Oscar is doing well in our home. In talking to people at his daycare, we have learned that he has been a completely different baby for the last three days.
For the last three months that he has been in care, it has been more chaos than control. Sometimes he slept, sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he wanted a bottle, sometimes he wanted baby food. His former foster parents told the daycare that he liked sleeping on his stomach, which is against both the state regulations for foster homes and the regulations that the daycare must follow. When the daycare told them that putting a baby (that was only a few months old) on his stomach to sleep was against the rules, their response was, "well, good luck with getting him to sleep then". From what I can tell, that was the general attitude toward daycare also. If it wasn't the way they did it at home, then there was no way that any other approach was going to work.
His teacher told me last night when I picked him up that he has been happy and laughing and smiling a lot more in the last few days. More specifically, since Wednesday morning, the first time he woke up at our house. As I said before, Tuesday was a rough day on The Wife, being at home with him for the first several hours of his arrival. He would sleep for twenty minutes, wake up, be happy for five or ten minutes, then just be pissed off and inconsolable for the entire time until he fell asleep again. Apparently that was every day for the people at daycare. He wouldn't eat and then he would insist on eating. He wouldn't sleep at all or he would only sleep for a few minutes. At our house, we have a schedule that we have to stick to, otherwise the whole process breaks down. We learned that the first few weeks with Leonard and Penny... we played fast and loose with the schedule (specifically napping) and we paid dearly for it with tantrums, crying and general bad times. I know that it has only been a few days, but I really feel like we are already making a difference in his little life.
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