A Quick Rant

What do you do with a twelve year old respite placement who starts wetting the bed nightly, one week in?  Here’s is what I do: search through his drawers to find where he stashed his pee clothes and then quick wash the sheets and blankets and put the same ones back on so that he doesn’t know I know.  He and his brother got into a fight over something stupid and his brother said something about him “pissing the bed” and then he hauled off and punched him and that seemed to trigger it.   

I called their caseworker after this incidence of violence and she didn’t call me back.  After two voice mails and FOUR days I called her supervisor and when I finally talked to the caseworker she was clearly annoyed that I had called her supervisor.  Her response to my concern about the bed wetting was, “It isn’t a problem with his regular foster mother.” I mentioned that I had seen a bed wetting problem noted on his medical intake form and she said, “that was at a vacation placement.”  Hello, I am a vacation placement.  It might have been helpful to mention that.  Not that it would have changed anything, because I have no idea how to handle this other than my non-handling of it, but would have been considerate to mention it.  She also did nothing when the older boy got kicked out of his camp program, forcing him to stay home with me all day.   

The boys play computer games and watch weird things on TV all day.  I have to force them outside to play basketball, throw a football, ride bikes, walk the dogs.  I don’t think that I can change their value system of how they spend their free time in two weeks so I wouldn’t really care except that I don’t want my 2 and 4 year old watching TV all day so I have to force them to turn it off. We just aren’t a tv/video game family and I don’t want my little boys who can entertain themselves for hours with popsicle sticks and rocks to sit inside with the TV on all day.  This is one of the reasons why I wouldn’t do a drastically older placement again, because of the things it introduces to my little boys.