down, they might be acting out of deep losses and hurts.

So, please, don’t say “all kids do that” because even if behaviors look the same, that doesn’t mean they are the same for our kids from hard places.

Link to original article source

I can think of so many examples of how I see and react differently to the behaviors of Kiera and Matteo than from Oliver or Soren.  Oliver was a shy and anxious baby and toddler and now is a chatty kid who easily talks to any adult.  I never wondered if grief or trauma was causing my little boy to be so clingy and I never worry about attachment when he chats it up with a random parent at the playground. But when Kiera didn't cry when I dropped her off for her first day of preschool, my internal attachment alarm bells went off, as they still do whenever she shows any interest in an adult outside our immediate circle of friends and family, 

I was guilt-stricken when I learned that I'd slept through Matteo's middle-of-the-night crying and our au pair had instead heard him and gotten up to comfort him.  I'm confident in his attachment to his dad and me, yet I feared that underneath the sunny disposition he displayed the next morning was a new seed of loss or distrust. 

When Kiera melts down if we redirect her behavior, she looks like the many other children who can't handle even the gentlest criticism. However, her lack of eye contact and silent treatment that can last hours are subtle clues to us that there's more going on.  We don't know if it's grief or loss or fear of re-abandonment.

Lots of kids are afraid of dogs, including Soren and Matteo. But in Matteo's case, we don't know what his history with dogs is. 

Speech Therapy Progress Update

A question commonly asked is how learning English is coming along for Kiera and Matteo.  As far as we're concerned, they understand English really well.  Even in the early days and weeks home when there were occasions they couldn't have understood what everyone was saying to them, they never seemed upset or frustrated due to lack of comprehension.  Because of their young ages, they learned English quickly and we never needed to rely on translators. 

Speaking English has not happened at the explosive pace that their language comprehension has occurred.  And it's not because they haven't learned English, it's because they both have speech delays, and very significant ones.  Of all their medical needs and catch-up care we've tended to the last 11 months, speech therapy has dominated most of our time.  

Matteo
We knew Matteo would need years of speech therapy because he was born with cleft lip and palate. The idea of speech therapy seemed so straight-forward initially. The therapists would teach him how to talk and we would watch him progress with leaps and bounds.  The difficulty of understanding his speech would be similar to a child with a lisp or mild speech impediment.  Of course this has not been our experience. 

I had little understanding of what kind of time commitment, patience and emotional fortitude Matteo's speech therapy needs would require. I wasn't prepared for a child with no intelligible speech who eventually didn't even try to say anything, perhaps because he had learned no one understood him. I was relieved to finally get him started on intensive speech therapy where he had up to four sessions a week - two at our local children's hospital with speech therapists who work specifically with kids with cranial facial differences and two through our school district's Early Childhood Special Education department.  I thought all we needed to do was put in the time. Given how hard Matteo worked, we should have seen  more progress, but we didn't. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that I can understand maybe 10% of what he says. There are so many sounds he simply cannot make. 

I was not surprised when Matteo's speech therapist and surgeon advised that he needs another surgery.  His bilateral cleft lip had been repaired at five months of age in China and he had surgery a month after coming home to repair his bilateral cleft palate. Closing his palate prevented food from coming out his nose when he ate, but we had to give speech therapy a couple of months before we would know if the procedure had done enough to help his speech.  It was clear to me very early on that the palate repair alone was not going to be enough for Matteo. His surgery next month will involve two procedures - a fistula repair (to repair the hole in the roof of his mouth that was created when his palate repair dehissed) and a pharyngoplasty, (also called a "P-flap" surgery) which will lengthen his soft palate and, fingers crossed, improve his speech.

The P-flap surgery won't be a magic procedure, unfortunately.  Matteo's speech therapy will continue for years as he works to master each and every sound in the English language.  However, I'm hopeful that the surgery in February will allow him to make sounds he is currently not able to make and will make more of his speech intelligible, even if not perfect.  

Kiera
The root of Kiera's speech and language delays is still a big mystery that we've spent the last 11 months trying to figure out.  Although she had not been diagnosed with any speech delays while in China, we knew based on the updates we had received prior to traveling to meet her that she had significant delays. When Kiera was two years and nine months old, I had asked the orphanage how many words she had or if she had too many words to count, and the response was simply, "She can say, Mama, Papa and sister."  She didn't have any two-word phrases.   

