Not again

My heart is breaking for my 3 kids at home right now.  They have been enjoying being able to play outside in the neighborhood without a ton of drama from Akila.  They have played outside all afternoon each nice day until bedtime, except for homework time and meal breaks.  But things have changed slightly, again.

I have written many times about our next door neighbors.  There is a girl with FAS who is fairly low functioning, she has now turned 18.  She left the home last April after one of many episodes over the years, which included my kids.  Imani had been outside playing with this girl and her younger sister.  The younger sister got jealous, and the two sisters started arguing.  The older sister got mad and went into a rage.  I ended up having to help, it was a very ugly situation.  I had a TV thrown at me, she tried to attack her sister as I was chasing her, it was not pretty.  The police were called, and she went to the hospital.  It was at least her 20th time at the hospital that I knew of.

Shortly after that, she went into a crisis home.  The county has been struggling to find the right group home placement for her, she is very hard to staff.  She was in the crisis home for over 6 months, as they tried to find something.  Then she had an incident on the school bus which landed her in the hospital again, without the possibility of her going back to the crisis home.  She moved home two weeks ago.

Imani told me several weeks ago, right after Akila left, that the younger sister said the older sister was going to move back home.  Imani said she was nervous about this, and made a comment about how hard it is, now that we finally have some peace at home, and that now she would have to face this stress.

The sister came home, but she has a lot of services.  She is receiving staffing through the State Operated Services program of the state of MN, which is evidently what is used for the extremely difficult.  She has a minimum of 2 staff working with her at all times, even overnight.

The challenge is, that when Imani plays with her once, the girl gets obsessed with playing with her and expects to every day.  I recommended to Imani that she did not play with her, to not set up an expectation.  Supposedly, next month her group home will be ready.  Well, this didn't work.  Imani and the kids played with her two days ago.  After awhile, she told her she had homework (she did not), and came in for the night saying that the girl was getting really bossy.  I know, I should be proud of her and happy about that she played with her, but I know the girl too well.

We were at Imani's volleyball game yesterday, and when we were coming home, the girl was in our front yard waiting to play.  Imani and the boys did not want to play, and begged me to park in the back of the house so they could avoid her.  I did.  But once in the house, they were dying to go outside and play.  They did, and after awhile, they came running inside saying the girl had a angry look on her face.  They stayed in the rest of the night.

I know that she should be moving next month, but I also know how things get delayed.  I am just sad for my kids who were starting to be able to recover, and play freely.  I have thought about talking to the next door mom and seeing if the staff could put a limit on her time when she plays.  It is one of those things where if they let her play for 30 minutes, it would work.  It is after this amount of time that it always goes south and she ends up freaking out.  But I know her well enough, to know that for them to try to get her to stop and do something else after 30 minutes, would probably not work.  She gets stuck really easily, and it is her way or the highway, which I know all too well.