A new season

As you can see above, I've changed the blog title & description.  It only seems to make sense to change things with the changes in our life.
I'm sorry it's been a slow, quiet couple of weeks around here.  I never planned to go through the changes that have happened here, so my heart was a little flipped upside down & backwards for a while.....which means this blog site was the last thing on my mind each day as I layed in bed crying & imagining the pain & sorrow our decisions would cause A&K.  Let me backtrack a little & fill in some gaps for those of you who still have questions.  I'll start from the beginning.

On 2/9/06, one of my closest friends - Lisa Hardel - died of complications surrounding her 2 bouts of leukemia.  She was in remission & considered to be "cured" by her doctors, but she was taking a million maintenance drugs and was having many, many side effects to those medicines.  She was miserable, but she was not on the verge of death, so her sudden death that Thursday completely took me (& everyone else who loved her!) by surprise.  She died about 4:30 that afternoon.  I spent the evening & into the wee hours of the morning sobbing for the loss of my friend.  By the following morning I had come to terms with her death (I thought) and was at peace with the fact that she was in Heaven, dancing with Jesus, eating the foods that her health issues had prevented her from enjoying on earth.  I learned later that my grief for her was not over, but I believe now that God brought me to a comfortable place so that I would have the mental capacity to deal with a much bigger issue that day.

