Meal time, not bad, bathtime, surprisingly good. Could we run a triple play with a good bedtime? We were certainly willing to try.
Now, the blessing of being parents, before we were adoptive parents, was that we could make all the mistakes and completely screw up our other kids before we tried things out on Maylia. Of all the things Todd and I had learned , of the things we had disagreed upon and the things we were united on, one thing the years had reinforced to us both was the first and great commandment of parenting : Kids need your love. And the second is like unto it, and certainly just as important: Kids need your limits.
No matter how much we wanted to not just love her but to completely spoil this hoped for little girl; No matter how much we wanted her to love us and attach to us, we both know that loving her was also about setting some expectations for her, helping her to understand a structure and routine that would help to provide not just consistency and predictability but would help her feel safe and secure.
There were a few schools of thought when it came to bedtime, particularly with a newly adopted child. Leaving them alone to cry it out in a room by themselves was absolutely not an option. The grief and trauma that accompanies the adoption upheaval , even in a life so little, is very real and must me handled very carefully. She needed to know that we cared and needed to know that we were there. Some families opt for a shared bed, much like with a newborn, but we felt that starting down that road becomes very difficult to turn back from and didn’t want to begin a routine that we would have to break or change later on. The hotel supplied us with a crib so we set it up right between us: Todd was on the bed on one side, I laid on a chaise on the other side and Maylia in the middle. Because she hadn’t had much of a nap that day we hoped her fatigue would work in our favour. We placed her in the crib and she immediately began to cry. Though it was hard to watch and listen to her sound so completely sad, it was, in an odd way, a little reassuring. We hadn’t seen much energy or emotion from her the entire day. Turning so quickly to tears reassured us that, developmentally at least, she was showing pretty typical emotions and behaviors. Todd and I promised each other that we would not take her from the crib. We would stay beside her, talk to her quietly and reassure her but resist taking her out, lest she figure out pretty quick what she would need to do in order to escape her simple confines.
Now , that said, if things for her seemed seriously traumatic, indicated either by the sound of her cries or if she began to engage in self-harming behaviour we would definitely remove her and try another strategy. Watching a little boy earlier at the Civil Affairs office, scream with rage ,even fear , and bang his head wildly, caused me to offer a silent prayer of thanks, one of many I had offered that day, that even though our little girl yelled and cried , after about 15 minutes or so began to yawn and rub her eyes and literally start to fall asleep on her feet. We kept taking to her quietly all this time and as her head began to bow and her eyes closed we leaned over and laid her down and watched this extraordinary little person settle into rhythmic breathing and , if it was possible, become even more perfect in our eyes.
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