The Math Pitfall

Why kids start to flail in upper elementary math

The Pitfall

Many, many kids (and adults) still count on their fingers long after 1st or 2nd grade. So what? Is that a problem? Actually it can be a huge problem. It can hold kids back from a deeper understanding for numbers that will create major hurdles as they delve into complicated subjects like multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, pre-algebra, and beyond.

It's Ok Though!

Before you go worrying that it's too late for your kid (or you!), that you won't have time or energy to deal with this, or that you can't afford a tutor, please know that you absolutely can fix this fairly easily with the right strategies. As a math tutor I did this with countless kids in 4th, 5th, 6th grade, and even older, and have been amazed by how much they could excel once this barrier had been removed.

Step 1: Understand Why Finger Counting Can Be a Problem

In order to fix or prevent this, it's important to understand why things like counting on your fingers may be holding your kid back. And I should start by clarifying that it isn't always bad. When kids are learning to add in preschool, kindergarten, and 1st grade, their fingers are a great way to begin to concretely understand what adding and subtracting really mean. It also helps them to see patterns like that adding makes a number larger and subtracting makes it smaller. 

But once a kid understands the basic concept of adding and subtracting and they start doing more complicated things, like adding two-digit numbers, there starts to be a problem. Imagine doing the problem 14+9 by counting on your fingers. The numbers you say out loud or in your head are "15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23." So you have said or thought a whole string of numbers that have almost nothing to do with 14, 9, or what the problem means. It will get you to the correct answer for this one problem, but you did it by clouding your brain with unrelated information rather than making a connection or practicing creativity or problem solving.

Step 2: Stop Getting An Answer!

The natural desire for a kid doing math, or a parent watching their kid do math, is to get the right answer. Fill in the blank! But the answer is like the last page of a book. You don't read only the last page of a book and then say, "That was a great book." Of course the last page matters to the story, but so do the other pages. It's time to start focusing way more on the process of solving a problem and way less on getting to an answer. 

This is where you have to start convincing your kid, and yourself, that rethinking your process is worth a little extra time and practice. Eventually, they will be able to do 14+9 in their head without fingers, not to mention far more complicated arithmetic, pre-algebra, multi-step word problems, etc. But they have to get past this first hurdle. For many kids and parents this feels like slowing down or going back to kindergarten. Explain that this is about learning a more advanced way to work with numbers and it will help them with much harder math.

Step 3: Learn Your Ten Pals

If your kid can take any number 0-10 and tell you how many more it takes to get to 10, then you get to skip this step. The "ten pals" are the numbers that go together to make 10: 0+10, 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5. They will need to have these memorized in order to easily manipulate numbers in higher order math. There are a bunch of ways to work on this and your kid may respond best to a combination of them:

• Have them use their fingers for good! If they have ten fingers, they can hold up some of them and then see how many are down. Hold up 6 fingers, then 4 are down. You might think, "I thought we were supposed to stop counting on our fingers." But the difference is that this helps them to visualize the relationship between the two numbers, and they aren't saying/thinking a bunch of unrelated numbers in between. 
• You can also give them 10 - x problems to do with their fingers. For example, give them 10-3 and have them practice holding all 10 fingers up, putting down 3, and seeing how many are left. It's best to use this method for subtracting 5 or less from 10 because it makes the visualization simpler.
• Use ten frames. You can easily find free blank ten frames sheets online, or just draw them with a pen. Then have your kid practice filling them in (top to bottom, left to right) partway with one color marker and the rest of the way in another color. Have them write the two numbers next to the ten frame. Or you can make flash cards that show the same thing and then have them say the two numbers represented (eg "six and four"). 
• There are also games you can buy like Ten On The Spot or Clumsy Thief. These work especially well for kids who are hard to motivate, but they aren't free like 10 frames or fingers.
• Have a chart of Ten Pals and let them use it to find and circle ten pals in addition problems. For example, give them 2+4+8 and then they have to circle the two numbers that make ten together. Pro tip: this is a great time to tell them NOT to find the "answer" (the total) but just to focus on that one task of finding the ten pals.

Step 4: Show Some Strategies

With ten pals memorized and some experience focusing more on the process than the answer, there are now a bunch of new strategies available to them. Showing them a few strategies can start to give them ideas for how to create their own strategies.

You can start by adding single-digit numbers that add to more than 10, such as 6+8, 4+9, and 5+7. Plus 9s are the easiest to begin with. Use legos or other physical objects to show how 4+9 can become 3+10 by moving one lego from the first group to the second group. Have them practice changing __ + 9 to __ + 10 by moving one over (and don't ask them to find the answer - just focus on the strategy of simplifying). Then they can try problems like 24+9 by using the same strategy: 24+9 --> 23 + 10. Once they have practiced this strategy a lot, try doing the same thing with Plus 8s and moving 2 over (ex: 37 + 8 --> 35 +10).

Another good strategy is using two people's hands to find doubles. For example, for 8+8, you and your kid each hold up 8 fingers (all five fingers on one hand and three on the other). Then put your hand with 5 together with their hand with 5 and say, "That's 10. What's left?" Put your hand with 3 fingers together with their hand with 3 fingers and let them say, "that's 6." And then say, "Ten plus six is sixteen." Once you have practiced this with them a bunch, they will be able to do it just by looking at their own fingers and imagining another set of hands. And eventually they will just have their doubles memorized.

Step 5: Praise Creativity

Anytime they come up with a creative way to manipulate numbers, praise their creativity. If they say, "I have to do 6+5, and I know 5+5 is 10, so this is just 11," throw them a tiny party with your words. "Ooooh, that's great idea! I love your thinking!" Or if they give you a quick answer, ask them how they figured it out. Their strategy might be different from yours, and that's awesome. Point out that there are lots of different ways to come to the same answer in any problem. You can even challenge them to find two different ways to do the same problem. 

