Episode Transcript
Taunya:
Elena I knew had been born, but I really wanted her birth mom to have some time before she was taken, before we picked her up. So I didn’t go to the hospital right away. I just let her mom have that space. And when she was about three days old, my mom and I went to the hospital to meet her and we found out then that the birth mom had not been up since she was born and she’d been alone. However, the nursing staff in the NICU, because Elena was in the NICU for five days, the nursing staff said they made sure someone was holding her all the time. So they took turns. They took turns taking care of her, holding her, rocking her, loving her.
Cassie Alvine (announcer):
This is “Family Portraits,” a podcast series by Sanford Health. And now, Alan Helgeson with Sanford Health News.
Alan Helgeson (host):
We don’t often hear clocks that tick anymore. Come to think of it really only happens these days if you’re strolling down the aisle of an antique store or maybe watching an old movie with popcorn of course, or listening to an amazing podcast. Seriously, why is time so special? It’s because it’s the same for you and for me. I get the same amount that you do, 24 hours today for a total of 8,760 hours this year.
Now what I do with it, that’s where it can go so many ways. Now today’s episode is about kids. And while getting things ready for this show, I thought about my two kids and when they were younger and how time just seemed to rush by so fast.
Today you get to meet Taunya and learn about her and her husband Todd, and using the same amount of time we all get, hear about how they followed their heart and their calling. (Editor’s note: We are only referring to them and their family members by first name for their privacy.) Today, you get to hear a special story about what it means to be in the corner for someone and to fight for them when they can’t do it on their own. For this story, let’s revisit that time thing again and let’s go back in time. Now I hope you brought some rice to throw because we’re going to a wedding.
(romantic music with man singing)
“Wrapped up in the moonlight. We’re dancing with the stars in the sky and the stars in your eyes. I got a feeling this is a moment.”
Taunya:
Todd and I had childhood best friends that married each other. So we met as I was the maid of honor and he was the best man in 1998. At the time he was married, and I was moving to Texas and in school. It was just a nice guy that I met in this wonderful little event of their marriage.
So three years later, his marriage ended and he asked if I was around and if they would set us up, and they did. And less than seven months after that, we were married.
Alan Helgeson:
When Todd and Taunya got married, they had a family day one.
Taunya:
Todd had primary custody of his 12-year-old daughter at the time. So she has always been with us. So I became a mom immediately. She was sad about her mom leaving and she needed somebody to fill the void. So it was me and we were close right away.
Alan Helgeson:
Life moves quickly and it wasn’t long before their family of three grew.
Taunya:
After we got married, less than one year after we met, we were married with a baby. So Parker came along pretty quickly.
Alan Helgeson:
Two, now four. And then one more makes a full house. For the record, any similarities here and with that TV show are purely coincidental.
Taunya:
Parker is now 22 and Nicholas is almost 20. So that is how they came about. Ashley moved out once she graduated from high school and then it was time for us to start fostering. We decided to foster.
Alan Helgeson:
Becoming foster parents and with young kids still at home.
Taunya:
Oh no, the boys were little. Parker was probably 6 and Nick was 4.
Alan Helgeson:
It’s not a decision that you make quickly, but one that you might know that is meant to be. As was the case for Taunya.
Taunya:
I had always felt a calling to foster. I have always felt like we needed to do something more. It took Todd a little bit longer to feel my calling, but he finally agreed to at least take the classes and see what he thought. So we did. And then he was hooked.
We never wanted to adopt. That was never our goal. We just wanted our children to know in life we take care of others. So we wanted our boys to know that. And we kept the birth order intact. So the boys were always a little older than the children that we brought in. And we usually had babies, and we had 20 different kids within that four years we fostered.
Alan Helgeson:
According to the organization, the American Society for the Positive Care of Children, right now over 430,000 children are in foster care. A child can spend on average between 12 and 20 months in foster care, and children in foster care can wait three to four years to be adopted. With Taunya and Todd, they fostered their children over a few years.
Taunya:
Just four years. There were some that were with us just a week. A lot of them were with us just a week, but we had quite a few that were with us almost a year.
Alan Helgeson:
Quite a whirlwind around the house with kids, school, activities. And then you add on both parents managing to work outside the home, too.
Taunya:
(Laugh). Yes, so (laugh), in fact, when we got our youngest daughter, she came to us at 5 days old. I was back to work the next day with a newborn.
Alan Helgeson:
Now I don’t know about you, but maybe I need to take a break and go get one of those fancy coffees or something because I’m tired just thinking about how Taunya and Todd managed everything. Whew.
