When I became a parent for the first time, I was focused on one thing: how can I ensure my precious baby is safe and has everything she needs?
So, it’s no wonder that I feel shocked, sad, and angry when I see or hear about parents who mistreat and neglect their innocent kids.
Of course, there might be reasons behind some parents’ actions, but there’s no justification for a mom or dad who puts their newborn’s life at risk by ignoring their needs.
Luckily, there are amazing foster parents out there who step up and make a difference when biological parents abandon their children.
The story of LeAnne and Eric brought me to tears, and I believe no one could read about what their family experienced without feeling moved.
LeAnne and Eric made the choice to look after a little boy named Easton Matthew, who was affected by shaken baby syndrome. His real parents decided not to feed him because they preferred to do other things, like sleep or go to work.
Fortunately, Eric and LeAnne found out about his situation and began a challenging, emotional journey that would show a wonderful example of unconditional love.
We have been allowed to share their touching and incredible story. I really hope you read it all the way through because I promise – it’s worth it!
The doctor gave me a small, weak, blue baby boy who was just 2 months old and weighed a little over 7 pounds. He said, ‘Take him home, love him, and feed him because, in a few days, this could be a different story!’ For the first time ever, I was scared to bring a baby home!
It was a fall day in 1996 when Eric and I, thrilled to start our life together, said, ‘I do.’ We moved into our newly fixed-up house and started planning to have kids, specifically 2 kids. We always wanted just 2 kids, and that’s what we got… first a lovely baby boy, then a lovely baby girl. By the year 2000, we were a happy little family living the perfect life in the suburbs, just like a fairy tale.
But a few years later, Eric was listening to a radio show called ‘Focus on the Family’ where they talked about raising kids with special needs. Eric felt that we should have another baby. So in 2005, we welcomed another beautiful baby boy, and a little over a year later, we had another beautiful baby girl! Now we were a complete family!
Then the day arrived when we left the suburbs and moved to the countryside. We found a smaller house with plenty of land for the kids to play and explore. Our home was lively and our lives were hectic, but we felt a strong urge to meet a big need in our community. Foster care! Helping children who, through no fault of their own, had been taken away from everyone and everything they had ever known.
But I was unsure. My parents had been foster parents for many years, and I understood the impact it had on biological kids. I realized how much time and attention the foster kids required, which meant less time for me and my siblings, and I worried about how it would affect our own kids, the very children God had blessed us with.
So for two years, we talked, prayed, and researched foster care. We discovered that there were many more kids in the system than there were foster parents to take care of them; and due to the drug crisis, the number of kids entering care was increasing. The need was significant, and after discussing it with our children, we started the classes. In 2014, we got our license for Foster to Adopt, and on the same day our license was approved, we welcomed our first placement of two kids.
Ready or not, we became foster parents.
In February 2017, we had already welcomed many foster kids into our home, and we were seen as experienced foster parents. We had a good relationship with the caseworkers and supervisors at Children Services, who understood which children would fit best with our family. Not every child and foster family is a perfect match, and for a child to do well in care, they need to be paired with the right foster family. One evening, as we were finishing dinner after recently saying goodbye to a wonderful baby girl we had cared for over the past year, we received a call. ‘LeAnne, we have a 2-month-old baby boy who is not doing well. He’s at the hospital, and we want to know if you can take him?’ ‘YES! Absolutely,’ was our immediate response. ‘Thanks, the caseworker will call when he’s ready to leave the hospital.’
That call would unknowingly change our lives forever!
Eager for the caseworker’s call, Eric and I decided to go to the hospital ourselves. When we got there, we were taken to a room where the caseworker was holding a baby. I had never seen anything like him. He was blue! Not the usual pink color of most babies. His skin showed all the tiny veins running through his body. He had no fat on his little bones. His head was huge, and the ‘soft spots’ were very noticeable, plus the seams where his skull came together were clearly visible. He looked so sad. He was tiny, weak, and still, and honestly, he looked a bit like an alien. I know that sounds harsh, but it was the only way to describe it. The caseworker handed him to me, and I felt nervous about holding him, but the moment I did, I realized that Eric and I were going to do everything we could to keep him safe.
