A Piece of History...

The other day, I happened to be in Manitou Springs for a playdate with a great group of ladies that I met at the park recently. It was a very fine day, a great time was had by all, and as I was leaving with the girls I spied my water bottle sitting on the seat, empty, and thought "I need me some spring water."

If you haven't been to Manitou, get your butt up there and try the spring water. Seriously, not just one spring either. Start at the far end (Memorial Park) and work your way all the way up to Soda Springs and out onto Ruxton Ave, trying each spring you come across. There's a bunch of them and each tastes just a bit different, due to their different mineral contents. It's a fun time, and you may find a favorite. Mine is "Twin Spring" on Ruxton Ave. It's basically the furthest one west, and it's got a great taste to it. I love it solo, but it makes a killer Manitou Lemonade, too. (Manitou Lemonade = Country Time made with spring water)

Twin Spring also has the added benefit of being a stones throw from my favorite B&B, the 1892 Victoria's Keep. When I was heading out to my favorite spring, I decided to swing by my favorite B&B and drive by it nostalgically. When I was driving by I was surprised to see a yard sale in the front yard. Immediately, I knew I had to stop by and get something.

Sure, it's pretty, but the breakfast is even better...

This B&B is not only an amazing place in a fabulous location with the best breakfast ever, but it happens to be something of a cornerstone to the Lauren and Nick love story. After we had been dating a couple of months, we had a spontaneous overnight there in the Royal Chambers. Talking rapturously about old Victorian houses, we discovered a mutual desire to buy and fix up an old house. I vividly remember talking about how great it would be to fix up an old Victorian and thinking "Could I do that with him?" It was the first time I thought of Nick as maybe being someone I would have around for a long time.

We came back to the same B&B, the exact same room, Valentine's weekend of the next year and it was there, sitting on a trunk at the end of the four-poster bed, that he proposed. He arranged for a beautiful bouquet of lilies waiting in the room when we arrived. When we were married in June, we returned for our honeymoon. We left the wedding and went straight to the B&B without changing because, by this time, the manager, Sheena, knew us and we thought she'd want to see the fancy duds. We were right. Before Mera was born we came back again, and Sheena was thrilled to see my growing belly. At breakfast she would bring us into the kitchen and joke that we were around so much that we weren't guests anymore.

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to go back since Mera was born... just too busy with the kids. Even more unfortunately, that yard sale was being held because the Victoria's Keep is closing it's doors.

After picking TJ up from school, we made a run by the yard sale to see if I could snag something for Nick as a surprise memento. I didn't realize they were shutting down, I just thought a bit of memorabilia might be a fun gift. But when we walked inside and almost all the furniture was on sale the realization hit me and I am not ashamed to say I very nearly cried.

Still, there's a bright lining on this yucky cloud. First, there's the fact that this business was not taken out by crummy economic conditions. The owners are moving into the summer rental business and converting the main house back into a single family home because they want to be able to travel and not have the responsibility of a B&B. But the real cool thing about it is that we were able to score a beautiful four-poster bed, the identical twin of the one that was in the Royal Chambers, for just $75. We set it up today and, for a sentimental sap like me, there's something truly magical about sleeping every night in a bed from the place that we fell in love, got engaged, and celebrated our marital vows.

Our new bed... minus all the romantic frillies and the nice bedding...

Today we brought home a piece of our own history, and I'm so glad we got that chance. I would have been very sad if I had simply found out months later that the B&B was shut down. This way, we get a piece of that magic for our whole lives. Plus it's a gorgeous bed for a stupid cheap price.

Test Results

Today the neurologist's office finally called me with the results of Geri's chromosomal analysis... sort of. The first round of test results have revealed that she has some extra genetic material. However, these results really don't necessarily mean a thing. Many people who are well within the range of normal have extra chromosomal material. It could turn out to mean precisely nothing in terms of her abilities and future development. So, now they are conducting a more in-depth test to figure out the exact impact of this extra stuff.

