Research....research....research

I'll never forget leaving that first SAT meeting and thinking that the teachers were asking for help and I needed to do everything I could to educate myself and then share that information with them.

So, I started by calling our adoption agency to see if they had heard of similar challenges from orphans from Russia. Our social worker was very nice and referenced their own children and how they had been able to help them. However, I didn't really feel like the challenges we were dealing with was anywhere near what the school was seeing. Everything was so....vague. I asked if they had received calls from other families - and the answer....no. Next, I called the adoption agency who did our home study. The social worker there who has met Jackson was very, very nice and reassuring. She referred me to one of her staff to visit with me about attachment disorder. I kept saying, "he doesn't have difficulty with attachment otherwise he would have never attached to us NOR his new brother and sister." And, so, with that, I waited for the return phone call. And waited....and waited......

After many nights of tears, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I began researching the following terms: orphans, institutionalization, autism, sensory integration, reactive attachment disorder and even fetal alcohol disorder.

The more I read about some of the disorders, I thought that maybe Jackson had a few symptoms of several of them. However, the one that really stuck out for me was sensory integration disorder. I'll blog more about this later. It was clear to me from what I read that Jackson had every behavioral and emotional reaction to not being able to cope with sensory input. Further, it was very common for children who had been institutionalized to have this diagnosis. And, in my head, it made a lot of sense - after all, we had limited the environments he was in for the past 4 years. Where did he thrive? Small groups, in-home, quiet, etc. Where was he known as the "naughty child"? School settings where he couldn't process the information.

YEAH - we were finally onto something!