David Matthew

Ok, let's get a start on the posts on my baby brother. We will need to go back in time to the 1960's and 1970's first.

My mother gave birth to her four natural children in the space of four and a half years. My oldest brother was born in 1965. When he was 18 months old, my second brother was born six weeks prematurely. He had a blood transfusion at birth and was very sickly. When she took him for his six week check up, she discovered that she was pregnant with my third brother. What can I say, my parents were frisky! LOL He was born six weeks prior to the second boy's first birthday! Now they had three boys under the age of two and a half!

The largest age gap between kids is between myself and that third boy. I was born when he was 22 months old. They had planned to have at least eight children. But because my mother was 25 years old, with four kids under the age of 5, her body could not handle another pregnancy. There were other factors, if memory serves, but that one always sticks out in my mind. Needless to say, she was devastated and wanted more and more babies.

Fast forward to 1972. I was three years old when we got our first foster baby. That was the start of over thirty years of taking in foster children. Some we had for a weekend, others for as long as two years. We remember them all fondly. We have hundreds of photos and my mother kept records for a while. She had a notebook with a photo and a little write up about each child. After 90 kids, she could not keep up with it all! LOL

The ones we had for long periods, she always sent away with a book of their own, full of their art work and photos of all of us together. It was horrible having some of those kids leave. Some were adopted, some were placed back into care and some went back to their families. Over the years, we have had over 200 little sweety pies come in and out of our home.

As my parents got older, they went back to just babies. Easier on them. No more toddlers getting into everything and needing to be potty trained, etc. They had some "special needs" kids and that ended up being what they really loved.

In February of 1992, my parents got a call that would change our lives forever. There had been a little boy born with Cerebral Palsy and all kinds of other disabilities. He apparently had not much in the brain area and was thought to be blind, deaf and would be a "vegetable". The doctors said he would not live past his first birthday. His parents had three sons and did not feel like they could handle all of this one's special needs. We were always sad that anyone could make a choice like that, and did not understand. But as the years went by, we were grateful every day that they did make that choice and WE got to have our home and family blessed by that angelic little boy.

I wish I had an early photo to share. All the baby pictures of him are not digital of course and we don't have a scanner. Not a working one, anyway. I am hoping to post a slide show to share on here one day soon, perhaps within another post on him.

That is all I can do for now, can't see the screen anymore.