For children who have experienced starvation you have a long road ahead of you. A road with lots of curves and steep cliffs, sometimes on both sides. Would that be a warning to second guess your self...NO. It is a reality that will help prepare you for your journey.
When childeren have experienced hunger for extended periods of time in excessive amounts it can profoundly scar them. Even children coming who are unsure may be food theives for a period of time. This has been our biggest battle and four years later we have not won yet.
If your child is coming out of an institutional setting you must realize that food is often not prepared where the kids are close by. As a result they don't smell it cooking. Sounds silly and irrevelent, well it is not it is VERY importand. A child in this setting smells their food the moment they are about to eat. In a home setting a child may smell food for hours before they eat. Let's say a roast or turkey cooking. A large pot of home made soup or stew. Bread in the oven or a pie. Kids who smell food and are not prepared to wait can have extreme reactions. For us it meant crying, hysterical crying from the moment wonderful aromas began until we sat at the table; sometimes that was 4 hours, if you were talking about a turkey.
We had to revamp our thinking. Rules about not entering the kitchen had to be set to avoid little people getting burned. We adopted four at one time. This way we would have a little line on the threshhold of the kitchen crying in unison. Then I had to think about the types of meals I would make for a while. The typical large roasted or long cooked meals had to be replace with meals that could be cooked in shorter times.
Becoming a quick and efficient composter of food garbage and above all making sure there was little waste was very important. Kids who have gone hungry can't understand food being wasted or thrown away. Be very mindful of this as your kids will eat out of the garbage if they can get the chance. We have faced several bouts of food poisoning over this issue. We may think we have solved it but then found out one of most difficult food relocaters has been in someone Else's garbage.
Eli has autism and is very high functioning compared to the rest of our children. This has made him the most difficult to break of the food issues. He remembers hunger and needs to constantly solve it. Even though he has never been really hungry since adopted that is a memory burned into him.
So if you were worried about all sort of terrible behaviors we don't have them. Our kids came from pretty awful circumstances. Eli is kind and very loving, helpful and a hard worker. He loves reading and wants to learn as much as he can. Despite his autism which affects his receptive and expressive language it has a counter side where as he is a collector of facts especially about science and history.
Would I recommend adoption? To everyone I meet. Would I recommend adopting OUR children right here in America, YES! Our kids need homes, with all their baggage and problems, with all their issues and disabilities. The Lord will equip you to handle anything he brings you to.
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