Moving through the hump.

Little Ham continues to struggle with the mind blowing concept that he is not leaving here. He is so ingrained in the routine of "6 months here, 6 months there, 6 months somewhere else" that he has packed his emotional bags two or three times in the last couple of weeks. He describes the feeling as being 'Way high up on the mountain where no one can reach me.' And from down here on the ground, it looks like he disappears into his head and there's nothing left behind for us. His eyes grow black and hollow. There is no meaningful conversation. Arms are crossed.

So, being the jackasses we are, we continue to talk to him while he's on the mountain. We ignore it entirely, and tell jokes to each other and sing songs and have a nice family right in front of him. This makes him storm off in a huff. 10 minutes later he returns, a little further down the mountain.

We go up and down the mountain about once a week, more so this week because he had a pretty bad head cold.  I am not sure if this will be better or worse after the adoption is finalized. This can't be fun for him.

In other news, Hamslice is back to his old tricks of making enemies of all the teachers at school. He is back to refusing to write ANYTHING AT ALL. He will give all answers orally, but if he is given a pencil and a blank piece of paper, well you can expect a tantrum but not any writing.

So we had our 23,645,230th parent teacher conference last week with the big support group that includes therapists and a note taker.

The school had put him on a behavior mod program without telling me, and I was pretty mad. The behavior mod had 6 aspects of behavior to achieve (which is too many) and they measured twice each day. If he passed all six aspects to their satisfaction, he would earn a reward. It had been running for 2 weeks, which means 20 evaluations. I asked how many of the evaluations he passed and they said ONE. So 19 times out of 20 he was told he was not good, and he had to see all that negativity written out in check boxes on a piece of paper.

They didn't like it when I said it that way. And I got them to admit that really all we need from Hamslice this year is for him to start writing, which would be a behavior mod program with only ONE check mark in it.

*Sigh*

Come on Hamslice.

Committment Issues, a la Little Ham

The adoption looms large in our household, and has bifurcated the family. Hamslice is ready to send Little Ham away, Hambone and I are "all in" and ready to sign the papers tomorrow if we could get them. Little Ham's response is a little different.

We had a good conversation about it yesterday right before bed. (We are able to have real conversations now without dissolving into screaming) He asked if he would be able to sleep in bed with Hambone and I after the adoption is final. I said, "no, probably not, but you don't have to worry about the adoption anymore, we have already decided we want you to stay."

He said, "Well what if I don't decide to stay."

I said, "You can say whatever you feel to the social worker and she will make a decision accordingly."

He said, "I wonder if she could show me some pictures of other families. I don't want to meet them and do Skype calls and all that, but I would like to see what my options are."

I said, "We could probably do that. BUT, if you get to look at other families, then we should probably look at some other kids, just to see what OUR options are."

Little Ham immediately closed the discussion, because he does NOT want us looking at other kids. He needs to have these really "on the line" discussions, and when he hears that we're open to his ideas, then he starts to hear how it sounds to say it out loud and he changes his mind. But I think talking through it is better than me closing down the discussion right away.

The social worker comes next Thursday. Stay tuned.