Mr. Sensitive

I remember when I was a kid we had these toys called "super balls" that bounced with extreme energy off of any hard surface. This perfectly describes how our middle child, Andrew, was when he and the other boys arrived. He was five and at times he literally could not sit still. I guess in an effort to calm his ADHD, his previous foster home kept asking to have his meds increased, until the poor kid was on two different medications, one of them was 10 mg of Adderall. There were other times when he was calm and pretty focused, so right away we began to question the treatment, if not the diagnosis. Within weeks of coming, we convinced his Psychiatrist to cut the Adderall in half, and a month later we got it eliminated altogether. Our feeling was that Andrew's hyperactivity was due to anxiety and adding a stimulant like Adderall was making matters worse. That anxiety was environmental, not due to any chemical imbalance, and he soon calmed down... SOME!

Andrew truly is Mr. Sensitive. He wants to please, to be liked, to be accepted, to be LOVED! This can only happen when there's trust, so we embarked on a course of firm, consistent boundaries along with plenty of reassurance and love. To say there weren't tough times would be an understatement. Andrew set the bar high when it came to testing us. He is the classic goofball, the class clown, and it's so true what they say about clowns, they paint on the face to hide the pain. He was destructive to our belongings, was in trouble at school from day one, and had almost constant encopresis (which he would often then smear on the walls, or hide). It would take months for Andrew to feel secure enough to talk to us, and even then it had to take a trauma of sorts to get him to open up. There were a few times that we wished we'd handled a given situation differently, but there's no time to dwell because there's something new to deal with right around the corner. Through all of it Andrew presented this huggy, lovey, clingy little boy who knew he'd done wrong, but hoped he'd be forgiven. So often I wanted to just reach in and fix it all right then and there, but this kind of damage doesn't happen overnight, so we had no choice but to love him. FIRMLY.

Today's Andrew is much more at ease. His personality has shown through and he's a joy to be around... most of the time. He still has issues to work out, and he is a seven year old boy after all, but we can envision a happy life for him, and that is all that we hope for!