Brynt Jakob is a child with many complexities. One minute, he's as loving as loving can be, and the next, bam! Instant meltdown! You don't know one minute to the next what he is feeling or what he is capable of doing. He's that unpredictable; yet he's our son, and we must learn to live with his idiosyncrasies and deal with them as they come up.
Brynt is six years old, a peanut of a child, with a mop of thick, dark brwon hair that falls in his eyes, a thin, pinched face, a beaky nose, and a scream that could peel wallpaper off the walls, it's so piercingly loud.
He is a beautiful little boy; however, life hasn't been kind to him. He was born to drug-addicted parents and placed into foster care when very young; he's been in and out of foster care. At the age of two, he was discovered to have autism after displaying some of the signs. He is definitely what one would classify as special needs.
It looked like Brynt wouldn't have a family to call his own; then we, the Egggers family of Bismark, North Dakota, took him in after we saw his picture: we were smitten on the spot. We didn't care of he was autistic or had special needs: all we saw was a lonely, sad little boy who was in desperate need of a family/home.
It took only a few short months to get him, from the start of filling out the mounds of paperwork, to the homestudy/interview, medical checkups, and waiting for the all-clear from our adoption caseworker. Then we got a lawyer; it was only a few short months later when he was pronounced to be ours.
Now we are a family; we now have a son we can call our very own.
Brynt is rather quiet and shy, especially around people. People make him nervous, especially if they're people he doesn't know or recognize. Then he will go into one of his famous meltdowns, where it takes both of us to hold him down as he screams as though he is being murdered. Then it's embarrassing; we just smile at the people and tell them he's having a bad day.
Brynt is smart, even with his quirky behavior. He is going into the first grade at the local school for kids who have special needs: we feel that a typical school environment would be much too difficult for him to handle. He doesn't handle change or new situations very well, as we've come to find out.
Well, we are going to go now. Sorry if this isn't much of an introduction to our family, but Brynt sounds like he is ready to go on a tear, and we'd best be ready to prevent any more damage to our house, let alone, our sanity. Take care, and we will write again! Thanks for listening and for reading our story!
~Regards, Jaycie Gopnik-Eggers, Bismark, North Dakota.
