The Final Countdown

Hey everybody.

So, a lot has happened since last week's events, what I like to refer to as "Tetanus-gate." Actually, thats not true, I don't really call it anything other than "the time when I wasn't paying attention and stepped on a nail." However, since the Grey's Anatomy-like drama that unfolded we've had a quite a bit happen: 2 inspections and our final class with our adoption agency. So, here goes.

On Tuesday of the past week we had our fire inspection. We had really been busting our butts to get the house in order to pass not just the fire inspection, but the health inspection as well. To be honest, we weren't all that worried about the fire inspection and thats mainly due to the fact that when I scheduled the appointment the Fire Marshall said "we really check three things, do you have a 5lb fire extinguisher, do you have smoke detectors in all bed rooms and adjoining hallways, and has your chimney been inspected." (Which, by the way, in my last post I ranted and raved about the chimney sweep never showing up. Well, they showed up on Saturday at 5 and got us fixed.) Anyways, back to the fire inspection. So the Marshall shows up at 9am, says let me see your extinguisher, and I open the sink where we have it stored and show it to him. He looks at it and nods. "Let me see your bedrooms."  Off we go to the bedrooms. One by one he presses the test buttons on the smoke alarms, and they all beep a noise that makes you wish the house was actually on fire because there's really no justification for a noise that loud and annoying. By the way, this dude was tall. He didn't need a stool or anything to reach the test button, he just reached up and touched it. So, that took about 2 minutes total, and then he says "did you get your fire place checked?" and I was gung-ho about showing him that yes, we had it checked and if only you knew the drama we had to go through. But he never looks at the form. He just takes my word for it. And then he signs the paper and leaves. It is now 9:06. All that work for 6 minutes. So, I'm kinda ticked/relieved because we did all this work and there was really nothing to it, but at least we passed. However, I really had no idea what the health inspection was going to be like the next day, so my Nixon-level paranoia kicked in and I'm worried that maybe we forgot something and they flunk us. I genuinely had a hard time getting to sleep because I was racking my brain. But I did, and when I awoke I was still a little weirded out, but all that went away about 5 minutes into the health inspection, and this is why: the health inspection lasted 5 minutes total.

Yes, thats right, the health inspection was just as quick as the fire inspection. The inspector lady showed up about 15 minutes early, so its a good thing I decided to preemptively put pants on. She walks in, we sit down, she fills out some info on her form, asks a few questions and then she begins inspecting: she looks in our fridge, she looks in the child's room, she looks in the bathroom. And she's done. That was it. She didn't look to see that we had all the plugs covered, she didn't look in our bedroom to see that we had Fort Knoxed all of our medicine's. She didn't go outside into our backyard where we had spent all that time last week, where we sacrificed life and limb to get that area cleaned up. Oh no. She actually just looked out the back window and said "looks free of sharp objects." And that was all. Part of me wanted to say "oh no no no no no. We did all this work and your happy hiney is going to look at EVERYTHING we did." But you don't want to tempt fate, you just take what they give you and what they gave us is a passing grade. My big take away from this was that there must be prospective foster homes that look like something exploded in their yards or living rooms. And maybe my father in law was right when I told him about all this and he said "its probably that they could just tell you guys had your act together. If they thought you didn't then they'd have been more strenuous." Maybe thats it.

Class.

The final class was actually 2 classes, both Friday night and Saturday. Friday's class was from 5:30-9:00 PM so we left the house as soon as Amanda got home from work. We hauled it to Austin and made it with about 10 minutes to spare. We then spent the next 3 and half hours learning about SAMA training. SAMA, or Satori Alternatives to Managing Aggression, or how to talk down of take down somebody that having a "moment."  Friday night was spent dealing with situations where a person was upset, angry, sad, whatever, and learning how to talk to them to get them out of their current state. This is called "Assisting." I won't go into all the questions and the order in which they need to be asked, suffice to say that it is a lot and we got to do a LOT of practice. It feels very unnatural at first too, to interact with an angry person and to respond in such a scripted manner, but they stressed that this was merely a template and that it could be adapted to fit the scenario. We worked and talked about this the entire time we were there. As class was winding down, our instructor said "don't forget to wear tennis shoes and comfortable clothes since we will be in the gym until 4." Gulp. Yes, she said 4. 9am-4pm. I actually said "did you say 4?" We had no clue. We thought it was just going to be a normal Saturday. Maybe this is God's way of telling us that there is no longer anything like a normal Saturday anymore. And there's one thing that got left out of the evening: dinner. Thats right. We didn't get to have dinner. By the time we were done at 9PM the both of us were ready to kill a drifter for a taco. We were able to get a burger at P. Terry's fairly quickly but we were still starving. Luckily, my wife is a smart lady and instead of driving home that night and having to get up early and drive back she booked a hotel room and we spent the night in Austin. Also, Amanda loves Doubletree and lets be honest, its because they have cookies. 

The next morning we got to sleep a little later since we didn't have the hour long drive ahead of us, so we stopped at the Kolache Factory and picked up breakfast for ourselves and our classmates. Other members of our class had brought doughnuts, coffee, bagels, so we thought we could do it for the last class at least. And its a good thing we did, because we didn't get lunch. More on that in a minute. The first hour of the class was spent going over the "Assisting" techniques one more time, and then we moved onto to placing our hands on each other, and not in the Joel Osteen/exorcizing of demons way of placing hands. No, we learned how to get out of situations when someone is grabbing you, trying to choke you, trying to push or hit. Basically anything that didn't involve a fire-arm. We all went outside or various areas and attempted to choke, hit, push, grab each other and then we used the techniques we learned to get out of the situation. We worked on this until around 12:30 and then they let us break for lunch for half an hour. We decided to call Jimmy John's and have them deliver us some sammiches but they didn't show up until 1:05 and by that time were back in class and starting the heavy stuff: restraining.  We learned a few types of restraints but we mainly practiced two, hug restraints and elbow to hip restraints. We worked on these in the gym and I'm pretty sure I restrained every single person in the class and had them restrain me in turn. Next, the taught us how to deal with the restraint when the child/person goes to the ground. So we got to all do that to each other. Lastly, the made us deal with some scenarios. So a class member would pretend to be a child having some sort of crisis/meltdown and then another classmate would play the parent and try to de-escalate the situation. Amanda got chosen to be a parent so she had to restrain a "child" being violent and throwing a crazy tantrum and she did Ah-mazing. She restrained her, took her down, calmed her. She was a rock star. The class clapped. Now, I know this wasn't real, and that she was actually restraining a 40 year old woman, but she did it and in that moment I could see what I have always seen in her, that she is going to be an amazing mother. She's brave, she's confident, she doesn't hesitate and yet she has empathy in her heart to help those in the times when they are at their worst. I couldn't have been more proud of her. I know she will probably be highly embarrassed by this, but she deserves the praise. And I know that as long as I've got her on my side that things are going alright. All that aside, we actually didn't finish class until around 4:30, at which time we left and drove to celebrate my father-in-law's birthday. We got home around 11 last night. We have done nothing today. I'm such an old man. I'm sore all over.

So that was our week. Next week we have to go back to Helping Hand Home one last time to do 2 hours of observation in their child care facility, so I'm interested to see how that goes.  I can't believe we have done all that we have. It seems like we just started this process yesterday and here we are today and we are done with classes and now its only a matter of time. Crazy.