I joined up with the Rockin' Mama Challenge today!As I have talked about many times on this blog, attachment is not always an easy thing.
Even after 5 years we see big gaps for both of our treasures.
After Caleb and Hannah had been home for a year I was talking with a dear adoptive mom friend about the struggle I was still having with Caleb and his attachment. She so wonderfully pointed out to me that I also was not attaching to him!!
Interestingly I had never thought about it in this way, nor heard about it, nor read about it. It was always the child attaching to the parent being the issue.
So at that point we did lots of research and I sought lots of advice from experienced adoptive moms, and we started the 'over loving' phase of adoption.
We praised EVERY small thing, we let some things slide that we never would have with our bio kids, we took every opportunity to touch and hug, we said words of affection at every turn. We found our hearts learning to love in a new way and him responding in a new way. It was great!
This is not to say everything was wonderful. We still had our struggles, but things were so much better.
And I would say now he knows we love him and we will never leave him. He still has behaviours that are related to trauma and loss. But overall we are on a good path.
This challenge with him, is hopefully to go deeper and help him with touch and expressing feelings at a new level.
With Hannah things have always moved at a different pace.
Due to her delays we have always worked with her a little differently from Caleb.
I have missed seeing that her attachment issues are definitely not going in the right direction.
Just in the last week it was confirmed in my heart that some intervention was going to need to happen and soon.
Thankfully my blogging friend, and now face to face friend, Lisa, posted a couple of days ago about a new challenge her great therapist gave her for one of her children with past trauma issues.
It was a rocking challenge!
You simply rock with your child on your lap with nothing else going on. Just you and them and a rocking chair for 15 minutes.
Now for me that is 30 minutes of uninterrupted time.
Not easy to find, but essential as I see it for my family right now.
You can go to Lisa's blog post and read more about it if you are interested. I will be posting here as we move through this process and let you know how I am doing and what responses we are seeing with the kids.
So day one looks like this:
Hannah-after 5 minutes laid back and started looking me in the eye and giving me full dialog of her day with prompting!!
Caleb-after trying for 5 minutes to remove himself sneakily from my lap, relaxed. He told me it was starting to feel comfortable after 10 minutes. He told me how much he liked his building sets and what he was reading about. Never really got more than a few fractions of eye contact.
Let me know if you decide to take the challenge and we can encourage one another!
