Monthly Archives: April 2023

Our home visit with the attending social workers – foster care

parenting

There’s a lot that’s been going on behind the scenes and I’ve debated mentioning it or not, because it’s possible nothing will come of it. I’ve decided to share our process of being approved for foster placements, and wherever it leads us, it leads us. If I wait until everything is settled to share about this, I’m likely to forget lots of the details and to be too busy with whatever stage we move into to write retroactively about our experience.

Brief background recap: A couple of months we were approached about fostering a young boy, who has a sister for whom a placement was found in Yavneel. The hope was to find two families in the same area to take each of the siblings so they could maintain a relationship. We initially said no, then went back for more information. After much discussion, we offered to take both five and a half year old twins, which so much took them aback that they thought we had misunderstood their request was to take just one.

Once we agreed, I expected that things would move much faster than they have, but there have been an unusual amount of delays in moving this situation forward. After seeing all of this unfolding, I have so much sympathy for social workers who have to work within this incredibly inefficient system. I can see how frustrating and difficult it must be for them.

Weeks ago, our first home visit was cancelled a day or two before it was supposed to take place. The necessary pieces weren’t coming together, despite lots of effort and advocacy and even heavily leaning on legal authority (by social workers, not me – I mostly sat back and let things unfold as Hashem wanted). At this point, the school and transportation have been arranged, which was necessary to have in place before they would come to our home to check us out.

And so, today we finally had our home visit, a critical step to be approved for fostering specific children.

Since my husband flew to the US yesterday, the meeting was between me and four social workers: our social worker, the head social worker of the foster care agency, the social worker representing the parents, and the social worker representing chok noar from the parents’ area in the north (I don’t know what the equivalent in the US would be – literal translation is ‘Youth law’).

They were here for two and a quarter hours. My expectation was that they would be very interested in seeing our home. They were, but that was the secondary goal. Most of the focus was on getting a sense of who I am, to know who will be raising the children. As they told me, these children have experienced a lot of trauma and they want their placement to be successful.

The conversation jumped pretty quickly into what some would consider challenging conversation. Basically, I was told there were very difficult behaviors involved and asked what made me think I could handle them. (My social worker later expressed concern on how this had been for me, but I recognized the concern that was behind the questioning and it didn’t bother me at all.)

I was interested in how the temporary foster home is dealing with it, so I redirected that first somewhat edgy line of questioning and asked. I was told that they’re not dealing with certain behaviors at all. I learned more about the current foster family, which was something important for me to know since I want to understand as much as possible where the children are coming from and what they’re used to.

I told her honestly that I have concerns about the challenges, that I’m sure that there is much more trauma than what we’ve been told about and that the behaviors will be worse than we were led to believe (the social worker concurred that this is likely), and that I hope we have the ability to support them. I also later told two of the social workers that I’ll make no long term commitments and if I feel that the safety of any of my children is being compromised by these children, the needs of the children I already have will take priority.

We went on to discuss our family, our approach to parenting and lots of other stuff. It was an interesting and positive conversation.

I was told that they had already checked our family out with various people, and gotten glowing feedback. I had no idea when I was interacting with various people in the local education department over the last three years that they’d one day be telling social workers their opinion of me. That was a pleasant thing to hear.

We ended with a quick tour of our home. Two of the social workers had to cut it short since they had another appointment, so they only looked at the first floor of our home. One told me the most important thing is that they see the room where the children would stay. The other two stayed to see the entire home, which I think is good because it gives a fuller and more accurate picture of our accommodations.

The next step will be to go back to court and petition for the children to be placed with us. I then learned that a country-wide search to find other foster families that were willing and able to support these children has already been done but no other family is available. This search needed to be done because of the opposition of the legal advocate/court representative, who wanted a family who isn’t living in Yavneel (I was told there’s a negative association with this area), isn’t charedi (because the bio parents aren’t religious), and is living in close proximity to a suitable school (so they don’t have to travel to school).

I was told it can take between a week to a month for this to come to court. However, it seems likely it will be closer to a week. If there is court approval for a placement in our family, then we’ll begin the transition stage in which we and the children begin getting to know one another over the course of several meetings.