Taunya:
You have to be very organized, but I always say once you get to three kids, it’s all easy after that because you have to be organized with three kids. So if you add a couple more, it doesn’t really matter because you’re already organized, so.
Alan Helgeson:
Over a handful of years, Todd and Taunya welcome many children to their home to care for them, contributing pages and chapters to each story of their new beginnings. You know, it’s funny, life can just be moving along comfortably. We’re doing our thing. And then as it happens, oftentimes there’s a phone call.
Taunya:
We received Desi at 5 months old. I received a phone call that there was a baby at the Sanford ER that had been shaken and dropped and used as a human shield.
She was having some testing done to make sure brain function was all good. At that time, we still had another little foster boy at home who needed a lot of attention, but we knew he would be leaving soon. So I went to the hospital, I went to Sanford to the ER, and I picked up Desi and she was healthy and pretty blank-expressioned. But after having her home for a month, she started just perking right up and was smiling for the first time and all of that. That’s when we picked up Destiny.
Alan Helgeson:
Destiny, or Desi. A beautiful little girl needed the care and love of Taunya and Todd’s home. Desi was 5 months old when she came into foster care with them. For the next year, Desi grew in a home around a family with love, but something had changed for Taunya and Todd. They wanted to adopt Desi. What happened, and why now?
Taunya:
Well, Elena was born.
Alan Helgeson:
Elena is Desi’s sister.
Taunya:
So Desi was 5 months old when she came to us. And then her sister was born about a year later. And so that’s when we picked her up, at 5 days old. The girls are 16 months apart in age.
Alan Helgeson:
Elena – or Ley – joined the family. At this point, it’s been about a year since Desi came into foster care and the family was cruising right along with their version of normal, right? Remember when I mentioned how life can get comfortable and then we get that call? Also, sometimes you just need to take a moment and smile knowing there are people that are doing good things when we can’t always be there to do it. Carry that with you today and tomorrow as you hear Taunya and how she meets Elena.
Taunya:
Elena I knew had been born, but I really wanted her birth mom to have some time before she was taken, before we picked her up. So I didn’t go to the hospital right away. I just let her mom have that space. And when she was about 3 days old, my mom and I went to the hospital to meet her and we found out then that the birth mom had not been up since she was born and she’d been alone. However, the nursing staff in the NICU, because Elena was in the NICU for five days, the nursing staff said they made sure someone was holding her all the time. So they took turns. They took turns taking care of her, holding her, rocking her, loving her.
Alan Helgeson:
Baby Elena, Destiny’s little sister, joins the family, a beautiful little girl. But as her life was beginning, there were medical challenges.
Taunya:
She spent five days in the NICU. They were concerned about her heart. They thought they heard a murmur, so they were watching her closely. They knew that her birth father had a chromosome deletion, a very rare one, and that she more than likely had that. She was tested immediately as soon as she was born. She had enlarged ventricles in her brain during ultrasounds. So they were really just keeping her and making sure that all was well before we took her home.
At this point, we still did not think that adoption was even on the table. The girls are both half Native. And so we knew that that would be a long, complicated process where we probably wouldn’t get them in the end anyway. So it wasn’t even an option for us until about a year later when we were asked, “So you want to adopt the girls, right?”
Alan Helgeson:
Starting the adoption process. It takes time and lots of patience.
Taunya:
By the time the adoption happened, Destiny was 4 and a half and Elena was not quite 3.
Alan Helgeson:
Over these days, months and years, the girls were growing. But for Elena, medical challenges grew, too.
Taunya:
Well, while in foster care we have to keep the doctors that the parents had started with, which was fine. We had a pediatrician through Sanford who was amazing, and when Ley was only 18 months old, she was still not making baby noises. She wasn’t crawling, she wasn’t attempting to crawl, she wasn’t eating food, she wasn’t interested in food, she only wanted milk.
And I knew as a mom, I had quite a few children, (laugh), these were not normal and that milestones were not being met. And so she then underwent testing through Birth to Three where they thought, no, everything’s fine. She doesn’t need any extra services.
So we went to her pediatrician appointment and he was amazing, Dr. Duck. And he said, what did they say? When I told him the story that she didn’t need speech therapy or physical therapy or anything. And he excused himself and stayed in the room, picked up the phone and started making phone calls. And he said to me, you’ll be receiving a phone call today. And then she was retested and she received all the services because he took the time to pick up the phone and make a call.
Alan Helgeson:
Here we go again. Another phone call. This one would change things so much for Ley, a world of services began to open up and this little girl began to bloom.
