So I really can't put the foster kids names on the Internet, so I will just use their initials. "Z" is the 3 year old and "G" is the baby.
Anyway, I couldn't wait for everyone to meet. We got to my parents' house around supper time. The girls had been waiting and waiting for us to get there. They ran in as soon as we walked through the door and bombarded the us and the boys with questions, greetings, hugs and kisses. Z was excited to see them also, as we had told him that we had two girls he would get to play with. The three of them bounced off the wall for quite a while. My mom came right to G and helped me change his diaper. I hadn't done a very good job of preparing her for his injuries. She was shocked and disgusted. I had been staring at him for the past 3 hours so I had already began to look past the bruises, but I was shocked again when we took off his diaper. The worst bruises were "down there" and it was awful. We couldn't imagine how anyone could have put those bruises on his body, not only how could they ever hurt a baby, but what could have physically happened to him to make bruises like that? Unimaginable.
So we all sat down and ate some supper we had brought over and then packed up to head home. Z was excited to see our house. We showed him his room and his bed, which he liked because it had Lightning McQueen on it, and made sure he knew where the bathroom was. He was a bit rowdy, but really, he was well behaved. We were all exhausted from the stress of the day and because it was getting to be our bedtimes, but Z insisted he was wide awake. Now, we know all the tricks for getting to stay up past bedtime, but something told us he was being sincere, afterall, this kid probably had never had a bedtime before. We let him stay up with us for a while reading books and watching cartoons. Finally, around 9:30 we decided we had to make an attempt to get Z to bed. We took him into his room and layed him down. We gave him a stuffed animal to sleep with and another book to look at. We tucked him in and gave him hugs and I told him I would stay in for a minute while he rested. I couldn't believe how well he was doing. I had been so worried about that first night with our new kids, but this was going great.
Well, of course I would think that about 2 seconds before disaster struck. It wasn't that bad, but Z did get pretty upset. He started crying and asking for his mom. It took a little while, but we got him calmed down. He finally went to sleep around 11 pm.
We went to bed then, but it was my turn to have trouble sleeping. I told Nathan that I didn't know what was wrong, I was sure tired enough, but I couldn't sleep. He said, "I know what's wrong, we picked up two boys today and they are asleep in the next room!". I guess he was right, I mean, how often do you get up one morning with two daughters and go to bed that night with two daughters and two sons? It was a bit surreal, but at the same time, it felt right.
The baby woke up a few times through the night needing a bottle, but overall the night went well. In the morning, Z got up, came into the living room, and sat beside Addison on the couch. He looked around and said "I think I like living here". It was so cute, but amazing to me at the same time. How could this 3 year old boy come into a house of strangers and decide it was a good place to live? My girls would have been screaming bloody murder if someone had picked them up and told them they had to stay there. It broke my heart to think about what his little guy had likely been through. He obviously loved his mom and missed her, but he was also content to stay with us. I later learned that his mom had been known to drop the boys off places and be gone for 10 days or two weeks at a time. So really, Z was used to this type of thing. After we had that first night under our belts, we began the process of settling in, teaching Z the rules of our household, and remembering what life with a baby is like.
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