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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (251348)	5/28/2014 8:12:47 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542149

Hi Steve. Yep, I'm still around and in good health and spirits, thank you for asking. I quit posting a couple of years back when I started getting involved with one of my daughters. My daughter who lives in Utah decided to become certified to foster infants, and not long after I started flying back and forth to help out because often she would be called upon to take home not just the infant but an older sibling or two. One thing led to another and she started taking in infants and sometimes siblings of drug addicted parents, mainly meth, so I got even more involved helping her. Anything I ever read about drugs paled when seeing the damage that particular drug does to peoples lives....the lives of the addicts themselves, the lives of their bewildered parents and grandparents, the lives of their siblings who often have turned their own lives upside down to try and help, and, of course, the lives of their unfortunate children. My daughter ended up adopting two of the children she took care of, two little girls. One she got as an infant and was her only caregiver except for about 3 months when she went back to live with her mother in a residential treatment center, so this little girl who is now three is pretty OK as far as we can tell now. A little slow on her milestones but she eventually gets there. The other little girl, who just turned 6, was 3 1/2 when she came to live with my daughter and had suffered terribly. In addition to all the types of abuse you might expect, she had pretty much been starved. At the age of 3 1/2 she was 7 inches shorter than the mean, her eyes were recessed and she stumbled when she walked, stopping to sit down frequently, weak. She had a vocabulary of fewer than 50 words, knew no numbers and one color: pink. I guess she had a couple of sentences because she would yell 'Holy Fuck' when she got excited and 'go away' when you tried to change her clothes. Nevertheless, things are going pretty well now and I'm reservedly optimistic for the long term. She grew 4 1/2 inches that first six months after she came to live full time with my daughter and her family. She's now in kindergarten, the shortest in the class but only by a hair, has filled out a little in the face and is very fit physically. It took a lot, and still does, to advance her academically. In fact, to get her to her current level has taken on a daily basis hours of input from family, three sets of grandparents, an older much loved brother, professional therapists, physical therapists and a licensed speech therapist, not to mention rich activities arranged by friends and neighbors. I mean hours and hours, day after day, and week after week. The reason I say this is because I now feel despondent when I think about the numbers of children born into toxic families who then go on into the public schools unable to learn or even behave well enough for learning to occur. You can't catch these children up by giving them a few mornings a week of pre-school or distributing a box of books and toys to their homes. Maybe some, but darned few I'll bet. At any rate, all of this is pretty much over. No more fostering, at least for now, so I'm back to being a normal grandparent and spending more time in Arkansas. Part of me is grateful for the opportunity to be of service and make a permanent change for the better to the lives of two little people. But honestly a part of me hates that I had to see the levels of depravity I saw off and on during those years. God bless the social workers who deal with that side of life day after day and go home to try and sleep at night. Well, enough of the rant. Are you still going at it with John over Krugman, lol. I don't think I've read a Krugman piece in 2 years. I guess he still writes for the NY Times?