The Little Things

Well, it’s Monday and it’s been rainy here in our neck of the woods.  On a day like this, it’s the little things that keep you going.  Here’s some of what made me happy today.

Emilia was playing with her doll this afternoon, calling it baby and letting it dance and jump.  Then she suddenly placed the doll’s head against her shoulder and patted its back.  She kept it there for quite a while and gave it a tight hug.  This is the first time I have ever seen her express affection toward her doll like this and my heart skipped a beat when I realized that Emilia was holding and comforting the doll in the same way I do with her.  It was so wonderful to witness her engaging in rudimentary pretend and social play.  Made this mama beam.

Since Monday is salad night at our house and Rex doesn’t go for much roughage, I made him a grilled cheese sandwich instead.  I decided to put about two tablespoons of pureed yellow squash between the slices of bread along with the rice cheese of the same color.  I was hoping Rex would still eat the sandwich even with a hidden vegetable component and he did.  Hurray.

Emilia had the first part of her preschool evaluation today and she did so well.  She showed off many of her skills and was interactive with the people from the school district.  I was very proud of the way she handled herself in the unknown environment with total strangers.  I was less than pleased, however, with what our district offers for preschool, so the chances that we will be sending Emilia there in the fall are slim to none.  However, I still would like to access therapies for her through the district, so the evaluations will continue next week.

During the preschool evaluation, I learned that because of when Emilia’s birthday is we will have a choice to let her start kindergarten at age 5 or age 6.  For me, that’s a no-brainer. Of course, we will start our tiny girl at age 6.  This gives us two more years from this fall until we even need to worry about any formal schooling which makes me very happy.  By then we should have a much better idea about whether she can handle a conventional school setting or will be homeschooled.

One of Rex’s therapists had been out on sick leave for the last two months.  She was very close to Rex at the time she left and today was her first day back in the classroom.  When Rex saw her in the hallway this morning, he instantly smiled his widest from ear to ear, jumped up and down excitedly, and then took Ms. Kyrie’s hand to walk with her.  Of course, Craig and I couldn’t be more thrilled that Rex remembered and recognized his teacher after an absence of two months and that he was able to show his affection for her in such appropriate and adorable ways.

You know what, for a Monday, this wasn’t a bad day at all.  And why should it be when I have such blessings as these in my life?

Orthodox Easter 2013

Happy Easter to the people of Armenia and Bulgaria and everyone else who celebrates this holiday today according to the calendar of the Orthodox Catholic Church.

We were fortunate enough to be invited again to enjoy the afternoon with our local Bulgarian community.  As always, they rented a lodge and brought on the food and fun.

The potluck dinner was delicious and plentiful, consisting of traditional Bulgarian Easter dishes like lamb, rice,  banitsa, lots of salads and sides, and kozunak.

Kozunatzi - more and more of them arrived later

I contributed hummus and tortilla chips (Rex loves that as a snack) and homemade lemon cupcakes.  I told Craig after so many months of GFDF baking, I wanted to concoct something utterly unhealthy and delectable, full of butter, sugar and wheat flour.  So I started with a lemon cake mix, but used butter instead of oil and milk and freshly squeezed lemon juice instead of water which made for some rich cupcakes.  The butter cream was prepared from scratch per my family recipe and I added lemon oil for flavor.  And then I mixed freshly grated lemon zest with sanding sugar to sprinkle on top.  That said, I will never be a good cake decorator because I lack all kinds of patience and don't enjoy it nearly as much as I do the baking.

Fortunately, there's lots of papery help from the store to make cupcakes look scrumptious.

We were so excited to meet our friends, the Van Roekels, at the Easter celebration again.  Their son Nikolas and Emilia were at the same orphanage together, so we are happy to keep their connection alive.  We were so impressed with how much progress both of these little ones have made in the last year.  Nikolas was very protective of and interested in Emilia today.  She also enjoyed his company, but wasn't quite as committed to the relationship.  Maybe she was thinking, "You're a super cool dude, but I have to keep my options open, okay?" Here they are playing:

As always, we felt so warmly welcomed by our local Bulgarian community and enjoyed the food, the dancing and music, the Easter egg hunt, and the company.  Nikolas even performed some Bulgarian songs with the other kids and Emilia danced along.  Wish the weather could have been better, but the wee Martinis were not deterred by the rain:

Our kids did great and lasted three hours at this very loud, very busy celebration, but on the way home, the peanut gallery was quiet:

I think an early bedtime might be in the cards tonight.

It's Crunch Time

Last night, the girl that would not even allow any solids near her mouth a little over a year ago, pushed a chair up to the kitchen island, reached for the bag of tortilla chips, grabbed a few and then:

Hallelujah!

