The Moose's Placement

I have gone back and forth in my head on how much I am going to share about The Moose's adoption here on this blog. Not because any of it is a secret. I am more than happy to share any of the details of the very long and very hard process with anyone who asks. But looking back, the process barely feels like it happened, even though The Moose has only been home for 9 months. Yes, I remember it, all the details. But after having him here, all that other stuff just doesn't matter. Maybe I'll share more in the future. For now, here's the most important part, placement.

Placement is the day the child is placed with their parents. So that's the day The Moose came home. He was born on August 30, 2012. He was placed on October 1, 2012. So he was 1 month and a day or 2 old. During that month, he was in transitional care. His transitional care mom's name is Billy and she was great. The transition period is pretty common. It's necessary when there are legalities that need to be worked out with the birth father (at least that was what happened in our case).

I was in a wedding in South Carolina (I live in Texas) on September 30, the day before placement. So I flew home very early on placement day. I can't tell you how nervous I was that my plane would be delayed or cancelled. Luckily, everything went smoothly.

Here we are at our adoption agency waiting for & meeting The Moose for the 1st time:

 That's Billy, his transition mom.

All of our communication with our birth mother was through our case worker, to her case worker, to birth mom. So somewhere along the way, we got the wrong induction date. We were told it was scheduled for August 29. So I did not sleep at all the night of the 28th. I waited by my phone for updates all day. I kept hearing "no news yet." And then in the late afternoon I find out that the date was wrong. Talk about suspense!

The delivery was a semi-difficult one. It was about 12 hours and ended in a C-section. He was allergic to everything. He was on a feeding tube. Our birth mom was released from the hospital before he was. The hardest part about that is I couldn't see him. We weren't allowed to meet him until placement. So all we knew was what our caseworker told us.

He went to placement with Billy. And he kept her on her toes! Since he was allergic to everything including dairy and soy, there wasn't a formula he could eat. About twice a week I would get an update with a new formula so that Ryan & I could prepare and get what he needed. After buying a couple, and returning a couple (including prescriptions that weren't covered under insurance since we weren't guardians yet), we decided to wait until a couple days before placement to get his formula.

He had really bad reflux. He threw up everything. He was in constant pain. He couldn't gain weight.

They put him on a prescription formula that was 57% corn syrup. To that, they added 4 tablespoons of a dairy free rice cereal per ounce of formula (it was sooooo thick). He also took 2 prescription meds and 2 otc meds daily.

The doctors and Billy were having such a hard time finding anything that worked for him. At one point, Ryan asked me, "Do you think they've tried ba-zerking him? Cause I bet that'll work." Ba-zerking is what we call blowing bubbles on his belly. And after he was home a couple weeks, I realized there was some truth to Ryan's statement. Because our ba-zerks seemed to be helping!

We kept that routine for less than a month. We put him on raw goat's milk. Cold turkey one day from all the prescriptions to raw goat's milk. WOW! It worked. And now he is super healthy. I don't think he will have any allergies. We are waiting until the one year mark (he's 10 months) to test out allergens.

The week after The Moose came home, we did go see his birth mom. She lives a couple hours away. She was doing great and it was amazing to see her holding The Moose and singing to him. We send her quarterly updates with pictures. We haven't heard from her since that time we saw her. We think of her often. She knows she can reach out to us if/when she is ready.

So that's how we met The Moose.