Another note: learn what growth and fixed mindset are. Saying things like, "I wasn't good at math either" or "You're so smart" are detrimental to their ability to persevere, practice, and improve. Humans can get better at anything with practice. Praise practice too: 

• "Wow, this is really hard and you are working hard on it." 
• "I can tell you have practiced this because it's getting easier for you." 
• "I know you'll get this with practice." 
• "I can see that this is super hard for you. Your brain must be growing so much right now!"

Step 6: Eventually Expand Beyond Addition

You might be wondering why I've spent this whole post talking about addition. The truth is that addition is the building block for almost all basic math. Addition going backwards becomes subtraction. Repeated addition becomes multiplication. Multiplication backwards becomes division. Division and multiplication become fractions and decimals. Once they have good strategies, understanding of numbers, and practice being creative in addition, they can apply similar techniques in everything else.

Backup Plan: Have Them Start Over

There was a 5th grade teacher who had their entire class go on Khan Academy math and start from Kindergarten and work their way back up to grade level. By the time they completed all this, their math test scores were significantly improved, and the kids' attitudes towards math was significantly more positive. The reason this works is that it a) builds confidence, and b) fills in any gaps they have. Our school uses a site called IXL, so I have my kids use that instead of Khan, but the concept is the same. 

How do I get them to do this? Each skill they complete is one point, and once they get to five points, I let them have 15 minutes of junk tv (ie, not educational). If they want any junk tv time they have to earn it with math points! Sometimes they save up enough points to watch multiple episodes or a movie. They have spent HOURS on math during evenings and weekends to earn junk tv time, and it has majorly improved their math skills. One of my kids increased her math skills by a grade and a half in a few months by doing this.

Note: I always encourage the kids to use tools when they are unsure or struggling. Hundreds chart, counting cubes, whatever helps. These tools may seem like a crutch, but they are actually scaffolding. When constructing a new building, workers stand on the scaffolding in order to build and make the building strong. Once it's strong, they can take down the scaffolding. The same is true in education. The tools help them to visualize or strategize and then they will internalize it over time.

Hope this is helpful! Best of luck in your math journey. You got this.

Moving In and Beyond

8/23 

First day of school drop off went well for our first and second graders but we were so focused on helping them be emotionally prepared for school that we didn’t do anything to prepare our littlest for saying goodbye to her sisters for the day. That was really hard on her. Things are still chaotic but settling down slowly. Routines are helpful. School will add more structure, so hopefully that will help as well. 


8/11

Move in was shockingly smooth. Kids asleep by 9. We’ll see if they wake up in the night and also what time they get up in the morning. Probably some ungodly hour. Love to all. 

Getting to Know Our Daughters

8/7

Their first overnight at our house went pretty well. We anticipated that bedtime would be very scary for them in a new house, especially because going to sleep is the ultimate vulnerability. They also do have nightmares/night terrors and so obviously that makes it even more vulnerable. Not to mention we haven't created or established or practiced bedtime routines over and over, so it's all very new and exciting. It took us three hours to get all of them asleep, which may just be the norm for us for a little while until they settle in and we figure out the best routine to set them up for success. But all things considered, we had them all asleep by 10pm, they all slept through the night, and they didn't have any potty accidents. So that feels like a solid medium-sized miracle. And it's a great place to start. Everyone was relatively well rested the next day, if a little sleepy.

We put water in the water table only to discover that the girls really wanted to get inside the water table. They like playing with water, but their main objective is to get as wet as possible. So we went to the community pool, which is set up really well for kids. It's unclear if our older two kids have been to a swimming pool before but if they have it's certainly not been more than once or twice. And we suspect our youngest has never been. We have life vests (like modern water wings) for them and we just let them slowly get more confident in the water. We definitely want to do swim lessons with them at some point in the near future. They are low key obsessed with the pool right now, and that's great because it wears them out. 

Also we had to brave a trip to Target to buy them bathing suits! We reiterated like 20 times before getting there that we were getting ONLY three things at Target - their three bathing suits. And of course when we got there it was, "Can we get that? Can I buy candy? Why not??" So we told them there are lots of temptations in Target and asked them how many things we were going to buy at Target today. That was helpful. I think next time I will tell them we are going to play a game where we each have an imaginary basket and we can pretend to put things in our imaginary baskets (kind of like the If I had a million dollars sort of activity). That kind of thinking helps to satisfy cravings a little bit even if it's not 100% instant gratification.

The kids also met the dog for the first time this weekend, and they really love him. Sometimes too much! We reminded them of the animal safety rules, which we have posted on the wall (only grown ups pick up the animals, if the animals run away from us we have to respect their space, etc). Luckily our cat always wants to be petted so that makes for an easy redirection when the dog runs away, which is frequent. "Oh, he doesn't want to be petted right now. We have to respect that. Look, kitty wants to be petted!" Translation: kitty is currently asleep and doesn't give a crap what you do.

A couple of times while they were here they wanted to know if they were sleeping over "forever and ever yet." We explained that right now they are sleeping over just one night but next weekend it will be forever and ever. They are very excited about moving in, although I don't think they've realized that it also means saying goodbye to their foster parents. Their therapist is going to be working on some of that transitional stuff with them and we are going to try to get a photo of them together with their foster parents for their life book. We hope that we can still see their foster parents a couple of times a year, as it can be very beneficial for kids to have connections with their past. But they will need some time away from them first in order to solidify their attachment with us and deeply feel the transition of caregiving from the foster parents to us.