While the further we go with this process, the more likely it is that the placement will be made, no one will make any assurances or predictions of what will happen. We’re making no assumptions, and wait and see continues to be our position.

Avivah

Help children prepare for travel and transition

parenting

This morning I took my husband and ds10 to an early morning train headed for the airport. They’ll be going to the US and will be away for a week. Ds10 has been so excited about this trip that he could hardly bear waking up each morning and hearing that it still wasn’t the day to leave.

To help him prepare for the trip and help him be aware of time, we made a calendar chart taped to the fridge. Every morning as soon as he woke up, before doing anything else he marked that day off with an X. Except today – he didn’t even think of marking today off since he was ready to go!

My husband made a separate chart for ds6, who naturally wanted one just like his big brother! We’re planning to have special time together and I’m looking forward to having this time with him. We talked about what he’d like to do, and he requested to go to the store together, and to a zoo that we visited recently. So we’re going to do that! I’m also thinking of taking him to a therapeutic donkey sanctuary that I was once invited to by the owner, if we can make the timing work. When it comes to children, less is more – I’ll wait until the day we have something planned to tell him about other plans.

Our six year old is very connected to ds10 and my husband, and we don’t anticipate it will be easy for him to be without them both at the same time. In order to help him have a sense of how much time is left until they come back, my husband took an idea from my daughter-in-law, and prepared five balloons (one for each day they won’t be here, not including the day they leave and come back). In each blown up balloon is a candy. They are taped to the fridge, and each day we’ll pop a balloon together.

Consistency is very important to children, and when there’s a change for them, helping create predictability and stability with something like a simple chart and balloon strategy helps them to feel secure and more easily emotionally navigate the changes they are experiencing.

You can create charts and routines for regular days; you don’t have to wait for a special event. Kids feel more secure knowing what is going to happen when, what follows what, what time meals will be, and what will be served for dinner. When our children were younger, our daily schedule, chore chart and weekly meal plan were always displayed on the front of our fridge.

As our children have gotten older and there are less people to keep on the same schedule, this has been less necessary and those charts have faded away. However, with the potential changes coming up for our family, posting a daily schedule and weekly meal plan will likely be making a comeback very soon.

Avivah

The disappointments in raising animals

homeschooling, parenting

When you raise animals, you learn a lot about disappointment.

There’s so much time, money and energy that go into raising animals, but the end result isn’t completely in your hands.

My fifteen year old son learned a lot from his experiencing raising chicks last year, and applied all those lessons to this season’s hatching. He renovated the incubator he built, set up good systems to protect the newborn chicks from injury, worked out the heating lamp system to keep the baby chicks warm as they grew, and the first two batches of chicks did really well.

Until he switched their food for Pesach. Six of his bigger chicks died in two days. We don’t know how many more would have died on Pesach, because…

Right after the first day of Pesach was over, all of his chicks were stolen from our gated backyard in the middle of the night. Every single one, from the new batch and the older batch. The afternoon before forty chicks were running all over the backyard, and the next morning none were left. When my son told me, I couldn’t believe it. I kept trying to think of a different reason to account for their disappearance.

It’s quite disconcerting to experience a theft like this.

I have a very, very good guess about who stole them. It’s very likely it was the same lovely children who stole his male goose on Shabbos morning last year. The children who two years ago stole all the tools a professional worksman left next to my gate, then claimed they didn’t have anything when I went to their home to reclaim them – and continued to claim they didn’t have anything as one by one, the tools were revealed in their yard. (Their mother standing right there said nothing but a very weak, “We don’t take other peoples’ things,” clearly not caring at all and not making any apology for the blatant theft of expensive professional tools.)

When something like this happens, you see how much we rely on parents to keep our world safe – when parents turn a blind eye or tacitly encourage these activities, it’s very hard to find recourse.

