That Explains a Lot

As I sit here beside the Princess, who would rather sit on a chair for two hours (we're not there yet but that's how long she held out on Ken yesterday) than admit the truth that she hit Connor and go to the park, I figured I would get a head start on today's post. 

I talked with Patrice yesterday.  I felt like I needed to let him know what was going on in his hotel after his staff, thinking that we had all gone to the park, came in to clean the bathrooms and found Diana and I sitting on a bed that was completely stripped of it's linens and all the curtains pulled back out of reach.  She wasn't currently crying or yelling but her eyes said that she had been and she was shooting me daggers.  To their credit, they did their best to cover the confusion on their faces when I told them that it was perfectly fine for them to go ahead and do what they need to do, that Diana and I were just going to sit on the bed and not get into their way. 

Anyway, when I stopped to talk to Patrice, he told me that he has seen it all before.  He had a family from Switzerland who adopted a boy that would bite anyone that touched him.  He knows how it is.  He is a great man for many reasons but this reason is a big one in my eyes.  I told him how and what Diana was doing.  He knows that she gets so upset that she breaks stuff (I'm trying my best to make sure it's her own stuff she breaks and not his) and he still is positive towards her and our adoption.  I'm sure we are not the first family with a child that does this and he still welcomes families into his hotel and treats them like his own family.

Ugh, I've been trying for three paragraphs to tell you what I found out.  Here it goes.  In Colombia, the substitute parents are just that.  When they take a kid into their homes, they know that they will be leaving.  They act more like pampering grandparents than parents.  It is evident that the girls especially have gotten to do whatever they want, eat whatever they want, and go where ever they want.  No one has told them no... or corrected them when they misbehaved because they knew they wouldn't have to put up with it for long.  Or maybe it's because they knew what kind of life the kids had come from and the think they are doing them a favor by spoiling them.  I'd like to believe the latter.  They are 'parenting' this way--and I use that term lightly--because they think it's what the kids need after a rough beginning. 

Anyway, it explains a lot.