Two more weeknight visits left, and then it's move-in time! So this is our last week of work for both of us. I will have 16 weeks off and John will have 6 weeks up front with subsequent 1-week periods later. The older two girls start school in just over two weeks, and we will have the youngest at home with us for several hours on school days. This will be great for us to work on some of the delays she has left over from a life of neglect, including speech, listening to an entire picture book, sitting down to eat, using forks and spoons, and not pulling all the tissues out of the tissue box one by one, to name a few. We anticipate that she will make a lot of progress when we are home with just her. We will eventually put her in some sort of pre school situation, but for now we think we can help her a lot by being 1-1 with her.


8/2

The weeknight visits are super intense because we have to pack up, order food, pick up food, drive to BART, take the train for two hours, walk to their foster home from the station, pick up the girls, walk them to the park, enjoy the park for an hour, walk them back to the foster house, walk back to BART, wait for a train, take the train for two hours, and drive home from the station. This whole time we are carrying all of our food and water and supplies (in 100 degree weather), and the park does not have drinking fountains. The process starts before 3pm and we get home after 9pm, all so that we can see our girls for 90 minutes. It would take us even longer if we tried to drive because of rush hour traffic. This is not a typical visitation schedule. Most people we know going through this process or who have gone through this process see their kids once a week until they move in. Our aggressive, four times per week pre-placement schedule is very unusual and a big part of the design of it was to attempt to settle the kids into our house before the school year starts.

As grueling as these evenings are (and the following day at work), they are totally worth it. The girls are making enormous progress in attaching with us during each visit. Even their therapist said she is shocked at how quickly they are attaching to us. But the most wonderful thing about it is that we love being with our kids. Weather they are laughing or crying or sad or disappointed or angry or defiant, we love being there for them and using each moment as an opportunity to deepen our connection with them. We have done a whole lot of research and self-education on attachment, trauma, grief, loss, adoption, trans-racial adoption, etc, and it is all paying off now as we parent our children in the best possible way we can. 

My favorite thing we learned about is emotion coaching, one of the tenants of which is to recognize your child's display of emotion (whining, crying, pouting, yelling) as an opportunity to become closer with them and coach them through a situation that is difficult for them. It may seem like something stupid to get upset about, but showing that you care about how they are feeling and that you want to help them to feel better teaches them how to regulate their emotions and helps them understand their own self-worth. Kids whose parents emotion-coach get better grades, sleep better, get sick less often, are less likely to experiment with drugs or risky behaviors, and grow up to have healthier relationships and happier lives. And the best part is that we have come to really cherish the moments when we are helping one of our kids when they are devastated that their sister flushed the toilet before they did or the twig they were playing with broke in half.

To learn more about emotion coaching (whether you have kids or not!), we highly recommend the short book What Am I Feeling? (https://www.amazon.com/What-Feeling-John-Gottman-PhD/dp/1884734529/ref=sr_1_1) or the longer book Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child (warning: this book is a bit sexist and deeeeply heteronormative, but if you can ignore that aspect, it has absolutely invaluable information that is all research-backed).


7/29


First visit to our house! They came over for the day. We did A LOT with them. We played with toys, played with the cat (we boarded Gandhi for their first visit to reduce variables), went to the park at the school up the street, went to the park at the bottom of the hill, pretended to sleep in their beds, tried on new pajamas, drew on the white board, read books, watched My Little Pony, ate lunch and dinner, marked their heights on the wall, went down to the yard to "look for treasure", and jumped on mami and papi's bed. Our oldest did some major bonding with John yesterday. She asked him to carry her like a baby, and he did for quite some time. Great workout for him, and as he put it, "She deserves and needs it." So that was wonderful to watch.

The girls did seem a little nervous/excited at first but they chilled out and got into the routine of things. They wanted to know if they could spend the night, and we told them no, they will spend the night next weekend. We also reiterated that they will move in the following weekend. Their therapist said they seem totally ready, so even though this is a fast transition, she thinks they will be successful with the timeline. Also we are starting to understand our youngest's threenager version of spanglish better. A lot of it is just her declaring names of ponies ("bodash" = rainbow dash, "labago" = twilight sparkle). We were hoping and praying we could get our older two girls into the school that's only a block away from our house (it was not guaranteed bc they fill up quickly), and we found out today that they did get enrolled there! The alternative would have been a 15 min drive, so this is definitely easier. Plus it's an awesome school. Overall, things are going really well and we are so in love with our little bundles of joy. We're still getting our footing on things, but that's to be expected.


7/21 and 7/22

Saturday at the park with their therapist was really great. She really helped us to make a slow transition and set us up for success. A huge turning point with our oldest daughter becoming comfortable with John's presence was when there was a cockroach under the picnic table and she asked the therapist to squish it because she was really scared, and the therapist said "Daddy's gonna squish it!" and John jumped up and squished it. From there on out, daddy was the protector. It was incredible how this cockroach saved our family. I want to make a shrine for it. We all sat down together to eat lunch and the girls played in a nearby water fountain and when there was a bee there, John protected them from the bee. Cut to five minutes later and we're all hanging out together drawing with sidewalk chalk and playing frisbee and being close to each other and laughing.

Sunday we went to pick up the girls by ourselves for six hours. Went to pick up food, went to the park, sat down in the grass to eat, then went to play on the playground. Them wearing matching dresses made it easier to spot all of them on a busy and large playground. We made sure to stay in range of eye contact for all of them so that they could see we aren't going anywhere and we are making sure they are safe (we also told them that ahead of time). We also took breaks to bring their stimulation levels back down by coloring, going for a walk around the lake, and reading books. We snuggled with them a lot and they all wanted to be carried, so we tried to carry them as much as possible! It's really good for attachment. Our middle daughter wanted daddy to hold her like a baby, so he carried her around like a baby for a long time. We were all tired and happy by the time we got back in the car. 