Honestly, I'm not terribly surprised. The girl has congenital heart and eye defects. She has GERD. She may have had a vestigal tail (there's a scar that implies she might have had one removed) and her head is a little mis-shapen. Obviously, something happened here. Maybe the funky genetic material is what caused all these physical abnormalities and that's what we're seeing. Hard to tell, but it's nothing to get scared about. Not until she starts levitating or her eyes go white and a tornado takes out the house. We'll be watching carefully when she hits her teenage years for any X-men style developments.

In the meantime, she is learning and developing SO fast. Just tonight she hit a major milestone in the feeding department by eating an entire meal in a booster seat. Translation: NOT in my lap. That's huge, truly huge. And amazingly convenient, too! She has started potty training. It was her idea, I kid you not. She saw her sister sit on the potty seat one night and started demanding it. "Goppy, goppy," she says. In the morning she waked with a dry diaper almost every time, and when she's dressed we take her to the bathroom and she pees in the toilet. She sits on it probably 4 or 5 times a day, and uses it typically 2 times. She helps pull up her Pull-up and her pants afterwards. She has figured out how to remove her shoes and socks. She makes the hand gestures for the Skinna-ma-rink song and tries to sing it with me. She knows where my head, eyes, ears, and hair are. I think she also knows shoulders and toes. If I'm too slow at responding to her requests for "this little piggy", she simply does it herself. Her gait is improving, and she refuses to ride in the stroller now. In fact, she insists on pushing it and sometimes gets mad at me when I try to help her steer!

This kid is a sponge, and she wants to learn how to do everything. Well, almost everything.

We still have a lot of ground to cover. Chewing eludes her at this point. Her speech is not terribly clear. We know what she wants and what she is saying, but people outside our family would probably not know what she is saying at all. She's terrified of her little sister. She continues to lack flexibility and resilience.

Yet, she's come such a long way in such a shot period of time that I can't help but believe that she will overcome these hurdles, too. She's a fighter, that's for sure.

Enter Cuddly

Nick and I have set a lofty goal for the sixth of June.

On that day we celebrate three years of wedded bliss/insanity and I want a date. A real date. No kids. Hell, if I see anyone under 5'4" while we are out I might snap and try to cut someone. I want at least one hour alone with my husband where I'm not fighting the urge to pass out because it's 10pm and I'm exhausted. Carving all of our "together" time out of our "sleep" time gets old.

Of course, nothing in this house can be embarked upon without a great deal of preamble these days, so we are starting the prep work early. We're trying to get Geri ready for separation from us... particularly myself. Lately she has been attaching to us very strongly, and that bond and connection has become very close indeed. It's sort of a mixed blessing, really, because now I can't step 4" away from her in public without her breaking down in tears. At home, I am almost entirely unable to leave the room without her. She wants to be in my arms just about 24/7. It peaked about 5 days ago, and was pretty tough for probably three days, and is now starting to ease up a bit. Still, if we are both going to be out of her sight for any period of time there is going to be a lot of ground to cover first.

Have I mentioned that I adore the book "Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child" by Dr. Patty Cogen? Seriously, I think I reference it about daily. If nothing else, I find a lot of reassurance in it's pages. Best of all, I get a lot of great ideas for everything that we face.

I could go very deep in depth about the stages of separation and the concept of scaffolding and such and such, but I'm going to stick to the application portion for the sake of brevity. Our plan for being able to go on the afore-mentioned date starts with a "cuddly."

The other day I made Geri her cuddly. I took a bright printed fleece and make a 12" by 12" square tie blanket. That's it. Two layers of fleece tied together. She seemed to like it immediately. First of all, I made sure to have her sitting with me while I tied it together. She was interested in the process. Then I held her with cuddly between us for a few minutes. Now, cuddly is our nigh-constant companion. When I hold her, I put cuddly in her hands. When she cries and I comfort her, I have her hold cuddly while she hugs me. At bed time, Nick and Geri and Cuddly rock together. Cuddly is there when she falls asleep and there for our wake-up cuddles.

She seems to be really starting to like it. She holds it and kneads it between her hands. The two layers of fleece seem to move in a way she enjoys. She bunches it up and holds it next to her nose while she sucks her thumb sometimes. When I hand it to her she doesn't just toss it, like she does with most soft toys. Tonight, while Nick was rocking her to sleep, she was playing with cuddly and saying my name over and over. She is forming a mental association between cuddly and me. Which is great.

