When I passed Little J's bedroom a couple of minutes ago I noticed his light was on. His humidifier was also going full blast, even though he doesn't have a cough, and I bet if I looked in his room he'd have his mud boots on, or at the very least an extra sweater - and I’m sure he’s sleeping the sleep of the dead. There have been nights we've peeked in on him and found two or three extra layers of clothing on his body, socks, shoes, and maybe an extra pair of pants on his head.

Little J has done other weird things, too: slammed himself into the walls and the furniture; asked us to spank him and squeeze him; stuck everything into his mouth; and drooled excessively (even up to age 3). I often have thought that he doesn't just sit on the couch, he interacts with the couch. Once he gets ramped up it is sometimes near impossible to calm him down.

My husband and I wondered - what was wrong with the kid? Would he be like this forever? Would we have an 18-year old who chewed on cabinet doors and crashed into walls? What should we do?

The first thing we did was to contact Early Intervention and ask for an evaluation. They said he was somewhat behind developmentally (as would be expected in a child adopted from an orphanage) and his speech was delayed, but what we really needed to do was get him an evaluation for Sensory Integration issues. They suggest we read the book (The Out of Sync Child) to start.

Apparently many children who’ve lived any portion of their lives in an institutionalized setting are at risk for Sensory Issues. If you think about it, many of these kids were enormously under stimulated in their previous environments. Crashing, mouthing, under and over-sensitivity to stimulation are just their brains’ ways of trying to get the stimulation that they didn’t get when they should have.

After going back and forth and asking for more evaluation and hoping he’d grow out of it we finally took Little J to a place called Emerge in Chapel Hill. There he was diagnosed with Sensory Integration Dysfunction. Since he’s over three (and no longer qualifies for Early Intervention) we would have to pay for therapy out of pocket (at $133 an hour!) so we asked for some things we could do at home for a couple of months before we take the leap into full-fledged therapy. They suggested ways we could play with Little J so he could get the stimulation that he needed; they also suggested he should be more engaged in sports. We’ve been integrating all these things into Little J’s life and I’m pleased to say that many of the behaviors he’s exhibited in the past are slowly but surely going away.

I’ll write more on SID later, as I think it’s a fascinating topic and one that all children adopted from an institution should consider when thinking about their children, but here's a great article about Sensory Integration Dysfunction by Harriet McCarthy to start.