We have a playlist for them for the car that consists of Frozen, Moana, Coco, Trolls, and My Little Pony soundtracks. Our two youngest love to sing along emphatically. The littlest always requests Moana and "Bee Me Dow!" which is a song that starts with the words "You're never gonna bring me down." On Saturday our middle daughter was telling us how it goes because we didn't know it and promised we would get it for Sunday. One of the lines she sang was "I not doing it a clapularity," and our oldest said "it's not clapularity!" but she couldn't remember the real words. We discovered on Sunday that the line goes "I'm not doing it for popularity." We like clapularity better :)

They are visiting our house for the first time next weekend (on the 29th), so we have a lot of stuff to do to get ready. We will see them Tues/Thurs evenings near their foster home for an hour and a half each, and then we'll see them for 8 hours on Sunday. We miss them so much but it's good to have some processing time in between visits to talk and problem solve and think about how we want to do things. Love to all! 💜💙💚💛


7/17

An evening visit with the girls went really well. Our oldest wasn’t ready to meet John yet but she wanted to meet me. I spent most of the evening in the room with her, and their therapist came in and out with notes from John. So there was a little bit of connection there even though she wasn’t ready to meet him. She was a bit nervous with me at first but I was surprised at how quickly she warmed up to me. She even leaned against me while I read her a book, and then asked if John was nice. The fact that she wanted my opinion indicates a level of trust already. And she poked her head out at John a few times, so she is definitely curious but also very nervous. We had made a video of us reading a book together and sent it to their therapist to show her ahead of time, and that went really well, so we are going to make more videos for her tomorrow and show them to her on Thursday. We are excited to see them again and it’s totally worth the two hours each way on the train (would be longer if we tried to drive). We’re both exhausted and excited and completely in love. 


7/14

I can't believe we met our daughters today, and that we have to wait three whole days to see them again! Actually, we only really met two of our daughters, as our oldest was very scared and wanted to stay in the bedroom. We said this was completely fine and we wanted to respect her needs. So we wrote her a note saying that we are excited to meet her when she is ready and that we are proud of her for asking for what she needs, and that we will return on Tuesday. Then their foster parents took a photo of us holding the note so she could feel that connection. Our other two daughters were very excited and made lots of eye contact and wanted us to read them the book we made for them with pictures of our house and our pets and ourselves. We brought them plush My Little Ponies and we asked them about the tv show they were watching. There were a lot of people in the room and the foster parents spoke with us quite a bit about the girls and their routines and how they wanted to help us out. They were great. And we figured out our visiting schedule for the next few weeks: 5:30 - 7 on Tues/Thurs, and longer times on Saturdays and Sundays. We made a schedule for the girls and we showed our middle daughter that where there is a sticker on the calendar that means we will come over to play. We showed her today, which had a sticker, and then tomorrow, then Monday, then Tuesday there is another sticker. She was very smiley and gave lots of eye contact. Honestly we were really impressed with how well she handled all of it. 

The meeting was at their current foster home and it was only for an hour. I think this was designed to not overwhelm them too much. And no, we don't have any photos yet. On Tuesday their therapist will come to our meeting with them, so she can help our oldest daughter with the scary feelings of meeting her new parents. In the meantime, we are going to take some videos and photos to send to them and maybe make some drawings for them too. We love them so, so, so much. We are really excited to go on this journey with them and eventually share with all of you the joy of playing with them!

7/10

AHHHHHH! We got a proposed transition schedule and it's a LOT faster than we thought. Basically we are going to see them all day Saturdays and Sundays, and on Tues/Thurs evenings until they move in, which is tentatively set for Aug 11. The social worker assured us that if we or the kids need more time, we can push the date. The most important thing is that everyone feels ready.


But meanwhile we have a lot less time to get things ready at home than we thought, not only because they are moving in soon but because we are going to be spending all our free time between now and then bonding with them and parenting them. So this Sunday is our last weekend day of not being a parent. Forever. We are trying to prioritize our list and figure out what can be done later. Love to all 💙💚💛💜

7/4

Somehow we are matched with the most incredible kids in the world, who come with an incredible social worker and an incredible therapist, and their whole team is fiercely dedicated to them. It honestly seems unbelievable. We are going to have the best support system possible, especially during this transition.

We spoke at length with their therapist today, and she gave us more insight into their personalities, triggers, coping skills, interests, and needs. She said that she is here for us 110%, and we responded that we are 110% ready to take any and all advice she has for us. She said that she has never heard that in her entire career working with foster kids. We found this kind of astounding. Why wouldn't you want to take the advice of someone who knows as much as she does? I'm not saying people should blindly put their faith in just anyone, but this person knows her sh**. 

We are going to mail her the book we made about our house so that she can share it with the girls in their next session. They know that their social worker found a forever family for them and they are excited and nervous and curious. The book will be really helpful and we're glad they'll get to see it before we meet them. It's a nice, safe introduction to us and our home and our pets. And apparently they LOVE books. Can you believe that? I can't wait to read with them. 

And then on July 14th we are going to meet our daughters! It will only be one hour (probably best not to overwhelm them) at their current foster home. I honestly have no words to describe how I feel just thinking about this. 

