New children. New house. New parents. New.
Those first few months were spent attempting to settle in as a 'normal' new family. Our 'normal' was only slightly different than other's normal. Rather than adding infants to our family, we added a three year old and an almost two year old. They were walking and talking. They were rambunctious. They were typical toddlers. Kind of.
Will settled in well. He has always been a happy-go-lucky little fella. Always on the go. Always cracking himself up over something. Always into everything. He slept well from the very beginning. He ate like a champ. He took looooonnnnnnngggg naps. Like, they sometimes would last for two hours. Wow.
Addie, on the other hand, was a very troubled toddler. She would rock herself from side to side when she got upset. She bit her hands until they bled anytime she got mad at the world....which was on a near daily basis. She screamed for hours on end. She begged us to get Lula...her favorite caregiver. She jabbered incessantly in Russian while talking on her 'cell phone'. She wouldn't sleep. In fact, every night I would sit by her bed for several hours holding her hand while she tried to go to sleep. Typically be midnight she would finally drift off and I would tip-toe down the steps to fall into bed....praying that tomorrow would be better. She got up at 6:00 (both of them did and still do) so she could see her daddy before he headed off to work. She went crazy if he wasn't here when she woke up. Then our day would be really bad. She refused to take a nap....and if by chance she drifted off, I would get a whole ten minutes to myself before she woke up, ready to conquer the world.
A couple months after we brought them home, we started to see a light at the end of the tunnel. She was happier. She would go whole days at a time without hosting a scream fest. She still wasn't sleeping well, but at least we had hope that things could improve.
Then the holiday season struck. That year we had our first Christmas gathering the week before Thanksgiving. The day went well, though the next day we had some minor setbacks. Thanksgiving day we spent with Jason's family. She did super. We thought. The day after we had our own version of black friday. She launched right back into her prior behavior. Scream fests. Biting. Yelling at poor Will. Rocking herself. No sleeping.
I cried much of the day. Jason didn't know what to do with the two weepy females residing in his home. It was a hard day.
The behavior continued through the weekend and Monday morning we placed a call to an attachment specialist located in Colorado. Nancy Thomas was a lifesaver that day. Actually, God was. He used Nancy to give us hope. She strongly recommended that we do a program called "Taming the Tiger While it's a Kitten". We were up for anything that could help. Anything.
But I don't think we expected it to be as intense as it really was.
Starting that very day, Addie was perched in front of me, facing me, in a 'pouch' (otherwise known as an Ergo...which I could do advertisment for wholeheartedly). It wasn't exactly what I would call fun. She hated it. She didn't like being held closely and here she was...forced to be close. Those first couple weeks of daily carrying were a near nightmare. She screamed for hours on end, spit in my face, latched her teeth onto my collarbone, scratched my face, bruised my sides with her little fingers.
She only got out of the pouch a few times a day. At 6:00, when she got up for the day, she would be held by her daddy. He placed her in the pouch on me about 6:30. At 7:30-8:00 she got out for exercise time. Exercise time was simply a way to help her work out some of her frustrations. She jumped on the couch, played ring-around-the-rosie, jumped over my stretched out legs....all while maintaining constant contact with me. Then it was back in the pouch until about 10:00 when she would get out to take a nap. Whether she slept or not really didn't matter to me....it was a good break for all. Usually she would sleep, though. Her screaming wore her out.
Jason would come home for lunch and take over until he headed back to work about an hour later. Then? Back in the pouch she would go. A couple hours later we would have bonding time....she would get either a bottle or a sucker to eat while lying in my arm like a baby and gazing into my eyes. After that? Back in the pouch til supper time when Jason would again take over.
During the whole 'pouch' thing, we also fed her all her meals while requiring eye contact to receive a bite. She got at least one bottle per day, plus a bottle every night before going to bed. She was treated as a baby in order to take her back through her missed baby stages of cuddling with mommy.
By week three she started to calm down slightly....but it took 11 weeks until we finally had a whole day in which she sat calmly in the pouch and sang songs, hugged mommy, laughed, and talked like a big girl rather than a baby. At that point, she informed me that she was ready to be a big girl. She liked to be a baby, but she wanted to act big. She also asked us to only call her Addie, as Zhanna was the other girl.
The end of week twelve, she was finally allowed to be a slightly normal three-almost-four year old little girl. The transition from the pouch to full freedom took another few weeks. She spent days sitting on a blanket to help her gain her freedom in a restrained way. She played cheerfully on the blanket and gradually was able to handle the freedom without becoming over-stimulated. I used to laugh at the phrase 'over-stimulation'. Now? I've seen it in real life. It's really not a laughing matter.
That was a long twelve weeks. She and I didn't go anywhere. Not to town, not to church, not to Grandma's. We were stuck in our house like little hermits.
And what was Will doing during all this you ask? He sat on my lap for a couple hours each morning and would spend the rest of his day napping and playing on a blanket right beside Addie and I.
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