Taunya:
She started speaking. She started crawling. She had a special education teacher that came to the house. She had occupational therapy, she had all the therapies, and she started making noises, baby noises, and moving. It was amazing. It didn’t take long.
Alan Helgeson:
When you have a child that has special needs, it’s hard to truly understand some of what the child goes through and also what parents and caregivers need to do to support and help that child. What can we do? We can learn by listening to their stories. In this case of what it might be like for a young child with a brain disorder.
Taunya:
So Elena has sensory processing disorder, and she was a runner when she was little. So we couldn’t go to a park without her running away, or we’d have to put a backpack on her with a little bit of weight in it to help her feel grounded. I started learning tricks through occupational therapy on what to do to help her. But we couldn’t go to a park. We couldn’t go on a vacation as a family. We tried and found out quickly that that was not, it was not going to work for her. She needed stability, she’s needed structure, she needed normalcy in her life.
So not being able to take Destiny then to a park or the boys to a park, because I couldn’t take, Elena was hard unless I put her in a swing. And then once she was in a swing, that little girl was fine. She loved the swing movement, the movement of the swing. It was something that she needed for her senses.
Alan Helgeson:
As Elena grew, having the right people to help with her growth made all the difference.
Taunya:
She was in early childhood with the school district, and she had an amazing special ed teacher who gave me literature on things. I didn’t know anything about sensory processing disorder. And she gave me information and told me what I could do to help regulate her. And that was when things started making sense. And when I started digging into, we just didn’t know what her syndrome was going to be because her chromosome deletion is very rare. She has a microdeletion on her sixth chromosome. It doesn’t even have a name. Her birth father has the same deletion. So we knew there would be things with Elena that would pop up and we just learned as we went.
Alan Helgeson:
Elena, having a rare genetic condition, Todd and Taunya learned that she may have bursts of aggression that could pop up anytime.
Taunya:
Well, she only made it through two months of kindergarten before she needed to be moved to Horace Mann to the Bridges program. It’s through Boys Town. It helps kids that have behavior issues and learning how to deal with those in the public, that kind of thing. So she went to Horace Mann in kindergarten and she was there through fifth grade.
Alan Helgeson:
There were also behavioral struggles.
Taunya:
In kindergarten, she would go into the bathroom and tear apart everything. All the toilet paper, all the paper towels would be all over the floor. So even just going to the bathroom, she would lose it, let’s say. And things would go flying.
She would run. You couldn’t get her to stay with you. She needed somebody next to her all the time just to watch her because she was a fast little thing too. So that was part of her behavior.
(upbeat music with male singer)
“That the sun would push through the rain and you’ll feel like yourself again one day, so go ahead, feel what you need to feel ‘cause it’s OK.”
Alan Helgeson:
Elena is 12 now. Several months ago, a new diagnosis.
Taunya:
Elena had been going to a psychiatrist since she was little. She’s been on medication since she was 4. And we would go into the psychiatrist every like every six months. He would hang out with us for five minutes, help us with med changes, was great with helping us whenever we thought we needed something to change. And he left. So we needed a new doctor.
It’s very hard to get it into a child psychiatrist. Someone told us about Sanford Behavioral Development, the team there, and we were able to get in and meet with Erin Schroeder. And she sat down with us the first day for an hour and a half and she asked Ley questions and she asked us questions and she just observed Elena in the room. And after about an hour, she looked at Todd and I and said, have you ever thought autism?
And Todd and I had always both known there was something else going on for Elena. We just didn’t know what it was. And because of her genetic deletion, the microdeletion on her sixth chromosome, there are a lot of unknowns, and all the children present differently. So we knew there was something, but we didn’t know what.
So when Erin asked us, I immediately said, no. Todd immediately said yes. And I looked at him and said, “what?” And he said, “We know there’s something.” And as I looked over, Elena was rocking herself in the corner and that’s when I went, oh my gosh, I’ve missed it. And so Elena was just diagnosed at 12 years old – right before she turned 12 – with autism.
Alan Helgeson:
A new diagnosis for this little girl that has already been through so much.
Taunya:
Doesn’t change our family. Everything is still the same. However, I think it gives people an understanding of, oh, that’s why she does what she does. You know, maybe at the school or if Destiny’s friends see her and don’t understand why she acts differently. Well now it has a name.
(soothing music with male singer)
“There’s always room for you here in these arms of mine.”
Taunya:
That chromosome deletion 6q27 doesn’t really tell anyone anything, but autism does.
