Books

If you come to our apartment and peruse our book shelves, you will find out a lot about me. There are biographies, from Saint Augustine to Malcom X; novels, from Don Quixote to the Kite Runner; and plenty of books on Christian living, prayer, and theology. There is my brief foray into researching the plague. Not kidding.

But my books tell someone else's story as well. Today I am writing about our journey to understand our daughter.

I read lots and lots of adoption books early on. Now that I'm in the middle of actually raising my adopted children, I don't read them at all. Maybe because I'm too busy actually raising them.

That said, I will be dusting this one off as Justin is speeding ahead into adolescence and issues will need to be revisited and talked about on a deeper level.

This one is a more recent arrival on our shelves. Our children are growing up in a country that is not their "passport" country. So, their sense of identity, who they are and where they belong, will likely take a while figure out.

Anna has never ever slept well. Ever. She takes a long time to get to sleep, and easily gets to a state of panic if she has seen something disturbing or scary.

The research and principles here have helped us at least to understand what is going on.

I ordered this one last fall, when Anna was having tantrums when she came home from school, when she saw what we were having for dinner, when she didn't want to walk anymore...you get the picture. Although it didn't lead me directly to the real solution (get her out of her school and get her difficulties diagnosed), it did help me find ways to reduce her stress and help me to react appropriately to help her calm down.

So, in the end, I guess my explosive child was trying to tell me that she had a diagnosable condition that needed treatment and, "Get me out of the French school system now!"


So, all of this has led us to a diagnosis of sensory processing disorder. It may be genetic in her case, or could be a result of her time in an orphanage where she was not getting the stimulation and care that she would have had in a family. Justin was in an orphanage for the same amount of time, and clearly had some sensory processing issues, but they were not as debilitating as Anna's.

One note about the orphanage. This was not a place where the children were not cared for. It's just that a few nurses, no matter how loving and attentive, cannot give full attention and stimulation to each baby. Especially if a baby already has unknown special needs.

What SPD means for Anna is that she has trouble processing oral, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive, and vestibular information. Yes, two of those words are new for me too.

She is hyper sensitive in some ways, especially orally. Teeth brushing was a battle when she was little. Some of our most painful moments in the last few years (painful as in both of us were in tears) involve dentists, orthodontists, and mouth x-rays. Now we know why.

She is hypo sensitive in others, like her tactile sense. This explains her habit of practically squeezing the life out of Negra as Justin yells, "Stop torturing the cat!" This happens just about every day in our house.

Some of her issues are easy to fix. For example, she has always gotten sick to her stomach and somewhat panicky when we travel in a car, train, or airplane. She will panic after just a few minutes in an airport and complain about feeling ill. Now that I know that she is hyper-sensitive to smells, I give  her a small bottle of aromatherapy lemon scent that I picked up at a pharmacy and  she uses it whenever she needs it when we travel. Easy fix.

Other things will be more difficult. I'll post about writing to give an example later this week.

Other things she might always have to deal with. We don't know what these things will be yet.

Posts this week: Writing and Strengths