Larry was having back pain problems & was under the care of a pain management doctor.  On Friday 2/10/06, he had injections in his spine to relieve pain.  We left the hospital at approximately 1:45pm & were heading home when the cell phone rang.  We were only a few blocks from the hospital we had just left when we got that call.  It was my father in law who asked us to go back to the hospital & check on Kelly (my sister in law).  She was married to G (Larry's brother).  I didn't get all the details at that time, but learned later that she & G had a car wreck that morning & she was in bad shape.  G had been driving drunk & was in jail in the county where the wreck occured.  Their children were, at that time, still in school.  My father in law was not sure of her condition, but knew that she had left their local hospital in bad shape.  He indicated that it didn't look good for her, but that they had brought her to Tyler where there were better facilities to handle her condition.  Since we lived closer he sent us to check on her while he waited for news.
When we arrived at the hospital, it was too late.  Kelly was already gone.  We were seated in the small "family room" (aka: the bad news room) at the hospital to cry, talk to the chaplain, call family members, etc.  We were asked to go in & identify Kelly's body, sign papers releasing her body to the funeral home, sign hospital forms about her bills and more.  It was the most surreal day of my life.  All at once I felt very "grown up" as I'd never dealt that closely with the death of a loved one before.......but also very helpless & shocked.  It was such a strange feeling to sign all those papers & identify a relative who was covered with a sheet.  Larry made the phone call to his father to tell him that Kelly had died and he (my father in law) prepared to tell her children as they got off the school bus.
Sitting in that little room at the hospital, we knew our lives were about to change.  Kelly had just talked to us a couple of months before about taking her children if something were to ever happen to her.  We had agreed, but of course never expected that it would actually happen.  As we sat there & talked to our pastors, who came to be with us, we discussed the very strong reality that our family was about to grow by 2.
Within my most selfish thoughts, I realized that Kelly's death & impending funeral meant I would probably miss Lisa's funeral.  I knew that family was more important in a situation like this, but I couldn't help but grieve knowing I would miss my friend's funeral.  Later on it would be confirmed that Lisa's funeral & Kelly's were scheduled for the exact same day & time.  I couldn't do anything about either death or the loss the 2 families felt, so I chose to attend the funeral that most closely effected me & the family I cherish.
It took several months for my grief over Lisa's death to resurface.  I was far too busy in the interim to think about her.  It's now been 13 months & I still cry over Lisawhen I think of her, but it's gotten a lot easier as time has passed.  She was so very young (barely 30) and had such a bright future (with her husband of 10 years and three young children, about the same ages as my own).  I love ya, Lisa.  Hug Jesus for me tonight.  :)
Anyway, in my home, life drastically changed.  We very quickly got together beds and clothing for 2 new children.  Family & friends came out of the woodworks, so to speak, offering support, prayers and much love.  The kids moved in 8 days after Kelly's death and our lives began a new season that we fully intended to see extend into their adult lives.  At the time they moved in, G had not yet been sentenced for his crime, but we knew that the sentence could range from 2-20 years.  We suspected that he might receive a heavier sentence because this was not his first drug/alcohol related arrest.  In the end, he was sentenced to 10 years, which means he'll serve approximately 2 1/2 years.  At present, he has been in jail/prison for 13 months, so he has a little more than a year left to serve.
We chose to go through the court system & get "official" custody of the children so that we would always be covered legally if something weird were to happen.  We re-wrote our wills to include them.  We looked at Andrew & Kourtney as two new children of ours .... not as our neice & nephew who had come to live with us.  Being a mama, I tend to quickly fall in love with kids anyway, so it took a very short period of time before I felt very much like their mother.  I always believed, and still do, that biological or not, they are at least part "my kids".
Over the 13 months that they lived here, we fell in love with the kids.  Kourtney quickly began calling me 'mama' & in a short time, she was giving me big wet kisses & snuggling me just as tightly as the other girls.  Andrew loved snuggling in bed at night, telling me all his memories and dreams and hopes for life.  Both kids missed their mom, but Andrew was always strangely detached from the loss.  Kourtney would cry & talk about missing her mom, but Andrew never shed a tear or seemed to grieve her a bit.  It didn't take long before my love for these kids and the hope & desire to 'heal them' was overwhelming.
When they moved in, we knew that Andrew had emotional/psychological issues to deal with, but we believed it was just his ADHD & having lived a hard life that were problems.  We had no idea that anything lurked deeper under the surface.  As time went on, we saw a very angry, agressive little boy emerge.  Not only was his temper quick, but so were his fists & his tongue.  The smallest spark set him ablaze.  I cried myself to sleep so many nights for Andrew.  I felt scared, early on, of what he might do to one of the kids or us, but kept believing that we had it under control & would "love him through it".  We had him in counseling & psychiatric care, so we felt like we were doing everything possible to help him overcome the rage & evil that was planted so deep in his heart.
While Andrew's attitude & dimeanor were always a little on the abrasive side--- a child who would trip the other kids, pick fights constantly and lie about everything under the sun --- he had a very gentle, sweet side as well.  I believe he always saw Kourtney & Sarah as equals, little sisters for him to protect & care for.  He never really hurt or bothered the two of them, but Savannah & Samuel were a constant threat to him and he would stop at nothing when it came to arguing/fighting with them.
As time went on, we witnessed Andrew's attacks on Samuel (who he shared a room with & was a quicker target) and Savannah (who he always butted heads with because she is the oldest) becoming more & more frequent.  Punishments and discussion never made a dent in Andrew's anger issues and in time, they became completely ineffective to stop him from flying into a rage and hurting himself or others or things that were nearby when he got mad.
While we realized that none of the things Andrew dealt with emotionally were his fault, we were becoming more & more nervous about what he could potentially do in one of his hot tempered moments.
We learned, through research we did on our own, that Andrew very very likely has what is called Reactive Attachment Disorder.  While never officially diagnosed, Andrew has every symtpom in the book so we began researching it in an effort to better understand him.  While healing and recovery from RAD is very difficult, intense therapy & teaching the parents/caregivers how to handle an RAD child is possible.  I joined multiple email groups on the subject & we checked out books from libraries all across the country trying to learn everything we could about how to handle Andrew.
For a very vivid picture of what an RAD child looks like, watch this movie.  I found it on blockbuster.com where we rent our movies, but I'm sure other movie rental places probably have it:  http://www.amazon.com/My-Flesh-Blood-Anthony-Tom/dp/B0003JAO8Q  There is a child in this movie who has RAD, although they never specifically mention that.  You will KNOW which child it is, however, when you watch the movie.  As I watched it, I cried knowing that this child has the same issues as Andrew --- a very disturbed little boy with pain running so incredibly deep that he can't control the way it boils over out of himself daily.  (Note:  the child in the movie however has Cystic Fibrosis & ultimately dies at the end of the movie.  This is a documentary, so the story is indeed a true one.)
In time, Andrew became a risk to the other kids and to Larry, threatening to burn down the house & stab Larry in the head in his sleep.  We were very nervous about these threats but when I walked in & saw him beating the tar out of Savannah on the morning of 3/11/07, I knew it was time to move him.  I drove the kids to church that morning and then got in the car & drove to the far corner of the parking lot to hide my face & cried for over an hour.  Realizing that we had reached a "point of no return" was the most painful revelation.  I knew that we had reached a place where safety was a concern but knowing we would actually have to physically remove him from our home was devastating, heartbreaking, painful & completely overwhelming.  I pulled myself together & went into the building for the worship service with the biggest cloak of dread.  I knew that I would have to talk to Larry about this quickly before the service began....but as it turns out, he was baptising someone & didn't make it to the pew til a few minutes into the service.  I sat there, tear-stained and broken, waiting for an appropriate time to tell him what had happened that morning.  He finally turned to face me at one point & recognized the sorrow on my face and I was able to write him a note & share the morning's occurances.  He read the note & put his face in his hands.  I believe that he knew what was ahead, too, and he was feeling the same anguish.
Over the course of the next 12 hours, we talked a lot, prayed more, talked with his parents and ultimately decided as a family to start calling the following day to have Andrew placed in a group boy's home setting.  We left the kids (all 5) with Larry's parents that evening & drove home in silence.  We were both aching over the place we were in and felt helpless to change the turn of events, hating that we were having to make these decisions and of course, having to add to the pain in Andrew's life.  The kids had no idea, when we left, that Andrew would not be coming back home with us in a few days.  They had a visit planned with Larry's parents, so we let it continue as planned & spent those next 2 days making a thousand phone calls.
(continued in the next post---there is a limit to the # of characters per post)