Not Accepted

Missy was not accepted into the camp for special needs kids. They said they were not sure they could keep her safe. End of story.

Another shut door.

Happy News!

Our lovely oldest daugher, 

Vanessa Joy is engaged to be married to Sean Nebblett. 

 We are very blessed!!

Fear

It's come clear that Missy, with everyone gone, the house quiet, etc.. Is not able to cover up her fear. She's afraid. Very afraid. Begging me to take her places or to have people over or to entertain her so she doesn't have to feel her fears. She's really really afraid. I think she's worked so hard to try push us away and spent all her time fighting us and now with it quiet her fears are overwhelming her and she is afraid of loneliness, of not being loved, of abandonment, of not growing up, of never being able..? I don't know exactly but terrified to have her bedroom door shut because I'm the only one home and she can't hear anything to assure her she's not abandoned. I've never seen her fears so stark. I was able to break through some of her layers this morning and have a conversation about love. She's calm at the moment. Pray for her.

Mental Health Care is Impossible

I started a post about our backpacking trip. Somehow I ran out of time and never wrote a word.... but stuck a few pictures on the blog. Well, it was a 26 mile, 4 day backpack trip up and down mountains and over snowfields and was incredible. Hoping I can finish the post soon.

I am trying desperately to get mental health care for this kiddo. Thanks to Obama we cannot go to Children's Hospital Mental Health Clinic. We live in the wrong county. Nice. We live in a small town with little available. My one option is to driver her to Seattle and take her to the Children's Hospital ER and have her admitted. They cannot turn us away.  Or I can go through the hoops of trying to get her admitted here and wait for an opening or a bed. Or I can continue to sit by the phone and hope someone finds the time to call me back. It's rough.

We've come to the conclusion that Missy is bipolar - and by we, I mean a person who works in adult mental health care, and some nodding by the pediatrician and by all the research I have been doing. She is now off the medication as it made her bipolar issues go crazy. Crazy, crazy.  We knew it could happen if she was bipolar. We were watching for the signs. She went into manic mode. She had pressured speech, hyper sexuality, hoarding food, craving carbs, stealing money, lying, eating out of the trash can, etc...( there was a HUGE hyperfocus on food).  Then she came off the meds and back to screaming and depression. She started throwing stuff and she nearly jumped from a 2 story window (had to put an alarm on her bedroom window). Most of her actions are for attention, but sometimes there's a look in her eye that tells me there's more to this. I am scared. She is out of control. I am doing my level best to get help.  Our little town has so little to offer. Our pediatrician is slow or afraid of mental illness. Getting psychiatric help is not easy let me tell you. I can't even get her in to see a psychiatrist!!! And I know that there is ONE in town.  Next time she does something crazy I am calling 911 or the crisis line. It's the only way someone is going to hear me. 

 James is at Young Disciple Camp. Vanessa is working there along with her fiancé, Brianna and Christina are in Vermont and headed to Nova Scotia to put on the teen program for camp meeting. Steve is working super long hours... like leaves before I wake up and home after 10...  I am trying to get Missy into Camp Korey which is a camp for special needs kids. They usually need the applications in before the end of April, but I didn't know about it until two weeks ago. She is in no way able to go to regular camp and is absolutely devastated that she can't go to YD. So, I called anyway and they had one spot left. I jumped through the hoops including going to the doctor for a physical and catching her up on immunizations and everything and now we wait. It's a free camp, not on the weekend, and serves vegetarian food for those who request it. It is on an organic herb and veggie market farm and has a whole medical staff to deal with her special needs.

All my efforts at finding respite care or more babysitting has failed. It doesn't matter that we are paying. No one is interested. My friends from church, Teresa and Cindy - also adoptive moms, and I all have our birthdays back to back. We decided to go out together to eat without kids. Oh my. I did not anticipate how hard it would be to get a sitter for ONE kiddo. It's a regular caregiver day so I assumed, but no, he was not able to be here that day and it looked like I would not be able to find a anyone. I looked around for a few days and finally found a lady from church willing to watch Missy, BUT then the caregiver agency came up with a new caregiver. Also, next Tuesday Vanessa and I planned to go wedding dress shopping in Spokane after I picked her up from being a counselor. The caregiver canceled again!! I resigned myself to taking the twins wedding dress shopping, but you can only imagine how that would go. A friend called today and offered to take the kids, and then the agency called has found me a caregiver... after some discussion the agency is looking for yet another caregiver. Between the three people we should be able to shop worry free. :-) 

James is loving camp and doing well. He finds Vanessa for hugs often. Her campers wanted to know what was up with that!! lol. Well, he's an adopted brother who has fear of abandonment... He needs assurance all the time. Son-in-law-to-be said James came to him quite perturbed that they played taps 30 minutes late one night. James wanted him to find the culprits and correct the issue. :-) That would be our little inflexible child... Ha!

Backpacking in the High Country

HARD

Missy has been hard, hard, hard.

It's nothing like we have ever dealt with before. More sophisticated... more driven, unending and unyielding.

Food hoarding. To the point of stealing money to get food from a vending machine. The money was James, but it all came out when she was found searching my room for money. We have to be more careful about using the lock on my bedroom door, the pantry, the freezers, using the alarm on her door, etc... We are the kind to leave egg money in jars on the window sill... little stuff, 3 dollars here and there.  There's food everywhere on the fruit trees and in the garden. If she were hungry she would go for something good, I would think, but no, she eats frozen things that have no appeal. But she also eats all the treats up.

Hyper sexualization. Inappropriate attention seeking from men and older boys. Cannot keep her hands to herself.

Distorted Speech. She has gotten very hard for me to understand. Her cleft issues has made it hard for her to speak absolutely clearly, but for some reason I can't understand her well right now.

Irritable. But that's not new. It's just a different brand. She has taken to throwing things.

This driven sort of behavior is strange. Like we can work with her and she will apologize and then 5 minutes later do the same thing over again. It's like watching a 1 year old. You have to know where she is every second. She's become dangerous to herself. I can't let her go swimming at the pool with the other kids unless I'm there. I can't let her go places and she insists that she is as capable as everyone else, but she's downright scary.

So, it has been suggested we are dealing with the mental illness more than the DD at this point. Calling Children's Hospital for help. I think that the sleep Clinic's doc was concerned enough last month when we saw her that she will get us a referral.  She actually had Missy step out of the room so we could talk. She could see we are struggling to do this...

We had an enjoyable three days camping while she stayed with my mom at our house. Mom said she was okay one on one part of the time, but got out of hand by the end. When we took the airport trip and she thought she was going, but had to stay home the tantrum was awful. She had my mom crying and everyone else. My mom was like, "call the psychiatric ward!!" Sigh.... in the process Missy broke the door jam.


BUT James continues to be even keel and happy.