Assessments

This is Tim posting again. As we wind down the trip here in Bogota, Ginny and I were talking a lot about where things stand with the girls. I wanted to write about it here for two reasons: (1) to look back at later and see how far they (God-willing) have come and (2) to hopefully get some input from those of you who have also been at this point.

I will start with the many positives:

• The girls are both very affectionate and seem to be attaching well. I know attachment takes a LONG time, but they love being held and kissed. Also, when we got to Bogota and their entire world changed without warning, they clung to us to keep them safe. I'm thinking that has to be a good sign.
• They both express themselves. That wouldn't seem like a positive when one of them is wailing away about something, but it's much easier to have their feelings out in the open than to see them shut down, which is what we have been told many adopted kids do when they are upset.
• They both seem genuinely happy. This is especially evident in Katie. The first week she always had this look of sadness about her. Then one day she cried a lot - real crying with tears, not the typical toddler whine / tantrum. We both comforted her and told her we loved her, and ever since then she has been a different kid. Disclaimer on this one: I remember the report we got on them saying something stupid like, "She was upset when we first took her out of the birth home and she was totally malnourished and afraid, but now she is 100% fine - no trauma whatsoever!" (the Colombians are big on telling you that everything is ok even when you know it's not). So we want to be careful not to think that she is just going to shed all her baggage just because she had a good cry, but nonetheless, it seems to be moving in the right direction.
  
• They are eating well. We went to the doctor today and got quite a shock - Katie only weighs 19 pounds and Rosa only weighs 13 pounds! Our little dog almost out-weighs them! So the fact that they are eating gives us so much hope. They don't have a lot of eating issues either. Katie was hoarding at first, but she quit doing that when she realized that we were going to let her have her food. Rosa gets easily distracted when she eats, but she still eats.
• They have both been sleeping through the night the last week or so. They each used to wake up in the middle of the night and be up for an hour or two. I think they still wake up briefly (we all do) but are able to put themselves back to sleep. Getting to sleep is another story (more on that later), but the fact that they were still able to sleep through the night here in Bogota in different beds is good news.

Overall we really have seen a lot of progress. Rosa is still so young that it's hard to tell what issues we are going to be facing with her. She basically cries when she wants food, drops a toy, or is really tired. We're not naive enough to think that she won't be facing some things later given her past (in which she almost outright died of starvation), but we just don't have a good handle on what those things are right now. With Katie, we see three big issues:

• Speech/Development: This one is not only the biggest hurdle, but it's also the one which we feel least equipped to deal with. The report we got on her said that she spoke in short sentences. We found out on day one that this was a total lie. We have heard her say one word in Spanish (agua), and we confirmed from her social worker that indeed she was not saying any words at the time we got her. That's not to say she isn't talkative - she is making noises of some kind pretty much all the time! - but she has not put together many actual words (in any language). In the time that we have had her, she has said a few words (like mommy and daddy), but she would rather sing (she can say E-I-E-I-O) or say words that sound fun (like "happy", which she says like "happpp-eeeeee"). She can communicate with gestures so we wonder if it's a matter of motivation. We tried forcing her into saying things (like "up" if she wanted picked up) but she did not get what we wanted from her and just got very frustrated. She has started saying some new words here in Bogota, so we are grateful for the baby steps. We also hope that once she gets immersed in an English-speaking culture and is around her little talking cousins, she will be more motivated. We also plan to see a speech therapist at home. Regardless, she is WAY behind in her talking and motor skills (she always looks drunk when she walks!), so she has a ton of catching up to do.
  
• Sleeping: We have been around enough toddlers to know that this issue is not limited to adoptees! That being said, we have also been told many times that this is a different issue for adopted kids. The issue with Katie is that sometimes she doesn't want to sleep - either for a nap or at night. So we have gone through many different methods to get her to sleep, all of which worked well once or twice, then failed miserably. We are now at the point where we stand over her bed and whisper softly to her while gently rubbing her hair. On our last night in Monteria, she drove us nuts because we did this for 45 minutes while she did everything in her power to keep herself awake (made noises, played with her hands despite the fact that we kept gently pulling them down to her side, even held her eyelids open at one point!). The end result was us giving up (thinking we were giving her too much attention and that was keeping her awake) and her taking an additional hour to fall asleep while she made "fun" little noises. It can be really maddening. Now here is the part where the adoption thing changes the game: if we leave the room and just let her fall asleep without us, she freaks out, and every adoption guide out there says that you never want to let an adopted kid just cry themselves to sleep (at least we think that's right - someone PLEASE tell us if that is wrong!). So we are not sure what to do when we get home and she is fighting us on falling asleep, because we REALLY don't want to be sitting in her room for two hours every night going through this.
  
• Aggressive Play with her Sister: This is the one that we feel most confident about addressing. In fact, she has already made a good deal of progress in this area. When we first got her, she would yank Rosa to the ground by her hair. We got that *mostly* under control with timeouts. She also runs her sister over and smashes her face into the ground. We have been working with her a lot on that one too and she is doing fairly well. At first we thought she just hated Rosa, but we learned from one of the workers that there was apparently a boy her age in the foster home who liked to wrestle and we think that this is just all she knows in terms of playing with other kids. The fact that she is making progress and the fact that soon Rosa will be able to fight back makes this issue the least disconcerting of the three.

So that is where we are in a nutshell. It's really not too bad given how much baggage these girls have in their past. There is work to do but things could be much worse. Regardless, God has given us a golden opportunity to turn their lives around and we are committed to doing just that.