The little girl we met in China was happy, but quiet.  Just like we had been told in an update, she got her needs met through a lot of pointing and smiling, and by our observation, just looking plain cute. While many kids have a handful of English words before they even arrive in the United States, Kiera wasn't saying words in any language, or even vocalizing much. We attributed this to her shy, cautious and quiet demeanor. Her nannies and foster family had reported that even as a baby she was quiet and didn't cry a lot.

Home in the U.S., the ENT discovered that Kiera had a significant amount of ear wax impacted on her ear drum and I thought for sure the mild conductive hearing loss that caused was the reason she wasn't talking.  She just couldn't hear!  With the ear wax removed and some more time exposed to English, I eagerly waited for the language explosion to finally occur.  Still nothing.

At follow-ups at the ENT, her right ear kept failing the OAE and they sent her for additional testing under general anesthesia right before Thanksgiving. Even though the doctor assured me that even if she was completely deaf in her right ear, it would not affect her ability to learn to talk, I couldn't help but "hope" deafness would explain Kiera's lack of words and what we were noticing to be an inability to follow multi-step directions or answer open-ended questions. 

The audiologist met me in the waiting room following the testing and announced that Kiera's hearing was perfect.  Those failed hearing tests in the ENT's office was due to what the audiologist had discovered was a "weirdly-shaped" ear canal.  No one could figure that out before we put our daughter under general anesthesia.      

As I continued to be concerned, it felt like everyone around me was telling me to relax because she was going to talk when she was ready or that I couldn't "get" her to talk if she didn't want to. No one had ever met a child adopted from another country and it seemed as if everyone was simply amazed that this cute and endearing little girl was doing as well as she was doing and easily overlooked that she wasn't talking. 

At five months home, I finally got Kiera into speech therapy, but not without a lot of advocating and a bit of a fight. One of the speech therapists at our local children's hospital commented with a hint of frustration in her voice, like I was wasting her time, that their role wasn't to teach Kiera English.  No one seemed concerned that at nearly three years old, Kiera had maybe five words in her native language.  In their opinion, Kiera just needed to learn English.

Language delays are not uncommon from children raised in even the best of orphanage environments, because nothing replaces the positive impact a loving and stable family has on a child's development. Yet Kiera had what my admittedly non-professional opinion felt like were pretty significant language and speech delays that couldn't be completely explained away by an orphanage upbringing.  Kiera came from an orphanage where the kids were well taken care of and she had spent the last year before we met her in a foster family where she was doted on and well-loved.  She attended preschool more days a week than Oliver and Soren did back here in Minnesota.  No, she was not living in a permanent family where her parents read to her every day and made sure she was meeting all her milestones, but she was not in a horrible orphanage setting where she sat in a crib most of her day and no one talked or played with her.       

That we were successful in getting speech services for Kiera was not because anyone listened to my concerns about her lack of language in Chinese or English or her questionable receptive language ability, but because an evaluation of Kiera's speech identified that she drops the last consonant sounds when she mimics words. My disagreements with the speech therapists aside, she was at least in speech therapy and I was hopeful that we would finally start to hear her voice more often. 

Kiera worked very hard at speech therapy for what consisted of up to four sessions a week. She enjoyed going and was persistent, but six months in and she had gained little progress.  Her vocabulary had increased, but she still speaks mostly with single words - when she initiates speech at all - and has only about three two-word phrases she uses.

The only noticeable change in her speech is that for a kid who can't talk, she can be quite loud!  She was super quiet the first couple of months home and while she's still quiet overall, when she's playing, she can make a lot of noise.  While she will patiently and persistently mimic words and even answer questions asked of her during a speech therapy session, all the vocalizing she does while playing isn't discernible speech.  It doesn't even sound like she's trying to make real words. (Except for the word, "Mine!" She quite good at that one.)

It's the lack of initiative to speak and the inability to answer questions that concerns me more than Kiera's articulation issues.  Other than sometimes saying "Potty," when she has to go, she does not use words to express her needs or wants.  She can't answer open-ended questions like asking her what she wants for a snack and will only answer if you give her choices to choose from.  We often don't trust her answers, even in this case, because it seems like she knows we expect an answer, so she just chooses one of them.  She will usually talk if we ask a direct question like pointing to an object in a picture book and asking what it is.  