As a reminder, the transition process often looks like this: 


First meeting is short and at their current foster home. Then we set up a time to come back and take them out to a park, then another time we will have them over to our house for dinner, then have them over for a sleepover, then for a weekend. This allows us to build up trust with them, to show them that we follow up on our promises, and to ease them into our family and our home. When they feel ready to move in and their therapist and social worker think they are ready, they will obtain a court order for their official move in date. We have no idea how long this will take, but we are taking it one day at a time and we are beyond excited to get started.

How You Can Help Our Kids

People are eager to help us out with our new daughters, and we can't tell you how much that means to us. There are so, so many ways we need help and they might not be exactly what you think (or as glamorous as you might think). I decided to put together a list of ways people can help, which I plan to update as needed. I hope this also gives folks an idea of the many ways there are to help foster kids, even if you can't be a foster parent yourself! 

A lot of these are things we can do without help, but we can't do all of them without any help. However, we're not looking for you to do things that you don't already enjoy though, so...

Let us know if there is something on this list that excites you!

💜💙💚💛💖

Research and Preparation Help

• Come over and install a hanging ceiling light in the girls' bedroom (they currently just have a floor lamp)
• Make a "St John Bat Signal" google group of people who are willing to help us when we need it. That way we can email out if there is something we need and if someone is available they can volunteer to help us :)
• Research options for securing trunk items in case of car accident
• Kid shows - research and create a spreadsheet of kid shows or family shows
• especially Spanish and Spanglish
• starring brown people, esp girls and women and queer people
• spreadsheet would ideally contain: show title, very brief description, where it can be watched (we have an apple tv, limited cable, hulu, netflix instant, amazon prime video, hbo go)
• Organization - come to our house to help us figure out how to organize better/use our space better AND/OR come help us actually accomplish that
• entry way - shoes, coats for adults and kids
• living room - couch area, charging cords, small tables - fitting an art table?
• bedrooms - finishing storage/closets, organizing clothes
• kitchen - mostly storage organization issues
• bathrooms - install towel hook (already purchased)
• De-Junking
• come over and help us go through things we don't need in various parts of the house
• take our unwanted stuff to donation centers, the dump, and elsewhere

Housework and Pet Help

Notes: We have a team of cleaning people who do the floors, counters, bathrooms, etc but we have other house work items that we would love help with. Especially in our first year or so, we need to be spending as much time as possible directly caring for and playing with the kids, so any house work you can help us with will allow us more time to help them attach and heal.

• Be part of a list of people I can reach out to for dog sitting and/or cat sitting
• dog sitting would be more for daytime things like trainings we have to attend or court dates
• cat sitting would be if we are gone overnight (probably further in the future)
• Mail Elimination
• we were devastated when PaperKarma went out of business, and we are constantly drowning in a sea of mail, including for people who haven't lived here for five years, including new(!!) subscriptions to magazines for people who haven't lived here for five years
• take a pile of mail from us and attempt to somehow get us off the mailing list
• Bay Area Christmas Housing for my mom
• My mom is visiting for a week this Christmas and we don't know yet if the kids will be settled enough for her to stay at our house. Do you live on the peninsula and have a room she could stay in? Alternatively, will you be gone over Christmas and are willing to let her stay at your place? (note: She is allergic to cats and some dogs). This would be really helpful for keeping our kids on their normal routines
• Laundry, Dishes, Errands
• come over and help us deal with undoubtedly an enormous pile of laundry to fold, an enormous pile of dirty dishes to run through the dishwasher, and/or various errands
• I'm still working on this list....let me know if you have any suggestions not listed!

Self Education

• Read "What Am I Feeling?" by John Gottman (very short book and we have extra copies if you are local) so that you can eventually come help with babysitting
• Learn about adoption microaggressions and educate others (spoiler: don't tell our daughters that they are lucky)

Registry

     http://a.co/9X9r1jv

Cultural Help

• Music - Curate playlist(s) (on Apple Music?) of music:
• by Mexican/Chicano artists
• in Spanish
• in English
• in Spanglish
• Mexican/Chicano traditional music
• Mexican/Chicano pop music
• Mexican/Chicano EDM/techno/dance music
• Mexican/Chicano kids music (especially traditional kid songs and lullabies in Spanish)
• NOTE: we have a subscription to apple music. Is there a way for someone to create a list there and share it with us...? Need research
• Books - Research, identify, and/or buy children's books (please let us vet them first!)
• prefer hardbound
• love used books
• prefer non-branded books (not Frozen, My Little Pony, etc)
• prefer books with high picture to words ratio
• especially in need of bilingual books in both Spanish and English, and those in just Spanish
• Art - Research, identify, make, and/or buy art (please let us vet these as well since we will be putting them on our walls!)
• especially prefer from Mexican/Chicano artists
• depicting brown people
• depicting traditional and modern Mexican styles
• Food - make us food or snacks! (NOTE: no cilantro, or at least a safe batch without)
• Mexican and Mexican-inspired dishes are what we need most!
• traditional food from other cultures as well (no cilantro 😊)
• even just making food for us once will be super helpful!
• Toys - research, identify, and/or buy (please check with us first!)
• dolls that are brown, especially dolls with wavy or straight black hair
• other toys that have brown kids/people (eg this type of toy only has white kids 😒)
• traditional Mexican toys
• Role Models
• we need people in our kids' lives that look like them
• we need people in our kids' lives that don't look like them (we've got it pretty well covered on the white people front), including people of different races, gender identities, ability/disability statuses
• Spanish Speakers (I speak enough Spanish to get by and we are both working hard on our Spanish)
• come speak Spanish with us and our kids
• be part of a list of people we can ask for help with translations, common slang, or nuanced meanings
• Other - let me know if you have other ideas not listed here that you are interested in!

