Matching Outfits

I can't help it! I love to dress my kids alike. WHY? Well, it is fun for one. I used to think that it was absolutely ridiculous. That was until I found my self parenting more than a handful of children that were all still very young. Matching outfits is actually a parenting tool for me. I will almost always coordinate my children if our family is embarking on a crowded adventure. I can find them easily. Since they are all relatively young, it is pretty easy to find the matching clothes. Kelly's Kids and Chez Ami have outfits in all sizes that work together. They are rather expensive, but if you search on e-bay, you can find last years styles for half the price. The outfits that my children have on were also bought on e-bay. Annie's dress and the shorts the boys are wearing are by Flapdoodles. I have searched for one in Chloe's size, but I haven't had any luck.

For now, I will continue to find opportunities to dress my children alike. I know the day will soon come when Landon will roll his eyes at me and protest the thought. I kind of expected that day to be here already. However, I have been tickled this summer. He has been sleeping a little later than the rest of the kids. I have noticed on more than one occasion, he came downstairs wearing the matching shirt that I had already put on his baby brother. SO, it is also fun for the kids. YES, I will take advantage this time.

I just recently bought a new mommy toy. I have "settled" on good point and shoot digital cameras for several years. I have never been happy. For Mother's Day, my husband told me to get my DSL camera that I have "whined" about for years. He wasn't about to try and surprise me. He wanted me to pick it out. I spent weeks trying to decide what to get. I purchased a Cannon Rebel the last week in May. This picture was taken after church. A good friend of mine said we needed to have a picture taken, and I just happened to have my new toy in my car. Thank you Emily. This might be my favorite family picture that we have had taken.

RAD Update

I have procrastinated on updating my blog because my December posts have been haunting me. The foster daughter that I wrote about is still in a theraputic foster home, but her social workers are currently looking for a residential treatment center. I am still so hurt by this whole situation. I want so much to bring her home and hug and kiss her and let her know that I have never stopped loving her. However, we have four wonderful children in our home. (One that shares her RAD/ADHD diagnosis.) I like to think that I could do it all. I dream of bringing her home and teaching her to trust us AND protecting my other babies from the world which she has been exposed. I pray for her continuously. I pray that she will find a forever family that will be able to love her as much as we do. I pray that she will learn to love and trust and not follow the paths that so many others have been down.

What is RAD? Reactive Attachment Disorder. I will post more on this in a later post. For anyone who really wants to know about it, Google it. Search Attachment Disorder or Reactive Attachment Disorder. Do not search for RAD or you will end up with Radiation results.

Update

As I am sitting on my neighbor's patio watching our kids play, she asks me if I am going to leave the title the same. Of course. Currently, we are still the Sweeney Six, but I would only have to change the title back to The Sweeney Seven in a matter of time. We do have my classroom gerbil living in our garage right now. She can serve as our seventh member for now. Hopefully, she won't see the same fate that our goldfish saw back in the fall.

spitefulness

I love my neighbor. She keeps me straight at times. She deleted my blog from her list of links because I haven't updated since December. I'm updating now, partly because I've been meaning to for awhile, but mostly out of spite.

Calling All RAD parents!!!!

The Sweeney Seven has become the The Sweeney Six since baby Trinity went back to her birthfather on Halloween. I, of course, don't want to change the title because I know that we will be seven again. My son won a goldfish at his fall festival, I considered counting it as the seventh member, but the fish died on Nov. 1. So much for that idea!

I am asking for advice on this post from friends and strangers in cyberspace that know what I'm talking about when I say RAD parents or refer to a child as a radish. Of course supportive comments from others are always welcome, but if you don't know about RAD, then you don't know that these kids are different than other kids.

Today is the sixth birthday of our first foster child. We had her in our home for 15 months and then she was reunited with her birthmom a few weeks before her 4th birthday. She spent the better part of the last two years living on the streets and perfecting her street smart, manipulative skills. She was placed back in foster care early this summer following her mother's shoplifting arrest at Kroger. One of the hardest emotions I've ever felt was the saddness of not being able to bring my little girl (I do consider her my little girl) back into our home. She is older than Landon by a few months making her the role-model. Some role-model (RAD and Bipolar!). Our brains overruled our hearts this time. She would not be a good mix with a five, three, not quite 2, 6 month old (Trinity), and a 3 week old! It hurt because she told her psychiatrist that she didn't care if mommy went to jail because she was going to live with the Sweeney's. It hurt because I know how much progress we made, and how much progress was undone in those two years. It hurt because I LOVE this little girl. She is in her second foster home from this removal. We got an e-mail earlier this week and phone call today telling us that her "goal" has been changed to adoption. I celebrate this because she needs permanency. OK, so here it comes:

Her birthmom has stated that she would sign over rights with no fight if she came back to our home. She also stated that she wishes she would have let her stay with us in the first place. This is the statement that makes me so mad!!!! If she wasn't reunited, then she WOULD still be with us and she would have been adopted already. NO QUESTION. I also get mad because that statement almost sounds manipulative towards us, as if she is trying to guilt us in to this. I am mad because an additional two years of who-knows-what kind of trauma has been placed on this little girl AND I wasn't able to protect her. I am mad because my brain (and hubby's brain) keeps telling me that there is no way. That it is not fair to my other babies. We are only days away from getting our "official" RAD dx on Annie. Can we handle 2 Radishes? I am MAD because we haven't seen her in two years so how can we make a decision like this. I am MAD because I feel like doing "respite" for a couple of week-ends would give her false hope. I am MAD!

So what do I do? Pray, of course. Call my husband. Pray some more. Then I start reading blogs from Raddish families. They are so inspiring. It is great to know that there are families out there that know what it can be like. Raddish mom's, how do you make the choice?

http://picasaweb.google.com/brittney.sweeney3/ChloeAndTrinity?authkey=iRswkSeO1Co#

There is no rhyme or reason to this post. I'm just experimenting with Picassa Web Albums. I've been in the process of uploading all my pictures. I have an instinctive feeling that my computer is about to crash and I don't have backups. This has been some job. I've used all my available storage space. Now I've opened my husband a google account just for picture storage on Picassa.' The link above (if it works) is from October 30th. It was our last afternoon with Trinity before she went home. I was trying to get some good pictures, but it is quite the challenge to get mobile infants to cooperate for the camera. Oh well.

Thanks for the comments on my previous posts. God HAS blessed us with an awesome gift. We feel that our family is our mission field. We are never offended by questions that people ask. We feel that God has put us in this position to help others with their own personal struggles with infertility. We've been there.

multimedia-transracial adoption

It's been a while since I've posted. I'm still new at this blog thing, so I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to write about, but I do want to share this link. We have had the honor of helping a WKU student with her photojournalism project. Click on the link. Click on multimedia. Click on Colorblind. I just viewed it for the first time myself. I think she did an outstanding job. Maybe Extreme Makeover Home Edition can come and work on our bedroom for a mini-makeover.--lol.
http://www.wku.edu/~rebecca.barnett684/