My big, strong husband had tears in his eyes when the caseworker started to tell us about his case. He was really hungry. The people who brought him into this world decided not to feed him because they had other things to do, like sleeping or going to work. You see, he had just spent 10 days at a really good children’s hospital where they found out he had Non-Organic Failure to Thrive. NOFTT meant there was nothing wrong with him that would stop him from gaining weight. While he was there, he gained a huge 11 ounces, which showed he could gain weight, but after he left the hospital, things got worse for him.
After that long stay, the hospital arranged for a visiting nurse to check on him every other day. On her first visit, she found him asleep in a bouncy seat. He was dirty, covered in cat and dog hair, and his diaper was messy. The chart that was supposed to keep track of his feedings was not filled out correctly. The nurse asked for a bottle because she wasn’t going to leave until he had something to eat. The biological mother went to the fridge, took out a cold bottle, and gave it to the nurse to feed him. The nurse explained that the bottle was too cold for him and asked her to warm it up. With a bit of an attitude, she said, ‘If he is hungry he will eat it.’ So, the nurse started to feed him the cold bottle to give him some food, and he ate. After she finished her visit, she went to her car and called the authorities. Little did she know, the baby’s nurse practitioner was also calling Children Services that same day.
A female detective answered that call. Being a mom herself, she recognized that what she was witnessing was a life or death situation and quickly took him out of that house. Detective M saved his life that day! She gathered evidence and started a case for neglect. Although she understood that what she observed was certainly a type of abuse, she had no clue about the shocking things we were about to discover.
The night we brought that adorable baby home, we felt really scared. We had just learned that he might die, and without the right care, he would be gone in just a few days! His weight was so low that he was in the .001 percentile on the growth chart. That night, we started giving him love and care around the clock. His tiny tummy could only handle half an ounce of formula at each feeding. So, we had to set alarms to feed him every 2 hours, all day and night. The tricky part was that he could only feed for half an hour because he worked so hard and used so much energy that if he fed for longer, he would actually burn more calories than he could take in. So, even though our first instinct was to let him eat until he was full, we couldn’t, and he wouldn’t.
On the first night, he could barely finish his half-ounce feeds. He was so tired. He slept, and we had to wake him up for every feeding. He never cried. He never woke up to eat by himself. He just couldn’t. That is what failure to thrive means. When a child’s cries for help are ignored, they stop crying. When their hungry bellies aren’t fed, they forget what hunger feels like. Without the right nutrition, they lose muscle and body fat. Without body fat, their little bodies can’t keep their temperature steady. They lose the will to fight, and they lose the will to live. That sweet baby boy had given up, but we were not going to give up on him. Slowly, his half-ounce became 3/4 ounce, then an ounce, and so on.
He had a nurse visit him once a week, and we took him to see his pediatrician weekly too, where he got weighed and checked. We also had to use a baby scale every day to weigh him. He was eating and gaining weight, but something still didn’t seem right. He didn’t have much muscle tone; he felt like a rag doll. His arms and legs just hung down, and he couldn’t control his head, which kept getting bigger. When he did have the energy to be awake, his eyes looked empty, almost like he couldn’t see. He still wasn’t crying or making any sounds at all. During the second week of the nurse’s visits, we shared our worries with her and told her we would talk to his pediatricians about it. She listened closely, and when we finished, she asked if we had ever heard of Shaken Baby Syndrome.
Shaken Baby Syndrome, you know… NEVER EVER SHAKE A BABY! We quickly looked it up online and then called his nurse practitioner. She was on vacation, so we explained everything to the nurse and waited for someone to get back to us with what to do next. That evening, the phone rang again. It was Emily, his NP. She said she had been at the beach, praying and thinking about this sweet baby boy, and she came to the same conclusion. Shaken Baby Syndrome. She ordered an MRI and an Ultra Sound. The same hospital he had been at before would call us to set everything up.
A month after we first held that fragile baby, he had to go under for a big MRI of his large head. Since he was at high risk, he had to stay overnight. We got comfortable for the night, prayed for answers, and waited for the results. The next morning, a group of doctors filled the room. I had never seen so many doctors in one place. They started explaining that the MRI showed blood in both ventricles of his brain (the middle part of the brain) and blood behind his eyes. The bleeding looked like it was from non-accidental head trauma. There was both new and old blood.