My boys are pretty certain about who it was, too, but won’t say a word about the evidence they have to support that conviction – they’ve accepted on themselves not to talk about those people. Interestingly, the morning after the chicks were stolen, the boy I suspect came to ask if we had spare pieces for a bike. He’s not a friend, and has never come to our home before. There’s no reason for him to ask us for this – and it made me very much wonder if he had entered our backyard (that can’t be seen into by passerby) and seen the bikes waiting to be repaired there. Who knows? I’m impressed with my son’s equanimity and his choice not to dwell on it, despite the significant financial loss and energy investment.

My son began incubating another very large batch of eggs. Two weeks into the three week incubation period, the power went out for fifteen hours. He was concerned the chicks were going to die, and most did – but thirty out of two hundred hatched. Not a great success rate but better than nothing.

In the meantime, one of his hens began sitting on her own eggs. When the first chick hatched, she took a walk with him. While she was off her nest, another hen sat down and co-opted the nest, then hatched the second chick, then walked around proudly with him.

My son wasn’t happy with that – he felt it was unfair for the first mother chick who did all the work for three weeks to have someone steal her nest. Somehow they worked it out between the hens, because a day or two later, the first mother had reclaimed her nest and the second chick. Barnyard drama. 🙂

As soon as the latest chicks were hatched, my son put them underneath the mother sitting on her nest. Chicks do best when raised by mothers and it’s much less intensive than using a heat lamp. By the time he had given her twenty chicks, she was very busy gathering them all under her to keep them warm.

So my son put another hen in with her to help her out, then put the rest of the newly hatched chicks in. So far they’ve lost three who weren’t kept warm enough, but all the rest are doing great.

It’s not just our experience, having especially bad luck raising chicks or animals that things like this happen. It’s the nature of it. There’s often something unexpected that goes wrong. Neighboring children bought ten chicks from my son’s first hatching, and did a fantastic job keeping them alive. Then a couple of days ago they woke up to three dead chicks in their coop, and the other seven were missing. (Their rooster they got from us was stolen the same night that my son’s chicks were stolen.)

They didn’t know what could have happened until they watched the replay on their security cameras. A fox repeatedly throughout the night came in and out of their yard, each time taking a chick with him. I know they planned a trap for the fox the next night, anticipating he would return for the three chicks he killed, but I didn’t yet hear an update.

I felt so badly for the children; I know what’s involved in raising week old chicks. It’s very disheartening to spend so much effort for months, and then have nothing to show for it.

Thinking about foxes and chickens, my son reflected to me a couple of days ago, “You know, Roald Dahl books make the good guys look bad, and make the bad guys looks good. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the farmer trying to protect his chickens is the bad guy, and the fox is the good one. And in Danny, Champion of the World, the poacher and his son were stealing but they looked like the heroes.” He’s completely right.

I now have a padlock on the goat pen. And my son is sleeping outside to guard his chickens from the fox, in case he decides to make a visit. He likes sleeping outside once the weather gets warm, so he’s just moving out a bit sooner than he otherwise would. 🙂

Avivah

Helping birthing doe deliver kids

homeschooling

It’s been a busy few weeks with Pesach preparations, tons of guests, and finally things are getting back to normal.

This week has been kidding season. It kicked off on Saturday night with our first time mother delivering twins – we got there in time to see the first had just been delivered, and were able to watch the second being born.

Bambi and Moonbeam, right after birth

The babies were dried off (both males), we got them nursing, and we all went to bed grateful things went so smoothly.

The next day the babies weren’t nursing and the placenta was still not fully detached. As the hours went by, it got more and more stressful worrying about this. I reached out to vets for help, but those we reached didn’t deal with goats. We couldn’t reach anyone knowledgeable about the specific issue we had until the late afternoon, nor could I find anyone who could give me contact information for a vet who deals with goats.

A friend with goats suggested we bottlefeed the colostrum to be sure to get it into the babies, so my son ran out to buy bottles and then milked the doe to feed to her kids. They didn’t get the hang of sucking on the bottle so we had to hold their mouths open and drip the colostrum in. That may sound cute but it really wasn’t fun. Baby goats will die if they don’t get enough colostrum soon enough, and we were both worried that the babies weren’t getting what they needed.