So Much To Do, So Little Time

I know I have been a bit quieter than normal on the blog lately.  It's not that there's nothing going on, but rather that I have been trying to focus my energies elsewhere.  Here are some random things that have been occupying my time.

My completely untidy and disorganized home has been driving me quite nuts in recent months, so I have been working one task at a time to remedy this situation.  I spent most of Sunday digging out our master bedroom (yes, we really do have wall to wall carpet) and washing all bedding in the house.  Boy, it felt great to go to bed last night in a fresh, clean room.  Now if I could only get around to fixing the bedside lamps that Rex broke... oh say, about a year ago, I would be quite pleased.

In an effort to motivate myself to get more organized, I scheduled a garage sale with my neighbors for this Saturday.  I don't have all that much to sell, but I needed a reason to go through each room and each closet and sort what had been accumulating.  Now I just need to get the pricing done by Friday night and set everything up in the garage.  I don't expect to make big bucks with this sale, but instead look forward to feeling relieved of the proverbial stuff one way or another.  What doesn't sell is going to Goodwill.

The kids continue to have a few therapy appointments each week (last week there were four) which is pretty time-consuming.  We also have a lot of extra appointments on the calendar for May, like dentist visits, pediatric check-ups, Emilia's preschool evaluation, and so on.  In addition, I am watching my littlest nephew again two days a week, so being a Naunty is back in fashion and a whole new ballgame now with a talkative almost kindergartener.

The Bulgarian reunion is less than two months away at this point and it seems like every day there's something to take care of for our event, whether it's answering emails with attendee questions, lining up volunteers, purchasing supplies or preparing activities for the children.  If you plan to attend and haven't registered yet, our registration deadline is May 1.  For more information, please visit our reunion blog.

Despite so much going on, all four of us are doing well.  We just wish spring would really, really arrive now.  I am tired of rainy days and windy days and random days with highs in the 40s and 50s.  Bring on the 70s and sunshine, please.

IAC 249 Results

The following referrals were issued in IAC Session 249 which was held on March 21, 2013:

1) Spanish dossier from January 2010 referred a male child aged 2 years and 1 month

2) Spanish dossier from January 2010 referred a female child aged 1 year and 4 months

3) Dutch dossier from March 2010 referred a female child aged 5 years and 6 months

4) Italian dossier from April 2010 referred a female child aged 6 years and 7 months

5) German dossier from May 2010 referred a female child aged 1 year and 8 months with features in health status

6) US dossier from August 2010 referred a male child aged 2 years and 2 months with features in health status and a family history

7) Dutch dossier from December 2010 referred a female child aged 4 years and 3 months with features in health status

8) French dossier from December 2010 referred a male child aged 4 years and 2 months with a family history

9) US dossier from January 2011 referred two female children aged 5 years and 7 months & 7 years and 9 months with features in health status

10) French dossier from July 2011 referred two male children aged 8 years & 6 years and 3 months

11) US dossier from March 2012 referred a female child aged 2 years and 3 months with features in health status

12) Portuguese dossier from April 2012 referred a male child aged 2 years and 2 months with features in health status

13) Canadian dossier from June 2012 referred a male child aged 2 years with features in health status and a family history

14) US dossier from July 2012 referred a waiting child (#983) with a profile on the MOJ site

15) US dossier from October 2012 referred a waiting child (#1988) with a profile on the MOJ site

16) French dossier from October 2012 referred a male child aged 6 years and 6 months with features in health status

17) US dossier from March 2013 referred a female child aged 10 years

18) US dossier from March 2013 referred two waiting children (#1449 & #1578) with profiles on the MOJ site

19) Italian dossier from March 2013 referred a brother and sister aged 10 years and 4 months & 6 years and 2 months

20) US dossier from March 2013 referred two waiting children (#1933 & #976) with profiles on the MOJ site

What's New With Rex

2013 has been a rough year thus far for Rex, primarily because we have introduced so many new things into his life and asked him to cope with these novel activities and situations.  Of course, as I am typing this update, we are at the end of one of the best weeks Rex has ever had where his happiness, cooperation, and connectedness have been overflowing.  We don't know how long this phase will last, but we'll take it.

As you all know, Rex has been gluten-free, dairy-free for well over three months now and is still going strong.  He hasn't really expanded his food repertoire any further, but we are pretty happy with where he is.  Sure, I'd like to see him eat more fresh fruits and veggies, but I am kind of over the whole food struggle thing and try to let him lead the way.  We get his probiotics and multi-vitamin into him most days and he drinks plenty of fluids, so the bases are covered.

