Grumble, Grumble, Grumble

Sometimes I have lots of words and nothing to say and so my fingers just babble across the keyboard amounting to nothing. Sometimes I put down whatever has been rolling around in my head just to get it out of there so I can start working on something else. Cheap therapy. And sometimes I have no idea what to think about or write about issues we're dealing with so I just do nothing until I get my head around it. I've emotionally flip-flopped so many times in the past week dealing with moderately impactful yet immensely annoying issues that I thought it best just to keep my fickle feelings to myself. But just so my pair of readers will know that I'm still bouncing around the planet, I thought it was about time to emerge and come up with some sort of spewage.

Sparky has some pretty serious behavior problems that Ana has been helping him work on. He and his brother have basically stalled emotionally in toddlerhood which is about the time they were removed from their mother's care. This means that they are concrete thinkers, they are very "me" centered, and they wail (Drama Boy) and tantrum (Sparky) when they don't get their way. Needless to say, it is substantially more difficult to deal with a screaming, tantruming nine year old than a two year old. For starters, you cannot physically relocate an older child to his bedroom yet they are not emotionally able to reason and think at age-level so calming them is difficult and a 9 year old's tantrum is far more destructive. With lots of structure and consistency he has shown some improvement. In the meantime, Ana also gets to deal with their birth mom who is blaming her for their misbehavior. What? Quite aggravating.

Meanwhile....our agency has decided to discontinue therapy and psychiatric services for Squeaker and gave us a few weeks notice to find someone in our area. We recently moved to a new county and the kid's MediCal is only accepted in the old county so we drive down there for health services. Because of her mood disorder, Squeaker is in special classes in public school and has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). She has also been approved for funding through the school system for out-patient therapy. Since I am not a big fan of either the public school system or state-run mental health services, I have opted not to utilize this funding so I have been waiting for the adoptions to be finalized so I can use her MediCal to find private counseling. We were not offered psychiatric services, but the agency insists that they are available, not understanding that we can't just demand whatever services we want from the state. The agency has totally put a wrench in the works by kicking us to the curb before we are ready. Again, aggravating....but par for the course I suppose.

In reading some of my favorite adoptive parent blogs, it seems that many parents who have adopted older children are going through situations where they must struggle with a pretty messed up system to get help for their kids. Even social workers that "get it" are often restricted by the policies of a system that can't seem to meet the needs of the kids it's supposed to serve so foster and adoptive parents have to fight and scramble and pester to get their kids the services they need. Pretty sad.