[Barksum]

Have to laugh somewhat ruefully when I read thru this thread. I remember thinking that "my" children wouldn't be like the children described in our classes, etc. I thought that just being firm, consistent and stable would cover most things. It helps, but....

I also remember being told to "access services" for any child we adopted. Maybe I missed the class that covered how to FIND the services (I didn't) but my experience has been that it is often very difficult to find appropriate services for the needs of the child. It takes alot of work, and entering into the whole thing with little idea of what the actual problem could be was very handicapping to us as parents.

Our oldest son has fetal alcohol issues, but came to us with no known/identified issues. HELLO! He had issues, but they just were not clearly documented. I can go back and see things in his case file now, but they weren't obvious to me before because we didn't really know what we should be looking for. Additionally, I learned things from his foster mom that were not in the case file. I give the cw's the benefit of the doubt because he was pretty young, but to be biographied as a child with NO issues was not quite totally acurate.

Our second adoption was very much more eyes open, but we did get a little surprise there, too. Ds #2's bio mom was hepatitis c positive. Our son had been screened for this at birth and that first test was listed as negative. In my naivte I thought that was all we needed to know. It wasn't until after he had been placed with us and his medical file forwarded to our pediatrician that I found out he had already had two blood tests and we still needed a third blood test at 18 months of age before he would be considered hep c negative.

Both of our sons came to us with some delays. Ds #1 has sensory integration issues (listed as "likely has dysfunction of sensory integration") as well as some of the "classic" fetal alcohol issues, such as social/emotional dysmaturity. Ds #2 has had significant delays in other areas. Starting out with his first eval at about 3 or 4 months he was assessed as functioning at about a 1 month old level. He is 3 now and has overcome all of his delays except speech. He has the expressive language of the "average" 1 year old. (Talk about frustrating! You try having a child with a high level of receptive language and very limited expressive language!)

I suppose the thing that I've noticed lately is that we have adapted our home and thinking to the different needs of our little guys so well that it is second nature to us. It isn't until we get the surprised looks from other families that we realize that we aren't average. (Normal is such an overused term.) I figure that hey, if I can learn to live with 45 - 90 minute tantrums then Wal-Mart customers can adjust to a 3 minute freak-out over having to walk by the cart. It just isn't that big a deal to me any more because I know how far we've come from where we were. That, and I live too far away to just stop shopping and go home.