Someone came to show me how to help get the placenta out by pulling up on the goat’s midsection, and a bit more of the placenta came out when she was here. But it was still not coming out. While she was here, two more people came by, one of who knew someone very experienced with goats. She called him and asked him to come by and help us.

I was so grateful when a couple of hours later he arrived. Finally someone with the knowledge and experience to deal with the placenta issue – a fully or partially retained placenta is also something that a goat will die from if not resolved soon enough. By this point it had been nineteen hours since she gave birth and the placenta hanging out was beginning to smell. He was able to remove it, and showed my husband how to give her an antibiotic shot.

He checked the babies and said they looked very healthy and strong, and their tummies were full and that’s why they weren’t nursing more. That was such a relief.

Happily, the kids started nursing regularly soon after that. With the mother doe recovering beautifully from the birth, we had a couple of days to relax and enjoy the kids before the next goat kidded. She delivered when no one was home without any complications, and my son came home to find a healthy singleton all dried off. A big and healthy purebred male.

Two and a half more days went by, and yesterday afternoon my son came inside to let us know the amniotic sac had partially emerged from doe number 3. We all ran out, anticipating seeing the birth within a few minutes. We waited, and waited, and waited. The face and front hooves were visible but then retreated back into the mother.

Even though everyone was very quiet, I thought perhaps our presence was hindering the birth so we all went inside to leave her alone, also taking the other goats and their kids outside the pen to give her space. More time went by, and I wanted to look up how long it should take a goat to give birth once the amniotic sac emerged, since I was concerned it was taking too long (over two hours had passed since we first saw the amniotic sac beginning to show). I also was worried because when she was laying on the ground, another goat tread on the amniotic sac and popped it – would the kid be born dead by the time he was out?

What I read led me to think we had a difficult presentation on our hands, and that was the reason for the extended laboring time. Usually they say goats give birth on their own and you’re not needed, but this wasn’t one of those times. My son called a friend with goats for advice; he was told we would probably have to help pull the kid out. Ds13 and ds15 went out to the pen, and at the first contraction, ds15 began pulling the kid out by his front hooves. Once the head and both front hooves were out, the body should have slid right out, but it didn’t.

Ds13 took the hooves on the right side of the kid, and ds15 held the hooves on the left side of the kid, and with each contraction, they pulled together.

We soon saw the reason for the delayed birth – the head of the second kid was right under the stomach of his twin, instead of being behind him. (Probably the back hooves of the first kid were keeping the head of the second one held in place.)

I told ds15 to push the head back in to allow the first kid to be born, but the force of the contractions was too strong and he couldn’t. Instead, the two boys pulled together as much as they could to get the first kid out from. They later told me they were pulling very hard because it was so difficult. It was a relief to see him breathing and his mother began licking him off right away. The head of the second one came out together with the birth of the second half of the first kid, and within a few minutes the second kid was born (also with assistance). (Male/female twins – there’s only one female out of five kids born.)

Whew. Ds13 got them started nursing, and we’ll keep an eye on them today to make sure they’re nursing on their own.

First time mother Bambi with four day old Moonbeam, curious about a hen

Goats can’t stand up immediately after being born, and it’s fun to watch them develop the ability to walk. They are wobbly and tumble quite a bit. Of the first two kids born, one is more playful and the other is shy – watching the inquisitive kid is so entertaining! Yesterday we were all very entertained and laughing watching him bound up the tarp covered hay, then sliding down – and then doing it again and again when he realized how fun it was.

So far, Starlight wins the award for the cutest and most engaging kid – we’ll see how the newest kids shape up in the next couple of days

Are you wondering what we’re going to do with eight goats? We’re not going to keep them all! The males will all be sold as soon as they can be weaned. We have yet to determine if we’ll keep all the does and the doeling, or just two of them. In a month we’ll assess the milk production and make a decision. The only doe who isn’t in question is Buttercup, the goat who gave birth yesterday.

We’re relieved to have successfully navigated our first kidding season. Now it’s time to enjoy the antics and playfulness of our baby kids!

Avivah