For this installment of {Voices}, I asked our oldest daughter to speak to issues with siblings and parents. Here is her recorded response in Amharic. (You can save the sound file to your computer by right clicking the link.) The roughly translated transcript is below: “It is hard to live with siblings that are biological...
I won’t lie. Grace has given us a run for our money in terms of behavior. In stressful situations, people tend to flee, fight, or freeze. Grace is a fighter. As a kid from a hard place, she is constantly in a state of high alert and very high stress so she is fighting the majority...
This is the fourth post in a series that answers the questions you asked. To read the rest of the series, click here. I apologize that the answers to your fab questions have rolled out quite as quickly as I imagined. Thanks for your patience. Our son is almost 5 and in thinking about adopting again,...
Pun intended. One of our kids really struggles with sleep. She either can’t fall asleep at night or wakes frequently. She’s also a sleep walker. She’s on the Feingold diet which helps a lot. The amino acids 5HTP and GABA help a lot, too, but I did not want her to be dependent on them...
You guys ask hard good questions. I’m going to answer them the best I can as things stand now. DISCLAIMER: If you ask them again in 6 months, the answers may be different. I’m also going to milk this Q&A thing by answering one or two questions at a time. We adopted three children –...
We just returned from almost a week on the road. We’re trying to find our groove again now that we’re back and CC is over. I have a lot floating around in my head but not enough energy to create meaningful posts, so I thought I’d give you a turn. For the next couple days,...
******UPDATE****** Sometimes super-silly as described here works as well. ********************* The key to dysregulated kids is figuring out how to re-regulate them. So simple, right? NOT. Here are some strategies that have worked recently with our kids: Art. As I posted before, art therapy can double as regulating and healing. Even if your child won’t...
Grace takes very well to art and play therapy. The other day I was able to re-regulate her by agreeing to her demands that we switch roles. I (as the child) begged her to read me a story which she consented to. By the time she was finished reading, she had re-regulated and we were...