The Wal-Mart Baby: Chapter 9

We were ecstatic that Summer was placed with us in April of 2010, but the chances of her being reunified with her dad was still very high. We just decided that we would enjoy her for as long as she was with us.
The next court date would be a 6 month review in October of 2010. This would be the court where dad would have completed his classes and rehab and begin having Summer on the weekends. Mom was not being considered for reunification but she was still allowed visitation. The CPS time-line said Summer would be living with her dad by April of 2011.

                              April 25, 2011                                            

In the first week of her being placed with us, we realized that Summer was very sick. She also had 2 bumps on her leg. It looked like it was shot spots but they turned into large knots and they were hot and dark red. Summer was also crashing into everything and rubbing her ears and she just became more irritable as the days went on. 

I decided to switch her to a new doctor and take her in for a visit. 

The first doctor we took her to, looked at her leg and said it showed all the signs of a dog bite! I told him our dogs do not know how to bite and if it was a dog bite, wouldn't there be puncture marks on the underside of her leg too, not just 2 spots on the top? I notified him that our dogs were the kind that had top and bottom teeth. Apparently doctor's don't like patients who are smarter than them, because this guy didn't even answer me, he just kept lecturing me about pet safety and he wrote "dog bite" down on her chart! The big problem with this is every doctor we see has to submit a report back to CPS. There was no way I was letting this quack tell CPS that Summer was bitten by our dogs. We walked out.

The next doctor we took her to was a keeper. He found out that Summer was a very sick little girl and she had been suffering with double ear infections and tonsillitis. They also figured out that Summer's shot record was forged and there was no clear indication that Summer had even been vaccinated! They had to start all over again with her vaccines and a new shot record. The best guess at the spots on her leg was infected shot punctures, certainly not a dog bite.

Summer was so sick in the first few weeks that she missed some visits and she went to the doctor several times. She also had a rash on her cheeks that would flair up when she got food or saliva on her face. She came with several different creams but nothing really worked. Especially since Summer always had something in her mouth and she drooled alot so the rash was always there.
We began taking Summer to her CPS visits with her parents, and even though they couldn't take care of her, nothing we did was ever good enough for them. The rash was our fault, she supposedly did not have that when she was in the foster home. They wondered why she was always in different clothes. When it was hot, they said I dressed Summer too warm. When it was windy they wanted to know why I didn't put a sweater on her. The asked tons of questions about why she was sick, and questions about why I put her in sandals without socks. Aside from having no fashions sense, they finally went off the deep end when they accused us, of all people, of cutting Summer's hair.

Part of our job was to keep notes on how Summer acted when she was with her parents. We had to photograph every bump and bruise and write an explanation. We had to document every parent phone call or visit and forms had to be submitted for every doctor appointment. Summer didn't have a baby book, she had a file.
We also had to make an itemized list of all the things that Summer came with and we had to make sure none of those items ever got lost. I certainly did not want to keep track of all the shapes that went with her birthday shape sorter and we did not want to have to count all her socks so we bagged up everything she came with and put it in the garage and we just bought her new stuff or used the clothes people had donated.

Even though we didn't know how long Summer would be staying with us, we still wanted to have her dedicated at church. We didn't involve CPS or her parents in this ceremony because no one ever told us not to give her to God, CPS just said she couldn't leave the state! Besides I could argue that belonging to God was always in the best interest of the child. So Summer was dedicated at Spirit and Truth Worship Center in May of 2010. 

                            Pastor Tom Copple                                                 

I went back to work and we enrolled Summer in a friend's Christian family daycare until she turned 18 months and could join the other 3 kids at their private school.

I wasted no time in photographing her, Summer responded so well to getting her picture taken! We took 1st birthday cake pictures of her and they turned out wonderful. We didn't know that when she did those adorable poses with her hand on her cheek that it was because she was in pain from her double ear infections during the photo shoot.

We quickly found out that Summer had an extremely high pain tolerance. She had skipped crawling in her obsession to pull up and walk. She was trying to stand alone at 7 months old, and run at 13 months.  However, her cognitive skills were not as advanced as her gross motor skills. This resulted in Summer having the ability to climb great heights but she did not have the understanding to be careful. She once scrambled onto the back of the couch in a few seconds and then walked right off the edge.

Summer was not talking when she came to us. We didn't know if this was because she spoke Spanish or not. Miss Teresa would come over and sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in Spanish to her and she would light up, but Summer never spoke words, English or Spanish. We had her assessed and she was functioning at a 7 month level in her language so we began teaching her sign language.

She picked up on basic sign language very quickly and before long, she was talking, but before she could even begin therapy, she no longer had a language delay.

                              Signing "All Done"                                                       

Knowing that Summer still had parents who were fighting for her and knowing that she wasn't even an orphan, made me, personally, refrain from bonding with her. I certainly cared for her the same as my other children, and I told her I loved her, but I treated her more like a child I was babysitting. 

I envied Sean because he seemed to love her while holding nothing back and the other kids immediately called her sister, but I was much more cautious about getting myself attached to her. I had always been concerned with her basic needs and wanting to see her in a secure and safe home, but I didn't feel like she was mine to love. She already had a mom.

Even though everything had come about so miraculously, I was still not fully convinced that this was the baby God was going to allow us to adopt. It still seemed impossible. 

Part of me didn't think that God would bring us this far to have her taken away again, but you never know.
Maybe God was just using us to minister to Summer's unsaved parents or maybe He was allowing us to see what the adoption process was all about. Maybe having her permanently wasn't His plan for our life at all...Only God knew. I was just trying to be emotionally OK with whatever His plan was.

I wished I could let myself love her like my own children. I sometimes imagined what I would say or do differently or buy if I knew that she would be staying with us forever. 

If she was staying forever I would buy trundle beds for the girl's room. 

At this point it was just too risky to buy trundle beds and it was way too risky to fall in love with Summer.

Summer came with some weird eating habits too. She did not chew and she would not stop eating. We had to monitor her intake. The first day she was eating while sitting on my lap. I had a burrito on my own plate and I was preparing to feed her baby food. While I was concentrating on getting the baby food onto her spoon, Summer stuck her hand in my burrito, yanked out the middle with her fist and swallowed the whole thing in one gulp.
She could also eat Flaming Hot Cheetos with no emotion.
Summer had a medical history packet and we saw that because she had Shaken Baby Syndrome, she needed more MRI's. I called the hospital to see if I needed to schedule those but the specialist said that she was fine and didn't need any follow-ups. She was not showing any lasting effects whatsoever.

Sean and I constantly marveled and praised God for how healthy she was considering all that she had been exposed to, in the womb and out.

It was clear to everyone that God had His hand on her but one day we realized the magnitude of the miraculous.

Summer was born in April of 2009. 

This was the exact month that we had begun praying and believing in faith for God to keep our future adopted baby safe.

Our faith and hope was renewed after God showed us that He had been working in the background and protecting Summer since the day she was born and we didn't even know it!

                                   May 2010