Life can be confusing!

I am the second oldest of nine kids, seven of whom are adopted, two from Hati and five from state foster care.

My Hation sisters came to our home in January 2009 after two years of paperwork, delays and money.  If you ever want to adopt children I will recommend you save up $100,000 dollars for oftentimes adoption agencies are mostly working in the best interests of their wallet and in some very bad situations that money goes to your lawyer...

Now in my memory the years have somewhat melted together, so I am not certain of the accuracy of the dates I remember.

I think it was about 2011 when Dad heard the call of fatherhood.  Our nation is on a moral decline, fathers are failing to raise their children in a way that will grow in them character, a willingness to work hard, the value of wisdom and honesty.  Fathers, are you raising your children, whom God has given you the responsibility to raise, to be good parents, to be good husbands and wives, are you teaching them charity?  My father, realizing that our society is crumbling due to weak family structures, decided to act on conviction instead of ignoring it.  My parents want to help the widows and the orphans and so they began the licensing process to become foster parents.

The process of becoming foster parents is interesting.  First there are the recruiters!  These folks are well intentioned, they see that there's kids in foster care with no house to stay in so they act, they say to the world 'We need foster homes, think of the children!'.
Then there is the training, it is constructed to weed out those who are of weak heart, you are told that the foster kids you welcome into your home might do bad things to other children in you're home and will probably destroy some stuff, you are also taught in the way of foster care rules and regulations, at which point you learn that the power to parent is not given to the parent.  If you ever consider adoption or foster care you will need to educate yourself!  Look up 'Nancy Thomas Reactive Attachment Disorder'.

My Mom and Dad, not being of a weak heart, went through this process and were licensed as a foster home.  We took our first placement, three little girls.  Yes!  We were doing good!  Taking care of the orphans.  We had those girls in our care for fourteen months with one of the best social workers ever, she understood that parents have to be able to be parents and discipline their children to teach about consequences, authority and cause and effect.  Surprisingly most social workers don't understand that and seem to think that kids will just be what are, like kids are just born what they are and parents have very little to do with what children will grow into!

After those fourteen months of great learning the three little ladies went back with their parents, were they belong.  It turns out that those girls where removed from their mothers care because their moms house, which they were not living in, was really dirty, she is a bad house keeper, but does being a bad house keeper constitute the removal of children?  And since then the state has removed those children from their home again.  I understand that most people don't just automatically do this so I am going to ask you the reader to put yourself into that parents position, you love your children and you will not give up on them and you want what is best for them.  Now imagine that someone you do not know comes to your door with the police and says you are a bad parent that is trying to harm the states children, then they take your kids away to a location that you don't know and with people you have never met.  If you have ever had a messy house is removing your children from your care the best solution to solve the problem?

My parents retained their foster license and we did emergency placement for a while (Emergency placement is when the child is first removed from their home and is not yet officially in foster care, the kids would only be in our home for about a week.) before they decided to adopt again, but this time from foster care.

So one spring, I say one spring cause I can't remember what year it was, my parents learned of siblingish group of seven.  The two oldest have the same dad as the two youngest and the two youngest have same mom as the three in the middle.  During that summer all the kids got placed into our home and so began the adoption process.  But the oldest boy, who was the second oldest of the seven, was just hitting puberty and becoming somewhat sexual, and we already having a girl in the close to his age, he could longer stay in our home, so we had him removed.  Now there was only six, but the oldest was not interested in coming under the authority of my parents, so she left on her own accord.
All of the five youngest in the sibling group have minuet Reactive Attachment Disorder or RAD, research RAD!
Now when these kids first came into our home they were not able to bathe themselves, make the decision on what clothes they should wear and they couldn't even put food on there plates, it was as if the task of putting food on their plate was more responsibility than they could handle.  Bryce, the oldest of the children that remained in our home, is borderline mental retarded and when he first came to our home he would have fits of yelling, throwing off his clothes and self inflicted pain, such as punching himself.
All of these children also displayed symptoms and behaviors of Food Maintenance Syndrome, research that.

Two something years, a couple investigations and a judge later the adoption was complete.  If you know any foster parents ask them if they have ever been investigated.

My Mom continues to research health and wellness and has been told by a nutritionist that she knows her stuff!  Who does better research than a concerned mother?

Fast forward to spring 2016, the kids we adopted from the state have always been small and for the three or four years they had been in our home they hadn't grown very much despite constantly having three large nutrient rich meals a day.  Like Dad calculated it and one of our common meals, which consists of rice, beans, onions, peppers and meat, has about 1500 calories a plate!  I am pretty sure that any healthy kid will gain some weight from eating meals like that everyday.

So Mom being a good mom did lots of research and in June, I think, of 2016 she put what she learned into practice. Removing gluten, dairy and sugar from our diet(diet noun not verb), with supplements.  The afore mentioned meal did not have gluten, dairy or sugar in it.

Back in January 2016 for Bryce's birthday we connected with a family that had tried to adopt these kids before us, but thanks to stupid doctors and social workers that did not happen.  The reintroduction of these good people into his life caused the resurfacing of painful memories from his past that caused an increase in his display of Food Maintenance Syndrome behavioral tendencies.  Bryce has a poor understanding of cause and effect, however he is very smart and pretty lazy making it nearly impossible to have in the standard education system as he knows they can't make him do anything.

Also I wasn't home for quite a bit of the summer in 2016, for those of you who know me this will be completely shocking!

So we continued with our diet(noun not verb!), monitoring both weight and height to see if we were making progress.  Bryce in about mid August, as far as I think, ramped up those Food Maintenance Syndrome behaviors, he started climbing out the window(He did not use the door because there is a alarm on it per therapist recommendations from a couple years earlier when we still did foster care, if this doesn't make any sense to you, you did not do your homework, look up RAD!!) and going into the basement and pillaging it!

So to prevent this from happening, my parents decided to tether him to his bed, which meant the alarm was not needed and we knew where he was which means everyone can sleep soundly!  Dad put it on the first night and every thing went great, the next night Dad wasn't here and Mom just went to bed, best we can figure he put it on himself, self punishment I guess or something, Bryce has been known to do stuff like that.

But than he cut the tether and hid in the basement, Mom and Dad not knowing the whereabouts of their son decided to call for help(Myself and older brother were not home during these happenings), as it was somewhat chilly, none of his shoes or coats or jackets were gone and Bryce has always had a low body temperature.
He was missing for six or seven hours, he was found in the kitchen(the kitchen is upstairs), somehow he got there without anyone seeing him, everyone thought he was outside as the house had been searched be my family and several police officers.  People showed up from all over, they even had a helicopter!  I got home that night.

Two days later a DCF(Department of Child and Families) investigator showed up with a sheriffs officer, as social workers can't actually do anything without the police, to investigate us, Mom let them in, DO NOT EVER DO THAT!!!!!!!

Two days later they came and removed my brothers and sisters from their home and family...

This is void of a ton details and is by no means the end, I will try to fill y'all in at a later date.

Thank you for reading!