One, Two, Three! (earlier posts)

7/4

Somehow we are matched with the most incredible kids in the world, who come with an incredible social worker and an incredible therapist, and their whole team is fiercely dedicated to them. It honestly seems unbelievable. We are going to have the best support system possible, especially during this transition.

We spoke at length with their therapist today, and she gave us more insight into their personalities, triggers, coping skills, interests, and needs. She said that she is here for us 110%, and we responded that we are 110% ready to take any and all advice she has for us. She said that she has never heard that in her entire career working with foster kids. We found this kind of astounding. Why wouldn't you want to take the advice of someone who knows as much as she does? I'm not saying people should blindly put their faith in just anyone, but this person knows her sh**. 

We are going to mail her the book we made about our house so that she can share it with the girls in their next session. They know that their social worker found a forever family for them and they are excited and nervous and curious. The book will be really helpful and we're glad they'll get to see it before we meet them. It's a nice, safe introduction to us and our home and our pets. And apparently they LOVE books. Can you believe that? I can't wait to read with them. 

And then on July 14th we are going to meet our daughters! It will only be one hour (probably best not to overwhelm them) at their current foster home. I honestly have no words to describe how I feel just thinking about this. 

As a reminder, the transition process often looks like this: 

First meeting is short and at their current foster home. Then we set up a time to come back and take them out to a park, then another time we will have them over to our house for dinner, then have them over for a sleepover, then for a weekend. This allows us to build up trust with them, to show them that we follow up on our promises, and to ease them into our family and our home. When they feel ready to move in and their therapist and social worker think they are ready, they will obtain a court order for their official move in date. We have no idea how long this will take, but we are taking it one day at a time and we are beyond excited to get started.

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7/3 

We have a tentative date to meet our daughters for the very first time on July 14th. It will only be an hour because they don't want to overwhelm the girls. It will be at their current foster home. More details as they come <3

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6/25 

We are matched with our kids! I don't want to post too much info about them, partly because we are still in the early stages and partly because some of it is personal and it's their story to tell, not ours. But I will say that while we were looking for two kids, we actually fell in love with three (eek)! Three girls, incredibly resilient and wonderful and beautiful and we are beyond excited to meet them. The older two girls are school-age and the youngest is three years old.

We have no idea what the timeline will look like, and it may not be possible to predict. We need some further training and the girls need to get to know us slowly to build trust and security. They HAVE to feel safe and ready to move in with us. Rushing this process could be incredibly traumatic for them. I think it's safe to assume the transition will take quite some time (probably several months? We just don't know). But we will have tons of support before and after placement and we are excited to start this journey.

Before you get excited about seeing pictures of them, please know that we won't be able to share photos until they are adopted, at least not photos with their faces. This is for security reasons, but we promise to take tons of photos and share them with you at a later time. When you meet them you can take pictures but you can't send them or post them anywhere. And as for meeting them, please understand that we need a lot of time with them alone before they can meet others. This is for their emotional health, and we will be working closely with their therapist and social worker around all decision-making, including introducing family and friends.

Words cannot describe how excited and honored we are to be these girls' parents. We will try to keep everyone posted. Love, love, love, Ava and John 💜💛💙

The Waiting Game

I knew that most people don't get matched right away, but I also knew we were going to get matched right away. One month, two, or maybe three months tops. And so I started mentally preparing for parenthood. Not just any parenthood - parenting two traumatized kids at different developmental levels requiring completely different approaches to help them heal. Megaparenthood. That's what I was preparing for. And it was going to happen by July for sure, probably sooner. I started viewing my job very differently - as a paycheck and a place to put in my time and go home to what was going to become my real purpose, my real life. I was cutting back on long-term commitments because pretty soon I wouldn't have time anymore. I was racing to make my way through a staggering list of books about foster kids, trauma, race, belonging, attachment, loss, grief, healing, fear of sleeping, food hoarding before I ran out of time to read. I was gearing up for my life to completely change direction. And gearing up. And gearing up. And gearing up.

Just when I was starting to think maybe we weren't going to be matched right away after all, we got a call and we were looking at going into disclosure. The kids didn't exactly match our search parameters, but some special circumstances of what the kids were going through made our hearts go out them. We thought, could these be our kids? I was researching hair types, care, and maintenance. I was gearing up for raising Black kids in today's world, where brown bodies are unvalued, dismissed, feared, and slaughtered in the streets by the very police force they pay tax dollars to serve and protect their communities. 

The disclosure process surprised me. The professionals there were looking for just the right family for these two, very special kids who had been through a lot of heartbreak and trauma. The social workers, therapist, and program manager were extremely invested in these kids. They gave us 200 pages of information about the kids' history, including birth and medical records, every report their social workers had written from intake to monthly visits, and school and therapy progress reports. We read through them page by page at home, soaking in every detail, trying to know the kids through badly photocopied official forms and descriptions of their personalities, likes and dislikes. The older kid loved dancing and the younger one loved Frozen and jumping rope. The older one was social and boisterous. The younger one shy and reserved.

I had so many questions. I knew for sure that I could love these children, that I already did love them. And I knew I was dying to be a parent. But I worried that these kids were not mine, that I was not theirs. They were outside of our search parameters and I feared that I would come to resent them for not being the children I had been looking for. With some of the things they had been through and the expectations that had unfairly been put upon them by their birth family, I worried that I would add to those unfair expectations, wanting them to be different than who they were. They deserved a family that wanted every part of them. 

I felt overwhelmingly guilty. Why couldn't I be the right parent for these kids? Why were these kids not enough for me? Who was I to reject them? What was wrong with me that I couldn't open my heart and home to these beautiful, lovable children? But I came to realize that I had opened my heart to them, that I loved them enough to say that they deserved the right parents and that I was not that.

