and Carl IS leaving on 3/20. He doesn't know that yet. It's a matter of whether a judge will send him home, or if DYFS will find a treatment home for him. I don't think he should go home. His lawyer's investigator will be here on Tuesday and she doesn't feel strong about him staying out of his house, then I'm either going to write a letter to the judge or show up in court. This kid has problems. He is certainly responding and certainly getting better--but there really is no way we can provide this level of effort to help him long-term. That's a therapeutic level of care and we have two other kids to consider. We're not set up for that. And we've told him as much.

Manipulative? ALL pre-teens and teens are manipulative. It comes with the territory. But man--this is ridiculous. And you can't even fathom how far he takes it. Then, when it's not working, the fall is really hard. Yesterday, I thought I might actually have to call Mobile Response and have him removed right then and there. I had never seen him so angry in the 3 weeks since he's been here. Matt actually had to get off of a conference call (on a Saturday--so it was an important call) to work with him. The thing is, you can't just do whatever to calm him down. He can't think that he can pull that kind of behavior and get what he wants. We have to work through it. Otherwise, the behavior never changes.

But we are ready for him to leave. We both feel horrible about the fact that we are literally counting the days... but we are.

In the meantime, I saw a beautiful little African-American boy on another state's adoptive photolisting. We were both nervous about adopting outside of our race (we're Caucasian) and the more different a child looked to us, the more worried we were. Part of it WAS us and whether or not we'd be able to look at that child and think it was our own; but another part of it was Matt's family. I'm Caucasian and 1/4 Italian and I am still an outsider. I'll never be one of them. How would it be for a child who was dark-skinned AA? But we both saw the picture and the description and neither of us really cared. He was just beautiful. He's also undoubtedly taken since the profile only marked some speech issues and NOTHING else. We would take more issues, he just doesn't happen to have any per the profile. Of course, the profile doesn't always tell you--but often they give enough info so that if you can "read between the lines", you know there are at least issues even if you don't know exactly what they are. This child had none; but that could be a novice profile writer.

Right now it's just Cookie and I... enjoying the silence. Matt took Graham to karate (he's now a level higher due to his January birthday) and Carl went with them to get out of the house. They're late coming home and I'm hoping that means they got Graham a haircut. I can pray, at least.