Life With Sydney: Never a Dull Moment

Never a dull moment probably should be my motto. A house full of kids kept me busy for a lot of years. Providing educational and social activities for Tate as he is growing up with autism has kept me busy, especially when he was receiving early intervention. Sydney is what keeps me the busiest now and I’m not sure anything else I have done or seen has compared to her activity level and the demands she (and her disability) place on me sometimes. I’m not complaining, just stating a fact. 

Every day is an adventure to Sydney and every activity has the potential to be very memorable. I suppose it is a combination of her ADHD and her Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and her personality. She is a go-getter, always ready to move and move quickly. She wakes in the morning and within seconds is up and running. I’ve watched kids wake many times over the years. They usually stretch, yawn, rub their eyes, roll over and occasionally go back to sleep. Sometimes they wake grumpy and sometimes they wake happy. With Sydney it is the same every morning. She wakes, HOLLERS for me, and jumps out of bed, to race out of her room. 

Sydney's kite

A couple of days ago, about the time I should have been starting dinner, Sydney came in from playing outside and noted how windy it was. She suggested we fly a kite. I have had a kite on a shelf in my closet for years and it has seldom been flown. She pestered me and begged me and nagged me off and on for an hour. I’d given her several excuses because I really didn’t want to run around a field in the wind. When I had run out of excuses and she had worn me down, I got the kite. We went outside and got that kite right into the air. It wouldn’t stay up long and kept nose-diving to the ground. I remembered from my childhood that a kite sometimes needs a heavier tail so I sent her in for an old bandanna. That was just what that kite needed. It flew really well and stayed up for long periods of time. Listening to Sydney laugh was contagious. She couldn’t stop. I didn’t mind anymore that dinner was going to be way later than usual. She was having the time of her life! Sydney was going to have a memory of flying a kite with her mama and I so enjoy hearing my kids laugh hard when they are having fun. One of my older kids once asked me why I liked going to the amusement park with them since I didn’t like to ride the rides anymore. I don’t know if it is the same for all parents; but for me, watching my kids have fun is one of the “funnest” things there is to do.    

Shawn got home about the time Sydney and I were winding up the kite string to head back inside. Sydney told Shawn all about the kite and showed him a few pictures I had taken on my phone. When Sydney has a really cool experience, Shawn often says to me quietly, “I’ll bet none of those other kids from that orphanage in Russia did that today.” It makes us so happy for Sydney but so sad for all the ones that didn’t go home with anyone. Can you imagine how their days are spent? I suppose, not knowing what they are missing, might mean they aren’t sad about not having it. I don’t know. I do know I am so thankful my God answered our prayers for Sydney, and that she is in our home. She teaches me constantly.

Sydney and Grandpa at the Sale Barn

Sydney sees so many ordinary things as extraordinary. Revolving doors, escalators, and automatic car washes, are as good as any amusement park ride. She loves it when we drive under an overpass because she says she feels like we are in a tunnel. Sydney sees beauty where few others would. Sydney loves animals; and a cow is, by far, her favorite animal. We are planning another trip to the sale barn soon so she can watch cows on the auction block again all afternoon. She would rather do that than anything else we could think of to do. We never pass a field of cows that she doesn’t call out to them. She says things like, “You are beautiful! Eat that grass and stay healthy! I love your color!” Then she exclaims to me over and over about how sweet cows are.  

Sydney thinks her grandparents’ home is a wonderland. There is a cat that will play with Sydney’s hair if she lays on the floor, a tire swing, and her grandma’s walker to push around. A ride out to the pasture to see grandpa’s cows is the high point of any day. Tuesday, Sydney saw chicks at the feed store in town. She was absolutely giddy. Yesterday, we went to Kansas City for her quarterly doctor appointment. As we drove off an exit ramp, she hollered, “Red!  I love red!” She was referring to the van in front of us. She just had to holler about the color red. The doctor allowed Sydney to pick a toy out of a box of prizes. She chose a plastic wolf and played with it all day like it was a very expensive prize.   

Today, we went to Kansas City again to take my dad to a doctor appointment. We had to park in a parking garage and Sydney was absolutely enthralled. She kept exclaiming, “COOL!” She got a huge kick out of the paper towel dispenser in the ladies’ room because it was motion sensitive and kept giving her towels without her having to touch anything. She’s seen all these kinds of things before. We don’t keep her from technology. It’s just that, Sydney doesn’t take things for granted like so many of us do. When we got home from that doctor appointment it sprinkled on us a little. She asked for an umbrella and went outside and marched around in the rain for quite some time.  

Sydney's Herd

Her favorite foods are vegetables and when we order from a menu at a restaurant, she always wants me to ask the waitress if she can just order a plate of vegetables. Her favorite toys are very simple. She loves workbooks, hula-hoops, baby dolls, plastic farm animals, and her remote-control car. I bought a 99 cent spray bottle this week to spray my plants with. She has latched on to that like it is an expensive toy. Watering the plants and squeezing that spray trigger has become a new favorite pastime. It reminded me of something I used to keep her busy with. Her tea party dishes have always been a favorite, but letting her pull a chair up to the sink and WASH those dishes with a few bubbles gave her more pleasure than most of us would find in a day at the zoo or another favorite activity. Sydney loves water and if she doesn’t get to take a bath at the end of the day, she feels like she is being punished. It just doesn't take much to make this kid happy.