I'm working on getting Kiera re-evaluated, because my gut says something isn't right, but I don't know what the answer is.  I don't know if it's an auditory processing disorder, apraxia of speech, anxiety or a combination of things.  It is possible she truly is a late bloomer.  I've learned that speech disorders are difficult to properly diagnose, especially in young children, but that early intervention yeilds the best outcomes.  There are also different approaches to therapy depending upon the disorder, which is why proper diagnosis is so important.  

I've been accused of worrying too much and told to just let it be, but my job as Kiera's mom is to be her advocate. She didn't have that for the first three years of her life. 

The Boyfriend Back Home

If you were choosing an au pair, would you choose one who had a boyfriend or girlfriend back home?  When we were new host parents-to-be, the relationship status of au pair candidates never would have been on our radar if I hadn't noticed it was one of the search criteria when we were looking at profiles.  (Yet the number of children an au pair is willing to take care of is NOT one of the search criteria...) It ended up not mattering since the au pair we chose did not have a girlfriend back home.

Then I joined a host parent group on Facebook, and whoa, folks there have OPINIONS on the subject of "boyfriend back home."  There's a small, but vocal group of host parents who screen for "boyfriend back home" and won't choose an au pair who has one.  (Host parents of male au pairs didn't have much opinion on the subject of a significant other back home, but our sample size was pretty darn small.) They warn of the extra drama you're signing up for when the au pair misses her boyfriend and locks herself in her room whenever off-duty, or worse, eventually gets so homesick she goes home early.  Or worse than that is the jealous boyfriend who will guilt-trip your au pair into coming home because he misses her.  One couple was so concerned we were considering a candidate with a boyfriend that within five minutes of my post on Facebook, they called me on conference call from their perspective jobs to try to talk me out of it. 

We did choose that au pair with the boyfriend back home, and well, for the long-time readers of my blog, you know how it worked out. Celina has been great.  Her boyfriend left on New Year's Day after a 10-day visit and we love him as much as we love her.

While he was visiting, we had a good laugh when I told him that the Skype call I had asked Celina to set up with him before we matched with her was actually an interview.  I assured him he had "passed" with flying colors.

I approach the "boyfriend back home" scenario with the same concerns as those from my Facebook group who would have said no to Celina as soon as they learned she had a boyfriend.  Instead of rejecting her, I wanted to go right to the source and talk directly to the boyfriend. So I asked him straight up what he would say to Celina if she called him crying that she wanted to come home.  I asked him if he planned to visit Celina and whether he liked kids.  I asked him what he was studying, what position he played in soccer and who his favorite team was.  To the extent I could in a short Skype call, I tried to get to know him as a person, just as I had when interviewing Celina, and went with my gut.

Thankfully my gut was right.  The boyfriend came and I can see why Celina is smitten with him. He was an impeccable house guest.  Celina had to work much of his visit and he jumped in as co-au pair and played with the kids, read books, built snow forts in the yard, prepared lunches and helped everyone gets coats and boots on.  Hopefully he gained an appreciation for all the hard work Celina does day in and day out.

For my curious readers, yes, we let him stay in Celina's room.  We don't pay attention to what two consenting adults do behind closed doors so long as they model good behavior in front of my family.  And that they did of course.  They cleaned up after themselves, enjoyed meals with our family, thanked me for cooking, said please and thank you, made pleasant conversation and modeled all the manners I'm trying to impress upon my children.  Equally as important, they modeled how two adults who care about each other treat each other.  There was nothing but respect and tenderness between those two.   

The downside to the boyfriend visiting is that the boyfriend eventually had to leave, and of course Celina has been sad.  However, the positives of his visit outweigh having a sad au pair, who otherwise has a good head on her shoulders and will find her way back to her previous routine of staying in touch with her boyfriend via Skype calls and Whatsapp messages. His visit was not a burden on our family, but instead made our Christmas holiday that much more fun.  And if that was our experience, I know Celina enjoyed his visit that much more and hopefully was a morale booster for what is a long 12 months away from home.