Next, they needed to do a complete skeletal scan to check his little body for any breaks or fractures. We waited again for those results and were relieved to learn that there were no injuries to his bones. That day, we talked to several specialists as they began to tell us more about what was coming next. More MRIs, EEGs, EKGs, CTs, appointments, therapists, and more. There wasn’t much time to process all the information because we had to focus on getting more answers about what had really happened to this sweet baby boy and who was responsible. And we had to do it fast because the goal for his case was still reunification. That sweet baby had to have visitations twice a week with people who were likely his abusers.
There are many details we could share with you, but in the end, all those details helped Detective M get a confession. You see, the baby boy was crying because he was hungry. He needed to be fed, but his biological father thought the crying was annoying. Since the baby wouldn’t stop, he picked him up by his rib cage, shook him a few times, and then threw him onto the couch. The baby bounced off the couch and hit the floor. When the Detective asked what happened next, the man said, ‘Well, he stopped crying.’
Then he went on to explain that the baby’s eyes rolled back in his head and he had a seizure. But he didn’t call 911 because he was scared of getting in trouble. And when his wife was told everything, she just said, ‘Well, he gets frustrated sometimes.’ Oh, and by the way, she knew something was wrong with that sweet baby boy but still decided to give him a bottle and let him be. That woman, who gave birth to him, stood by that abuser even during the criminal trial. A year and a half after we first held that sweet baby boy, his abuser was sentenced to four years in prison. Sadly, that baby boy was sentenced to a life with disabilities.
Now we get to the happy part of the story. That sweet baby boy was truly loved and taken care of. He fought really hard. When we brought him home, we didn’t just feed him; we held him too. He was held all the time. During the day, I wrapped him close to me so he could hear my heartbeat and feel my skin on his cheeks. At 4 months old, he started therapies. He had occupational, physical, and speech therapy for feeding. For many months, he couldn’t hold up his head; by the time he was a year old, he still couldn’t sit up by himself, let alone walk.
We were lucky to find specialists who worked hard with us. They told us they wouldn’t say what he could or couldn’t do, but instead, they would let him show us. They explained that the brain is an amazing thing, and neuro-plasticity is a fascinating science that helps the brain heal. Even though he had a TBI (traumatic brain injury) that caused brain damage, the brain can actually reformat itself.
At the age of 2, he was diagnosed with Hypotonic Cerebral Palsy, which is something he will have for his entire life. He also has dysphagia, a condition that makes it hard for him to eat and swallow, so he still gets formula to make sure he gets the nutrition he needs.
He is also dyspraxic, which means his speech isn’t developing like it should. His brain knows what he wants to say, but sometimes his muscles can’t figure out how to say it. He started walking with the help of special braces when he was 2 and a half. Every day, he puts in a lot of effort, he fights through challenges, and he uses a ton of energy just to get through his day. There are days when he feels really tired, so he spends most of the day relaxing on the couch. He can’t keep up with kids his age, but he is still happy! He doesn’t focus on his differences and doesn’t let them hold him back.
He has spent a lot of time in the hospital during his young life. Due to his unique abilities, he is more likely to get sick, and it’s tough for him to recover, so when he does get ill, it can be really serious, and he often ends up in the hospital. He always seems to handle it well, and the hospital staff can’t help but love him because he keeps smiling through everything. He has captured the hearts of all his doctors and therapists. Recently, many of them told us they never thought he would be where he is now. Even though they didn’t limit what he could achieve, they all admitted they didn’t expect him to accomplish much. He has exceeded all their expectations. LOVE and good nutrition can truly change a life.
Thanks to Eric and LeAnne Stadler.
Now, here comes the best part of the story. After many testimonies, lots of tears, countless prayers, and the hard work of dedicated caseworkers, the courts decided to give the county permanent custody of that sweet baby boy. Just before Thanksgiving and his 3rd birthday last year, that sweet baby boy officially became our child. He is now Easton Matthew Stadler, our fifth child. A child that God knew we needed! Many people say he is lucky to have us, but we feel the opposite. We are incredibly lucky to have him. Fifteen years ago, after hearing a radio show about raising children with special needs, we never thought we would be opening our hearts and home to such an amazing little boy who we proudly call our son!
Okay, I usually read these stories and then just go on, but this one made me cry. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.
Thank you for helping that lovely boy! I really wish there were more people like you, and none of the ones who hurt God’s blessings. This world really needs more people like this incredible family!
Wishing many blessings to your family and this amazing boy as he goes on his journey.
