Baby "M"

What I left out of the last blog post was that when Ian called me and said we were going to lose Baby “A,” he said, “Apparently, there’s a baby boy a month younger who has become available. I said ‘yes.’” Now, Ian is the cautious one of the two of us. He notices the crack in the ceiling and worries that the attic is going to come crashing down on us, and he notices that the pool has extra leaves in it and worries that the pump is burned out and is going to cost us hundreds of dollars. (For the record, he was wrong about the ceiling, and right about the pump)

The baby – we’ll call him “M” – has been with the same foster family for 19 of his 20 months on earth, and they couldn’t keep him any more, even though parental rights with his biological mother had been terminated almost a year ago. This means that almost all of the hassles of foster-adoption, the two or three hour long visits several times a week with the biological parents, the threat of having him returned to them, all that wasn’t going to happen. We were asked if we could pick him up Thursday between 1 and 1:30, and we said we would, but we still had Baby “A” and only one crib.

There was a behind the scenes kerfuffle, and we brought Baby “A” to our agency where the people who had brought in his four-year-old sister were meeting us. They seemed very nice, though after the fact, I learned there had been a bit of a funny British/American translation issue. Ian wanted to tell them that “A” wouldn’t sleep in his crib without duress and he used the British word for crib, which is “cot.” “You let him sleep in a cot instead of a bed?” they asked, horrified, imagining the poor baby in a fold-out army issued number.

Having decided we were taking on Baby “M” stifled our grief over losing Baby “A.” We were like a restaurant, flipping lunch service for dinner service in the 24 hours between babies. Today, we went down to the Culver City DCFS office and met him.

He’s handsome. Our social worker called him “beautiful,” and that might be more accurate. We were told there might be some behavioral issues – scarcely surprising for any foster child, let alone one on his first day away from the only family he’s ever known – but aside from a brief cry when Ian picked him up, he was good as gold and remained that way all day long, from driving back to our house, to play time, to dinner time, to bath time, to bed time.

Tomorrow, he’s got a visit with the pediatrician, and our three day weekend. We’re hoping this angelic demeanor will last. Everyone keeps saying to us, “This is the one.”

Feels like it.

The First (and Last) Week of Baby A

We had Baby J for a month to the day; it looks like we’ll have had Baby A for just over a week. We got a call yesterday from our social worker saying that the family who took in his four-year-old sister, someone certified to take care of her asthma, is also going to take him in. There was a possibility we could have kept Baby A longer if we had agreed to take in his sister, but it would have been very difficult to take care of a chronically ill child and her very active toddler brother without help, and there was a good likelihood than in a couple months, he would end up with his biological mother and her seven other children at the end anyhow.

It has been a great week with him. What a difference between a 21-month-old (not an 18-month-old as we had thought before) and Baby J, the five month old. We took him to petting zoos, pony rides, parks, and on Saturday, the Pasadena Pops, where our friend Rachel Worby is the conductor and musical director. She played on the steps of City Hall, and Baby A was standing up on stroller boogying when they got to the Duke Ellington medley. Definitely a memory we’ll always have.

He’s taking a nap now after playing ball in the front yard and then a walk over to the grocery for some much needed ‘nanas. Probably go to the park this afternoon after lunch.

We don’t when he’ll go, today or tomorrow, but we’ll enjoy the time we have left, though it’s hard to plan your day when anytime, you may be called home to pack a bag for forever for the little one.

Baby A

We got a call last night at 10:30 about a year old baby boy who was in need of immediate placement in a foster home. We had been getting a number of calls since losing Baby J in February, but none of them seemed right. There’s always the possibility of losing a child when you foster-adopt, but some possibilities are stronger than others, and if your goal is to be an adoptive parent and not a babysitter, you have to keep that in mind.

Earlier yesterday, we got a call about a 2 day old baby girl, born positive for crystal meth. We said yes, and in the minutes it took to pass the word to the county social worker, another family had already beaten us to the front of the line. Last week, we turned down a match with another little girl born positive for crack and syphilis, but whose mother was fighting to keep her.

Fifteen minutes after we said yes last night, he arrived. Baby “A” is actually more of a toddler than a baby, not twelve but eighteen months old, and doesn’t fit in any of Baby J’s old clothes. He was asleep, but woke up in my arms as I carried to the crib. He cried when I tried to put him in the crib, so we brought him to bed with us. He was exhausted but so resistant to sleeping, he stood on the bed as his strength left him and he began to do the drunken splits. Finally, he snuggled in with us and slept until 7 this morning.

He’s very vocal and babbley, saying favorite words like “Ball!” “Spiderman!” and “Mine!” He refused to eat his breakfast of bananas and cereal, and it was such an anathema to him that we discovered we could use the bowl to chase him away from anything we didn’t want him to get into. Finally, when the hunger got him, he showed that he would eat bananas (on their own), crackers, and drink milk and water.
When I was at Target with him buying him a high chair today, I made a classic rookie dad mistake. He pointed out a big ball, and he had been so good, I grabbed it and gave it to him. I don’t know what I was thinking: that he would be happy with the ball in the basket, to be played with when we got home? No, obviously, as we were the store, we were playing the game where he throws the ball down the aisles, crying until I retrieve it for him. And then he gives the “I got you!” grin, because he knows he has.

Have no idea whether we’re going to be able to keep him for a while or forever or not.