I often hear people insinuate that we would be the best parents for any children out there, probably because we are unusually well-read and educated about the issues of trauma, grief, and identity that pervade the foster system, and because of our experience with children and knowledge of child development. It is true that many people go into foster parenting and fost-adoption with very little knowledge on these subjects and sometimes little to no experience with kids at all. But we are not the perfect match for every child, or even the best match out there. Children are individuals, with individual circumstances and needs. There are kids who have birth siblings in Madera that really need a family that can provide frequent visits with their siblings. There are kids with significant medical needs or are medically fragile, and kids that really need a stay-at-home parent for several years. There are kids that act out their own experiences of abuse by hurting animals, and need a home without pets until they can heal and learn to be caring and have their needs met in a healthy way. All of these kids need and deserve families that are willing and able to meet them where they are, provide for them in the unique ways that are necessary for them to thrive.

And so we lovingly said no, which broke our hearts in a way that is very difficult to describe. The only comfort I have is knowing that their social workers and therapist will find the best possible parents for these two children.

For us personally, this devastating process brought one positive outcome: we became clearer on our search parameters. We solidified our own understanding of what we were looking for. We were told by our social worker and several other professionals that we were smart to wait for the right match, that we were doing the right thing by not rushing into the wrong match. And now we just had to wait for the right kids to come along.

What followed was a long period of radio silence. Months went by without a word from our social worker. I emailed to check in: had we been forgotten? Were they annoyed that we had gone into disclosure and then said no? Were we being cast aside for being too picky? No, we were assured. They were still looking out for the right kids for us, they hadn't seen any potential matches, but they were still looking. They still wanted us to stick to our gut feeling about what we were looking for. They told us that we were still considered to be early in the process and that it was not at all unusual for people to search much longer than this to find the right match. I began to realize that, in going into this process, you and outsiders are very concerned with how long it will take, viewing waiting parents as being on a list that they will eventually rise to the top of, like waiting in line at a bakery. In reality, the process is far more complicated than that. It is important and takes courage for parents to wait for the right match, and in the end it won't matter how long it took if the match is the right one.

But during this wait, a number of things happen. I'm sure many people experience it differently, but I know I am not alone in my own feelings and experiences because when I have expressed them to other waiting parents or other parents who have been through this process, they say "yes, I know exactly how that feels." 

I'm sure it is easy to imagine that I want this waiting process to go faster, but I would also be just as happy to have someone tell me that I would not be a parent for at least another 10 months. When I tell people this, their first response is often that it would be nice to make travel plans and know what I can commit to on my calendar. But that is truly the least of my worries when it comes to not knowing how long this will take. What is far more difficult to navigate is the emotional process of mentally preparing to be a parent without knowing when it will happen. I watched as my friends got pregnant, mentally and physically readied themselves for an approximate deadline, had their babies, took parental leave, came back to work, and commiserated with friends and colleagues about their collective experiences along the way. Although I have never wanted to become pregnant or have biological kids, I deeply envy the routine and predictability of their process to parenthood. I know there are plenty of "unpredictables" throughout their process, but when compared to fost-adoption, pregnancy and birth seem to consist of a very fixed set of relative similarities.

In this limbo I'm in, I am oscillating and disoriented. At first I wanted to take advantage of this time and read as much as possible about parenting foster kids, gather as many tools for my tool belt as I could. But the yearning to be a parent became more and more overwhelming as I read about kids like the ones I am going to have. I found myself feeling desperate for parenthood, like nothing else mattered except getting to parenthood. Then I worried that I was building it up in an unhealthy way - that when I got to parenthood I would be so stressed and overwhelmed that I would wonder why I didn't enjoy my non-parenthood while I had the chance.

So I started indulging in things that I knew would be much harder to have later on, like lots of quiet time, binge-watching shows, sleeping in, and taking naps. Ever-so-helpful parents of biological children would say things like, "Enjoy it while you still can, because pretty soon you won't have time for anything and won't have any sleep!" I cannot tell you how many times I have heard this, without an ounce of awareness of how extremely different my path to parenthood is than theirs.

As an aside, many foster kids have a deep fear of sleeping (it is the ultimate vulnerability to be unconscious), and can take a year or more to sleep consistently and healthily. On the other hand, some foster kids have no trouble sleeping whatsoever and will easily sleep through the night within a few days of moving in. The minority of foster kids that happen to be newborn babies have been inexplicably snatched from the mother they have been attaching to for months in the womb and are confused and terrified. Many of them are medically fragile because of substances they were exposed to in the womb, and may have tremors, need methadone, be severely underweight, and need feeding every 45 minutes. But the majority of foster kids are older, are developing attachments in unique ways and at their own pace, and may or may not have trouble sleeping. So thank you so much for telling me about the sleep I'm about to lose. What would I do without your vast and thoughtful wisdom?

Because of the nonstop, consistently unhelpful advise I get when I tell people that I am struggling with this wait, I have withdrawn a lot and don't give many details to most people. This is difficult for me because I am a distinctly not-private person. I like telling people personal details of my life. I am an open book. I do want to reach out more to other waiting parents and people who have gone through this before, which I keep telling myself I will do and I keep not doing. Of course I do have a couple of friends who bizarrely just know what to say without having been through this process at all, and countless others who are humble enough to assume they don't know everything, eager to learn, and quick to find out how they can support us. I really do appreciate all of them, and I know I will rely on them even more when this whole parenthood shit hits the fan.