About six weeks ago, Rex also started therapeutic listening under the careful watch of his OT.  A fellow adoptive mom explained what it is here, so check it out if you want.  Rex had an extremely strong reaction to the therapy in the beginning with his energy levels dropping down very low for weeks.  He even fell asleep sitting up in one of his 1:1 sessions at school once.  We called the specialists at Vital Links and asked them if this was common and they said that each child responds differently.  They suspect that Rex's brain is expanding its spectrum of arousal to encompass a calmer state that was previously rare for our high energy boy.  They told us that eventually this would balance out and hopefully they are correct.  It does seem like his energy is in an upswing again now, so fingers crossed.  If nothing else comes out of this, Rex has learned to wear headphones to enjoy all of his music, not just the modulated selections, which is a great blessing for parental sanity.

Like Emilia, Rex also started Prompt speech therapy.  Since he has a host of issues affecting his speech development, we don't expect to see the quick progress that Emilia is making, but we still believe it can help him.  Hopefully I will have more to report on that front in the next update.

In school, Rex has mastered a few more of his goals.  He can now match ten different objects to their partners in an array of five and is working on matching objects to pictures.  He has also mastered receptively identifying ten different objects in a field of two and is in process of growing that number to 25.  He can label five body parts, so he's half way there on his way to ten.  He has also learned to identify Daddy, Emi and Mama in pictures.  That said, his rate of acquisition at school has slowed to a certain extent which his therapists believe is due to all of the changes he has had to process so far in 2013.  They fully expect that later this year he will pick up the pace again.

Both at home and at school Rex's play skills have improved and he is working on gross motor stuff again.  Most noticeably, he has become quite a climber and likes to hurdle over the furniture just for fun.  Rex has also discovered how easy it is to climb from his own bed into Mama and Daddy's which means some nights we suddenly have a lovey little intruder slipping under the covers with us and then sleeping very calmly, snug as a bug in a rug, in-between us.  There's something else about Rex that seems to be changing, too, but I can't quite put my finger on it yet.  It's like my mommy radar is picking up a slight difference somehow without quite knowing what it is at this time.

Oh and Rex understands the meaning of I love you.  The way he has recently responded to being told so has shown us that he knows.  We couldn't be more thankful that his heart is right there with ours, full of love for our family and our life.

Where's The Time Gone?

This year has been getting away from me at lightning speed.  I feel like we just got Christmas behind us, but now here we are squarely into April.  Whew, were did those months in-between go?

For our family, quite a few weeks went down the drain due to illness.  We practically spent the entire month of January recuperating from last winter's nasty flu and now we have been sick again for April, too.  Rex started us off at Easter with a stomach thing (what happens in Wauseon stays in Wauseon).  It took about a week to get him straightened out again with eating, sleeping and BM patterns.  I was hit by something different next.  I had no GI symptoms, but was just achy and spent several days going from sweaty to freezing and over again.  And I was tired, so tired.  I could have slept for days.  And now Craig is under the weather, so luckily the weekend is here for him to get some rest.

This second illness in just a few months made me realize that I have not been taking the best of care of myself.  I usually put everyone else's needs before mine which might not always be the best strategy.  So, I am trying to do better, keeping up with taking my vitamins, getting more fresh air, and drinking more water each day.  I am not going to put the pressure to exercise on myself because then that's just one more thing to stress over. If it happens, great.  If not, life goes on.

My mom's visit was another very large and productive chunk of time of 2013, too.  Remnants of her stay still linger throughout the house and I find it hard to believe that she left over two weeks ago.  One of the projects I completed while my mom was here was to put together baskets for a silent auction to benefit Rex's preschool.  We ended up with 18 baskets and raised over $1400 in a week which is a huge and unexpected success and will greatly help the 14 children who attend Rex's preschool.  I can't wait to see some new equipment in the classroom.

It feels really good right now that summer plans are in place.  We are very excited to be welcoming a Swiss teen into our home for eight weeks to help us with everyday tasks and especially with entertaining our kids.  We hope she will have a good time here, improve her English, and learn something about children with special needs.  Vacations have been booked, too.  We will kick off the season camping for a few days with Craig's mom followed by the Bulgarian and Armenian reunions and then a week at the beach.  Right now that seems so far away, but by the time we go, summer will be almost over and I'm sure I'll be wondering about the months slipping away again.

It's weird how time seems to speed up when we get older, isn't it?  When I was little, an afternoon could drag on forever and summer break was practically an eternity.  Now, in the grind of the everyday, sometimes I don't remember the difference between one day from the next (Did my kids poop today?  Yeah, or wait... was that yesterday?) and when I go to bed some nights, it feels like I just got up.

~

How did it get so late so soon? 

It’s night before it’s afternoon. 

December is here before it’s June. 

My goodness how the time has flewn. 

How did it get so late so soon?

~ Dr. Seuss