Praises & Frustrations

Today is a day of mixed emotions. Let's start with the good!

The good news is that Miss M has fallen right into a great schedule, and life is a lot less chaotic than it was a few days ago. On Sunday night, I read several articles on this blog. These two, in particular, were life-changers for me this week:

Getting A Consistent Schedule

Sleep Training - The Four S's

She's fallen right into a great schedule that leaves out a lot of the stressful guesswork and gives me some good time to get things done. She's also sleeping much better at night. Two nights ago, she slept for about 6.5 hours straight, and last night, she slept for over 7! She's only woken up once both nights!  You go girl!!

This would lead you to believe that I, too, have gotten a lot more sleep, but that would be a false assumption. We're dog-sitting right now for my husband's sister, and two nights ago, he woke up in the middle of the night whining and howling. We put him in his crate downstairs, but our walls are so thin that it hardly made a difference. Then, last night we had a terrible thunderstorm with tornado sirens. My dog went crazy on us and paced back and forth panting for over an hour - terrified of what was going on outside. We just went to sleep despite her concern, but a little while later, she woke us up by having a nice accident all over the carpet. I'll spare you any descriptives. After the hour it took to clean that up, we went to sleep and my sister-in-law's dog again began to whine and run around. About an hour later, Miss M woke up for feeding. By the end of the night, my husband and I were just doubled over on the bed laughing out of sheer exhaustion!

But I digress, the real frustration revolves around our plans to go visit my family in a neighboring state. We had planned for a while to do that last weekend, but the court refused to give us permission to do so. We were bummed, but we made a plan to go this weekend instead. Today I found out that, yet again, we probably will not have permission. The need for permission to leave the state was something we were aware of, but we had been told that "it's usually never an issue to get permission to go out of state." I've learned by now that "usually" doesn't hold much weight in the world of foster care. I can't wait until the 18th, when Miss M will return to court, and we will have some answers and some finality about what's going to happen in her future.