The idea is that cuddly will become a physical reminder of me. She will touch it, smell it, hold it and be instantly reminded of mommy. It will, hopefully, become something of a suitable sub when mommy isn't available. Eventually, she will outgrow cuddly and be able to call me to mind without a tactile reminder, but that's a long way off I figure. In the meantime, we have something that will give her a much-needed reminder when she feels upset.

We're introducing it now because we want to get this thing established well before the next phase, which is practice separations starting in May. Hopefully, a whole month of constant cuddly presence will be enough to root the thing in her mind. I'm thinking it should be, since she's already responding to it. I honestly expected it to take longer just to get to this point.

In other news, tonight she sat next to me in the booster seat and ate some spaghetti. I can't explain how HUGE this is. She has NEVER eaten when she wasn't in my or Nick's lap. It allowed some great eye contact practice, too, which was nice. After she was full, she even stayed in the chair and engaged in some very focused play with me and TJ. It was a nice development and I hope it keeps up.

TJ is doing much better in school. Nick spoke to his teacher and she said that her statement to TJ about the video games was about him talking about them in class, not about him playing them at home. Nick wasn't entirely sure about what she was saying, honestly, and then she brought it up to me later and she completely contradicted herself about it. Sigh. I don't know what to make of this chick. Two more months, we just have to last two more months.

Mera is a little nut who wants to wear her new Snow White dress EVERY DAY. Such a cutie pea.

A New Low...

Not content with simply badmouthing my son to me daily, his teachers have now stooped to a new low - undermining me to my son.

First it was the teacher's aide, who made comments to TJ about his lunch containing "junk food" and telling him that he should bring only fruits and vegetables and water in it. It bothered me that the teacher was talking to him about it instead of bringing it up with me, but I let it go because by this point I was intent on simply getting through the rest of the year without any more dust-ups and I didn't want to be that parent who complains about everything. TJ and I had some great discussions about what is junk and what isn't, and about moderation, so I just let it slide.

Today, when I was picking TJ up, his teacher leaned in close to him and spoke to him very intently. I couldn't hear her (I was on the phone but I was actually trying to listen at this point, it appeared that she was trying to keep me from hearing her) so as we walked away I asked him "what was that about?" and TJ replied "Miss Lulu said that I shouldn't play violent video games at home."

Those of you with weak stomachs may want to avert your eyes...

I asked him why she would be talking to him about that and he replied "I was talking about Star Fox and how you shoot the icicles and the robots with lasers and she said it was too violent."

I have a huge problem with this and tomorrow I'm going to raise some hell. If she has a concern about the media my son consumes at home, then she needs to speak to me. He does not make the rules in this house, we do. That's like complaining to the inmates about how the prison is run. It accomplishes nothing... except to undermine my authority in my own home by attempting to set household rules behind my back.

He's not your child. This is not your home. Do you disagree with the way I'm raising him? Tough. Unless I'm abusing or endangering or neglecting him, it's none of your concern. And if you think allowing him to play Star Fox constitutes abuse then I invite you to call DHS. I'm sure they'll get a good laugh out of your call before going back to dealing with the drug addicts and molesters.

I'm all for cooperation between parent and teacher, but that doesn't mean the teacher calls the shots in my home. And attempting to call the shots behind my back isn't cooperation in the slightest.

And that's completely ignoring the fact that Star Fox 64 (the closest recent version to the original 1993 version that we play with him) is rated "Everyone" by the ESRB. For crying out loud, it's 16 bit anthropomorphic woodland animals flying space jets against robots, walls, and the eventual cube with monkey faces on it! Violent? If that's overly violent for her than the world must be a damned frightening place.