Alan Helgeson:
So as Taunya says, it doesn’t change anything. It does help to know. So she gets the right care for the things she’s been diagnosed with.
Taunya (to child):
Do you wanna get out the skillet? What’s a skillet? The skillet. Open up the cupboard. OK, the back. This bottom one. Ready? I’m going to lift this one up.
Taunya:
Elena has a chromosome deletion of 6q27, a microdeletion. She was then diagnosed with ADHD, borderline OCD and then autism.
Alan Helgeson:
Getting to the right place doesn’t mean much if you don’t also have the right people you believe in, the people you trust your family with. Taunya and Todd found that for Elena at Sanford Children’s.
Taunya:
Well Erin, now Erin Schroeder, has been great about making sure that we have connections to whatever we need. So after that diagnosis of autism, Elena started occupational therapy at LifeScape. She did that when she was younger and we felt that it had helped a lot and that some of those issues we were really trying to work on, she had figured out, like things had calmed down a bit.
Well now, years later with a diagnosis of autism, now we’re back doing occupational therapy. And it just, it’s helped her learn how to self-regulate. She’s learned some things about her reflexes, kind of tuning back some of those reflexes that we all naturally have overcome as we’ve gotten older. She hasn’t, she’s stuck in. And so those things they’re working on now with occupational therapy. She receives special services at school. She has a special education teacher at school.
Alan Helgeson:
These days, Elena is a busy girl in school.
Taunya:
Elena’s last year was her first year being just mainstream back in her home school. So she’s in a regular middle school. It was a challenge last year, but she figured it out by the end of the year. If things were going well, let’s knock on wood for this year too. But she does have a special education teacher. She’s on an IEP. She has some gen ed classes, but not a lot. A lot of support classes. She’s behind cognitively in reading though she loves to read. In reading and in math, everything’s just a little harder for her. Everything takes just a little longer. Her walking took longer. Her talking took longer. Her education, everything is just going to take longer.
Alan Helgeson:
And as with middle school aged children, there has to be a social life too, right?
Taunya:
She does have friends and a few friends that we have play dates with even – or get together with I guess. Almost teenagers. So we better say get together with.
Alan Helgeson:
Elena, as she’s growing up, and there are challenging moments that come. Through everything in the family there’s one person there that is her calm from the storm.
Taunya:
Todd is her person. As much as I am with the kids more because I’m off in the summer, Todd is her person. And he always has been. He is the one that she walks straight towards. He’s the one that can get her to calm down the best. And when Dad’s around, then life is just a little easier for her.
Todd:
I suppose that I am her safe zone, if you will. Her and I, I guess have some type of a connection where she feels safe with me to like show her true colors. You know when you have kids, you never know which kid’s going to have a better bond with Mom or Dad and it just works out how it works out. It’s nice to have that connection so that I know and she knows that she can come to us or me with anything and we’ll work through it and we’ll move on to the next thing.
Alan Helgeson:
We’ve talked so much about Elena. Now let’s go back and check in on Desi.
Taunya:
She was a shaken baby and she was dropped. We really didn’t know what life was going to look like. And she was given an all clear, but you still don’t know as they get older and having, holding trauma from birth or from that young even, we knew at some point it would probably come out. So we’ve been proactive and she’s had counseling on and off since she was 3. And then now that she’s 13, she’s just decided now that I’m OK for right now. If I need it later, I’ll let you know. But Desi is in all accelerated classes. She’s, ooh, a little emotional. I’m a little emotional again.
She dances in town. She has I think seven dance classes a week. She’s a beautiful dancer and dancing’s her thing. So she’s funny. She’s quite witty and right now she likes me. And I know the teenage years get hard, but right now they’re OK. So I’m just going to cling to that because I know in a couple years we have some hard teenage years coming up and they just are.
Alan Helgeson:
Desi is a bright, beaming young lady with a brilliant smile. She gets to use that smile quite a bit with her brothers and sisters around.
Taunya:
Everything makes her laugh. She loves teasing her siblings, her brothers. She’s just quick-witted so you can say something and she’s going to come right back at you very quickly with something witty. So she’s just, she’s a good kid. She’s a sweet kid.
She loves her culture. She’s had so many people helping us along – we all have – helping us along the way to make sure that she is proud to be Native. And she is. And she knows far more now than I ever thought she would because of people that have been put in place for her. She’s very proud to be Native.
Alan Helgeson:
Elena is getting to an age where she is starting to understand her Native American culture too.
