So I really need to update.  I have been posting on my other blog and you can head on over there for details: www.newsonnix.blogspot.com.

I wanted to post some other stuff here, just for posterity and so I can look back to see what kind of progress we have made (or haven't).

Disclaimer beforehand: Life with S is awesome.  We love her to bits and are having a blast.  What I'm going to be talking about are the hard parts.  Because not everything is unicorns and butterflies.  We knew that going in.

A little backstory on S: I am best friends with her mother's stepsister.  That is how we got involved.  S had been in foster care and they were terminating the birth mother's parental rights which is when we entered the picture.  Birth mom signed over rights to us.

Because of a crazy judge, when we got full custody, the judge did not cease the weekly visitation that BM (Birth mom) gets.  She had one visit and S regressed majorly.  She still misses her mom, as any five year old would.  She doesn't really understand why she can't see her anymore.  We have told her that we are her new family so it confused the hell out of her that she was still getting to see BM.  We have been working with our attorney though and as of yesterday we got visitation to stop.  We are on the fence about having one last visit for the two of them for closure reasons.

Anyway, on to how she is adjusting.  She is a happy little girl most of the time.  But she has her moments.  Mainly when we ask her to do something like put her shoes up and she ignores us.  When we make her listen to us and do it she melts down.  I'm talking screaming, kicking, scratching, the whole nine yards.  We have been doing a lot of bear hugs with her until she calms down.  Often when she is relaxing after a meltdown I will rock her in our rocking chair.  The other night I was lying with her in bed (one of us stays with her until she falls asleep).  I told her she couldn't play with her toys because it was time to go to sleep.  She gets up out of bed, looks me straight in the eye and touches her dollhouse as if to say, "what are you going to do?".  I pick her up and put her back in bed at which point she melts down.  Then she starts screaming that she wants to rock.  She did that just so she could get in trouble and have a tantrum so she could get in the rocking chair.  We had a talk after that.  If she wants to rock all she has to do is ask us.

As far as attachment goes, she called us mommy and daddy right off the bat.  She is a little too giving with her affection.  I don't know if I would go so far as to say she has reactive attachment disorder, but she is definitely disordered.  She will go to anyone, which is not a good thing.  We have her first therapy appointment this Friday and we are going to discuss with the therapist things we need to do to help her realize that we are her parents and no one else is.  (At one point she told us that we were her new family, but that next year she would have another new family.  She has been moved around so much that she doesn't understand that adults stick around).

She has regressed a bit in the toilet training area.  She is fine during the day and will tell us that she needs to go to the bathroom.  At night however, she still has to wear pull-ups.  When we first got her, she would wake up dry about half the time.  Now she wets her pull up every night.  Sometimes she will go in her pull up while still awake, immediately after we put it on.  I don't know what that's about.  We asked her and she said she likes to go in her pull up.  : /  Speaking of the bathroom, when we first got her, she would say she needed to go to the bathroom to get out of doing something.  Example, we are eating dinner and she wants to leave the table.  We tell her she needs to wait until we are all finished.  Then she says she has to go to the bathroom, but instead of doing that she goes to her room to play with her toys.  After we figured out what she was doing, when she said she had to go, one of us would take her to the bathroom, put her on the toilet and then bring her back to whatever we were doing.  She hasn't done that in a few weeks now.

The other night she had the worst meltdown so far.  She is taking ballet classes.  I told her she needed to get ready to go.  She dragged her feet.  I said she had 15 minutes to get dressed and get her shoes on or she wouldn't be going.  She got dressed, but didn't put her ballet shoes on.  I gave her a two minute warning.  She acted dumb, like she had no idea how to put them on (putting them on backwards, putting the elastic behind her heel, etc).  Finally she was out of time so I told her we weren't going.  30 seconds later she had her shoes on, but it was too late.  I said we still weren't going.  That's when she lost it.  45 minutes of constant screaming.  It devolved into her being upset about ballet class and then went to her crying about missing her mom.  She has got so much going on in her little brain and she doesn't know how to deal with it, hence the meltdowns.  I think she has a lot of anger too (justifiably).  I'm going to ask the therapist about how to help her deal with her anger in a healthy way.

We are changing her last name to ours when the adoption is finalized.  At first she was adamant that she was not going to change her name.  Then about a week or two ago she asked me when her name was going to change.  I told her and said her full name out loud.  She got super excited and spent about five minutes yelling, "I'm S---- K---- N----!".  Some days she still isn't happy about changing her name, but more often than not she is accepting of it.

Like I said before, it's not all gloom and doom at our house.  There are just some difficult times.  But then again, she's five.

The adoption finalization is set for August 9th.  She starts school on August 20th.