Sweet Baby

Just imagine with me for a moment holding a brand new baby in your arms, she is so beautiful. She has thick dark brown hair that just stands straight up and she has the most beautiful olive skin coloring. Her eyes are a dark brown and her cheeks are rosy and oh so kissable. She is just tiny, remember she is only a couple of weeks old. You are holding her in your arms and loving every minute of it and then she begins to shake uncontrollably, she pulls faces that tells you she is in pain. She can't get comfortable no matter how hard she tries and no matter how softly you rock her or sing to her, all you can do at this point is hold her and love her through it, soon the shaking will stop and she will be able to rest again for a short while, and then it starts all over.
What you just read is what it was like for us when we brought one of our foster babies home from the hospital, she had been born addicted to heroine. Watching her go through the withdrawals were horrid, but I am so grateful that we were there to hold her and love her while she went through it.
I wanted to adopt this baby more than anything and I thought that her mom should have zero rights to even attempt to try and get her back after what she had already put this baby through, but the judge thought differently. The Judge ordered her mom into a treatment center and said if she could complete so much of the treatment then the baby could move into the center with her. We really all thought the odds were against her because heroine is so hard to get off of, but this baby's mom beat all the odds!  She would be in our meetings with a garbage can next to her because she was so sick and she would have a rag wiping the sweat as it ran down her face, she was just dripping wet. She really looked like death most of the time and she told me "Kim if it weren't for my baby I could not do this, it is too hard, she is the only thing that makes it worth fighting for." When the Judge first made his ruling I was angry with him, but by the end I was very happy that the Judge had given this mom a second chance! This was a great learning lesson for me, it helped me to see that people can change and sometimes they do!