Taunya:
She is, I don’t think that right now it’s as important, but everything takes Ley just a little bit longer. She knows about her Native culture and she’s proud of it, but it’s not the same as it is for Desi. And I think Desi just has it on a deeper level right now that Ley doesn’t have yet. But she will.
Alan Helgeson:
While Taunya can look back now on everything that her family had to learn and go through in getting the right care for their children, the challenges can seem mighty. There is power in the fight for your children and your family.
Taunya:
With the boys, I never even thought about advocating for their health because there was an issue, we’d go to the doctor, and things would be solved. I didn’t know what any of that meant until Elena came.
So I just have to always be pushing for more. At least until we met Erin and the behavior development team, they pushed for us. So it’s nice not having to do that anymore. But I always felt like I was, and maybe not just medically, but even educationally, I just always feel like I have to be ready to fight, you know?
When the girls were little and they were still in foster care, there’s a lot that we as foster parents don’t get to know, are not told or somebody just forgets to tell us. So physically their physical well-being wasn’t always in our hands. It was kind of like whoever at DSS would take care of things.
But once they became ours, that having to always ask for more, always fight or always be on the ready to fight maybe has been something that we’ve always had to do with Ley. I had to research her chromosome deletion and there wasn’t any information. And I had to find out what are the things that could possibly pop up with this deletion and how do we address those? And to make sure that everyone had the same information I did or that I had their information. Just always having to be ready to fight is exhausting.
Alan Helgeson:
If you ask her, Taunya is pretty direct with how to change that.
Taunya:
You find the right people, you find the right doctors, the right place, and doctors that will fight for you. And we have that now. So yeah. (Pause) I’m a crier.
Alan Helgeson:
Taunya and Todd had a calling. They opened their home and their hearts to children, first as foster parents, then to two of those little girls that they later adopted as their own. Todd was pretty clear on why it’s important.
Todd:
It’s not about us. It’s more about the kids. I guess it means that we’re fortunate enough to have a safe place for them. We’re stable enough to be able to provide for them and take care of them. And that’s the reward, just knowing that they’re safe while they’re with you.
Alan Helgeson:
If foster care is something you thought about, there are plenty of emotions to consider and that’s OK.
Todd:
Hesitation and fear is normal. I had both because I just wasn’t sure what it was going to be all about. But as we started the classes, I was more on board and more on board. And by the end of the classes we were definitely ready to foster.
It’s an eye-opener. It definitely makes you more aware of the world around you. Makes you more aware of different situations that people are in, different things they’re going through. And it’s just nice to have the feeling that while the kids are with you, they’re safe. They have nothing to worry about. And hopefully, you know, it does make an impact on their life. Some are too young to realize it at the moment, but you just need to know that while they’re in your care, they were safe. They had nothing to worry about. And hopefully that impacts them in some way.
Alan Helgeson:
Well, we’ve talked about time and how fast it goes, right? We’re already nearing the end of this episode. Now imagine if able to look into the future. What would Taunya want it to hold for Destiny and Elena?
Taunya:
Well, for all my children, because my children are just my children, whether I gave birth to them or not, we don’t say “half” or “step” or “adopted.” We just are. And my hope is that my children are all just happy, that they’re healthy and that they’re happy. And happy means different things to different people. For Elena, she will graduate from high school and from there she will have a job, she will be a productive member of society. She will have a sense of belonging and purpose in her life. And that’s all I care about.
(upbeat music)
And that’s the same for all of my children. I just want them to be happy. They don’t have to be the most successful or make the most money. That doesn’t mean anything to me as long as they’re happy.
Alan Helgeson:
A story about a family welcoming kids who needed to feel loved and over time, two little girls needed them. Foster care, adoption, medical challenges – all are what make Todd and Taunya’s large family special, or I guess I should say normal. After all, what is normal anyway? When looking at where they’ve been and how far things have come for their family, Taunya and Todd are stronger today because of what they’ve been through.
Taunya:
I just think it’s really important that people search until they find the right doctors, the right team – because really it is a team – to search until they find the right people. And you know when you know, like when you know when they’re the right ones, when they’re the ones advocating for your little one, or they’re the ones that will take an hour and a half of their day to make sure that they learn who you are. I mean, those are important pieces. Or people who will hold a baby who isn’t theirs because there isn’t anyone else holding it.
(soothing music with female singer)
“I think I want hold you.”
Taunya:
Those are important people to have in your corner. Whew.
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Posted In Children's, Emergency Medicine, General, Parenting, Rehabilitation & Therapy, Sioux Falls, Specialty Care