But I'm so tired of hearing parents of four kids complain about how chaotic their life is as if their four kids appeared out of nowhere and the parents are heroes for stepping up to this completely unavoidable and unexpected challenge. I'm not unsympathetic to people for their struggles regardless of how those struggles came to be, but I hate that parenthood is the default for people, that it's viewed as a noble and selfless thing to bring additional people into an overpopulated world that has an excess of kids that need homes, that so many people make the decision to become parents with little or no consideration of whether or not they actually want to be parents, that people who decide not to have kids are unusual and often looked down upon. I don't begrudge anyone wanting to have biological kids that really want to have biological kids, and I know some really fabulous parents. I just dislike how many people really don't desire to be parents but just kind of do it, and then act like I should be grateful for their suffering through parenthood as their contribution to society. (To clarify, none of my friends are those people who shouldn't have had kids, but I know plenty of people who only ever wanted the idea of kids, and I have very little respect for those people).

So here I am. So close to parenthood, but not a parent. Waiting not only for kids, but for a basic timeline of major life changes, a mental map of what other cultures and identities I will be incorporating into my life, what color of dolls to buy, which hair and skin products I will need, how to decorate the kids' rooms, and the confidence to tell people to fork off when they don't know what the hell they are talking about. At least I hope I will have that confidence when I am a parent and will feel I have the street cred to say it, because right now I feel like I'm not allowed to say it as a non-parent. And right now, a non-parent is all that I feel I am.

Finding A Match

Now that we are on the brink of getting certified, I am getting a lot of questions about the matching process! So here it is to the best of my knowledge:

Step 0: Get certified
You can't look at any potential matches whatsoever until you are fully and officially certified. This is why we are looking forward to Monday when we can sign off on our final paperwork and start looking at kiddos!

Step 1: Looking for matches or waiting for matches
You can be as passive or proactive as you want during the matching process. Some parents choose to sit back and wait for their social worker to find matches for them. Others will be in the office every month looking at new cases that have come in and identifying which ones they want their social worker to pursue. 

Step 2: Reaching out
For any kids we might be interested in, our social worker will reach out to the kids' social worker to express interest and send our homestudy (that 15-20 page document they wrote about us). At this time, our social worker may also call us if a case comes up that she thinks might fit our profile. We can say no to any potential match. For example if we wanted kids of a particular age, ethnicity, level of special needs, etc, those parameters are all enumerated in our homestudy, and we will use our parameters to guide our search.

Step 3: Disclosure Meeting
Once a child social worker comes back to our social worker and says they think we might be a match, we set up a disclosure meeting. This meeting includes us, our social worker, the kids' social worker, the kids' lawyer, and the kids' therapist(s) or other professionals working with them. This meeting lasts several hours and during this time we hear everything they know about the kids, everything they know the kids have been exposed to (abuse, neglect, domestic violence, etc), any behaviors they have seen, and where the kids are in the legal process. We can also ask any questions we may have.

Step 4: Baby, Think It Over
After the disclosure meeting, we will meet privately with our social worker and determine whether there are any red flags from her perspective (obvious ones would be intentional harm to animals or fire starting*, but our social worker will also know the more subtle things to ask about). Then we sleep on it and think it over and decide whether to move forward or not. If not, we start over. If we move forward, that means we are committing ourselves to the kids. They don't want us to meet the kids if we aren't committed. (Imagine if a pregnant person gave birth and then said "well, i don't really like her, so let's give this one away and try again.")

Step 5: Meet the kids
Our social worker and the kids' social worker will work with the kids' current foster parents to set up a time for us to come to their house and meet the kids. We will bring the book we made with photos of our house so that they have something to imagine and it's not just a scary, mysterious place. We will also bring a gift for each kid to break the ice. We will be introduced as "friends" of the current foster parents.

Step 6: Transition
We will set up a time to come back and take them out to a park, then another time we will have them over to our house for dinner, then have them over for a sleepover, then for a weekend. This allows us to build up trust with them, to show them that we follow up on our promises, and to ease them into our family and our home.

Step 7: Moving in
When the kids' social worker thinks the kids are ready for it, we will set a move-in date with the court. This will also become the first day of our parental leave from work. Our social worker will visit once a week for the first month and then every other week to see how we are doing, see how the kids are, ask if we need support or paperwork, and help us keep track of any requirements we have (taking them to the doctor/dentist within 30 days of placement, getting authorization paperwork for access to special education services, etc).

Step Alternative 5-7: Rushing it
The transition described above often spans 2-4 months and is very beneficial to both the kids and parents. Anytime it is possible to do that transition slowly, it is done in this way. However, about 25% of the time, that transition must be rushed. Usually this is because the kids need to be moved as soon as possible to a new home, like if the current foster family suddenly has to move out of state to care for a sick parent, for example. If the kids are going to be moved suddenly to a new home, they would rather it be the kids' future adoptive home so as to minimize the number of transitions. For this reason, it is possible that we would get a phone call asking if we are interested in becoming a parent in two days, set up an immediate disclosure meeting, and get an immediate move-in date. This is why we don't know if we will have any lead time on when we are going to be parents. One set of adoptive parents we met got a call about a kid with a move in date five days later. They managed to get the kid's foster mom to bring him over to their house once before he moved in so that it was less of a shock. More likely once we get matched we will have some sort of transition, as well as some sort of idea of when they might move in with us.


* Note: Kids who have done intentional harm to animals or started fires absolutely deserve loving homes and families. Nevertheless, every family has to decide what they can or cannot commit to before any kid comes into the picture. It is incredibly harmful for a kid, especially one with developmental trauma, to bounce in and out of a home because the parents didn't know what they were signing up for. A single parent household or a household with two working parents may not be the best family for a medically fragile kid or a kid with extreme behavior challenges, for example.