I know you might be saying, “all kids like escalators, revolving doors, umbrellas, and car washes,” and maybe they do. All mine have; but it is different with Sydney. She seems to experience things with an intensity that my others did not. Maybe it’s the ADHD. Maybe it’s the FAS. Maybe it is from the neglect she had the first year of her life. Maybe it is just Sydney. Whatever it is, its amazing.  

If you liked this post then you might also enjoy this one: It's a mad mad world.

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A Sparkling Personality Has A Price

When my first six babies were infants, they were held for hours upon hours. They were talked to, sung to, cuddled, and snuggled often. Almost every noise they made was acknowledged and responded to, if not by me, then by another family member. My babies were socially educated from the minute they were born and they developed personality very quickly. Of course, the first five babies were typically developing and soaked up everything around them like a sponge. Tate did not. He could not. His brain was not able to understand much of the communications or the social world around him. I saw some of the evidence of this early on and one thing that was different about Tate from infancy was that he did not like to be sung to. He did like to be cuddled, held and rocked but he wanted silence. Unlike my other babies, he did not enjoy hearing mama sing. My voice isn’t the most beautiful voice but I can carry a tune and my other children have enjoyed being sung to immensely. Not Tate.  The louder I sang, the louder he cried, so I stopped singing and learned to rock quietly. If he was hurt or upset and I gently said “shhhhh” as I tried to comfort him he took great offense. The “sh” sound was NOT allowed either. I had to warn people not to “sh” Tate and once in a while one of us forgot and he would wail. It was one of the many quirks we lived with and I chalk it all up to autism. 

This blog post isn’t really about Tate and his quirks today though. I have been thinking a lot of about the “what-ifs” concerning Sydney lately. Sydney laid in a crib for most of her first ten-and-a-half months. She was not talked to, sung to, cuddled or snuggled. She was not carried around. She was changed and fed on a schedule with a bottle that was propped. In an earlier post I discussed her feeding schedule and how I changed that immediately upon taking custody, thus helping her stomach issues tremendously. What if, she had been fed appropriate amounts for her small stomach in much more frequent feedings? What if she had been changed as needed, bathed more often, not tortured with the itch of scabies, talked to, held, and carried around sometimes? What if she had not been neglected? So many of Sydney’s behavioral issues are blamed on the diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and probably rightly so. However, would the FAS be so severe if the neglect had not been there? I will never know for certain because I will never get to go back and give Sydney those hours and hours of interaction that my first babies were given. Would Sydney have been much like Tate: unable to understand, in spite of all the attention? After all, her brain had been damaged by alcohol in the womb. Of course I believe Tate would be so much more handicapped if he had been in Sydney’s situation for the first ten months of his life. So therefore, the reverse must be true. I doubt there are too many people who would argue. We saw how fast a little attention could result in a lot of progress before we had even finished the adoption process. 

When we were in Russia to visit Sydney in October of 2001, one of the first things we noticed was her lethargic personality. I said more than once to Shawn “she doesn’t have any sparkle behind her eyes.” We assumed she had brain damage but did not know much about FAS. We did ask if her birth mother had consumed alcohol and were assured that she had not. The second time we visited Sydney in the orphanage we were with her in a playroom full of children. Sydney was probably the youngest in the group and she was not usually included in playgroups. That was for the older children who were crawling and walking. At eight-and-a-half months Sydney wasn’t sitting up, crawling or even cooing or jabbering. She was silent. When she cried, she just hummed. During that visit we met a girl working at the orphanage who was from Germany and could speak English very well. I was able to ask her some questions and she asked the nurses and interpreted their answers for me. We had noticed a baby, close to Sydney’s age or a little younger, sitting in a bouncy chair across the room. That baby was very interested in her surroundings, trying to make eye contact with anyone who would look her way, and she was making a lot of happy noises. I asked the nurse why there was such a difference between that baby and Sydney. She told me that Sydney had never had a visitor, while the other baby had a mother who visited her and fed her a bottle every evening. THAT baby had known a mother’s love. Sydney had not. We told Sydney’s doctor later that we were concerned about Sydney’s lethargy and the fact that she was not being given any individual attention. He told us if we left him one hundred dollars he would hire someone to hold Sydney and play with her for an hour a day until we returned for her on our appointed court date, two months later. Shawn immediately handed the man a $100 bill. When we returned in seven weeks to take Sydney from that place, she was a changed child. She had personality that we had not seen before. She was active and much more engaging. She also had seven new teeth. When we had visited her two months prior she had none. She still didn’t make any noise other than a hum but she had some “sparkle.” Shawn and I will always say that it was the best one hundred dollars we ever spent. Of course, that fee was a drop in the bucket, compared to all the other adoption costs but it was one that jump-started Sydney’s personality and slowed down the effects of all the neglect.      

If only those first ten months of learning and growing emotionally and intellectually had not be stolen from Sydney. If only she had been handed to a mother who would love her and nurture her from day one. Every baby deserves it. 

Sydney, before we added the "sparkle."