Settling in - older child adoption

Estifanos has been home over a week now and we are seeing his personality emerge a bit more each day. He is still pretty quiet - but does have a sense of humor that fits right in with the other kids. He is such an easy going guy, and what a gift that is. Tomorrow he starts school which should be really great for him as he is going to need a bit of ESL support - his english is pretty good - but he does the smile and nod quite a bit. He loves and I mean loves riding his bike - and he is very very good at it. He also really loves hanging out with the big brothers - it is so sweet to see.

People always say there are reasons for various delays in adoptions - I wasn't sure we would ever understand why they came home seperately - but of course now we do. It is because girlfriend is waaay the heck harder than he is. If they had come home together I am not sure how well we could have coped. I hesitate to say that Alemtsehay is hard - when I know lots of folks have had it way harder. When you contemplate older child adoption it is very important to read and know all the challenges you could face and the fact that your child could have all the challenges. She doesn't have all of them - she has a few meltdowns each week - which are exhausting but understandable. The harder part about her is the needy-ness. Now if you haven't adopted a challenging child you have no idea what I am talking about - but there is a needy part of her that theatens to overwhelm us at times. She knows what love is and wants it but often becomes very frantic over it. Her biggest drama revolves around feeling like I love the other kids more than her. Tell her no to something and boom - there you are I love the other kids more. Before she had her dental work taken care of every time she was upset about not getting enough - she would cause her mouth to bleed so that we would have to drop everything and take care of her. Ummm yeah - it worked at first until we got wise to her and then we would just give her some papertowels to take care of it and walk away - but even that was a victory for her. Sigh. She also used to be anemic to her nose would bleed fairly easily when she was upset - but then we figured out she was deliberately making it bleed to get attention.... sigh. Yeah cleaning all that up wasn't fun. Once her dental work was done and the anemia cleared she didn't have the usual things to resort to - both of which probably really provoked reactions from the orphanage staff. So then she resorted to delibertly vomiting - LOL by this time I was totally wise to her tricks. One time she did it and then had to clean it up - which totally did her in. The other time she did it was over taking her meds - which have to be taken every 12 hours. Sooo she doesn't want to take the pills and is trying to find out what I will do about it - she takes them and then makes herself throw them up....sooooo then I make her take them again (same pills mind you). I know it seems tough - but this is not an area we can have any give in... needless to say we haven't had a single problem with meds since, or throwing up for that matter. She is getting better - and I have to remind myself that it has only been 2 months...hopefully the next 2 months see even more improvement.