IDK LOLZ NOMZ NOMZ

I have been recently watching another mom at church go through some tough parenting decision-making lately, and I'm actually feeling like I understand what she's going through. I'm at the very beginning of the exact problem that she is currently mired in, and I just know that I'm headed for the same place as her. She's being torn between the opinions of therapists and physicians on what appears to be a sticking point in pediatric care... Ankyloglossia

For those of us who don't speak doctor, that's a tongue tie. Another term, which you may have actually heard before, is "tight frenulum." Here's some more info from the medical experts ... here. 

This is what Geri's tongue does when
she sticks it out... she looks part snake...

Geri has a tongue tie. It's pretty severe, I'm thinking, because it makes the tip of her tongue appear forked and there's a deep groove in the middle of her tongue. Her feeding therapy team seems to think it might be bad enough to be impacting her speech and ability to chew and swallow. Her pediatrician, however, seems to think it's a cosmetic issue. 

Here's the situation that us poor, hapless moms are thrust into. We're stuck between a therapist and a pediatrician. One tells us in our feeding/speech therapy sessions that this tongue tie has got to be clipped, that it needs to be corrected. The other tells us, during regular office visits, that the condition really only affects nursing and if the child is eating solids then all is well. If we go and see an ear, nose and throat specialist (ENT) then the message is "I can't guarantee the surgery will help with anything." 

What's a mom to do? We've got one expert telling us adamantly to get this condition corrected. We've got another telling us not to bother. We've got a third refusing to guarantee results but talking about putting our little ones under general anesthesia, which always sounds ominous. 

Dear therapists, docs and specialists - please find a way to agree on this without putting us parents in the middle. See, we're not experts here. Sure, we can do our research online but that research is just going to reiterate all three of your viewpoints and leave us with nothing more than what we started with. Being stuck in the middle of your disagreement feels a lot like being a little kid whose parents are fighting - I don't understand what's wrong and I don't know how to fix it. I feel powerless and confused because the people who are supposed to know what to do appear to, well, not know what to do. My mom friend said today, half jokingly, that she'd like to stick all these experts in a room together and make them argue it out. I actually envisioned a cage match, where one of the three emerges sweaty and bruised and gives the orders to some nurse who scurries off to make it happen... or not happen, whatever the case may be. 

When our kids have a problem, we want to fix it. It's part of being a mom. We're looking to you to tell us what we need to do. So get your crap together, hash this junk out, and give us a way ahead. 

Or, I swear, I'm building an octagon in my backyard. And then won't YOU be sorry!

Catchup!

I know, it's been a while. We've been a bit busy, so here's a madcap roundup of all of our adventures!

Starsky and Hutch? That's my undercover cop on the left...

SAVED!!!

Tajee: That's what Mera calls him. It gets me every time... He's been doing really well. We're switching schools next year. In the meantime, his school had a disco dance and his costume rocked. We had a rough patch at school, and I'm counting down the days until this year ends and I can internally flip off everyone there and get out of dodge. His teacher and I no longer speak (because I had to ask the principal for help with the rapidly deteriorating situation between us), they tried to expel him two months before the end of school for his vaccines being a bit out of date (over one shot... at the end of the school year... makes NO sense to me), and the teacher's aide from his room has been making snide comments to him about the food we pack him for lunch (never mind that she ran into us in the grocery and made snide comments to me about what was in the cart... 4 packets of Ramen is not only not a big deal, and not the only darned thing in the cart, but also none of your business). His principal was supposed to observe him in class to figure out whether he was having a real problem, but since I haven't heard any findings from him two months later, it's safe to say that he's blown it off. In spite of it all, my little prince got an awesome report card. He's doing great in everything, reading above grade level, and apparently a "delight" in his gym and art classes. Karate is going well and last night he read all of "Go, Dog, Go!" to us at the dinner table. And he was baptized this Sunday!!! Hallelujiah!!

A true artiste really explores her medium

Mera: Welcome to the terrible twos. Holy crow, this is the most stubborn child alive. When she hits someone she refuses to apologize, and her refusal can last through a 45 minute "time-in" with daddy. When prompted for the apology she actually yells "NO SORRY!!" at the top of her lungs. sigh. But she has such a sweet side, she adores her big brother, and she is so danged smart. She is finally sleeping through the night more often than not. Her hair is crazy long, she's cute as a button, and I am thoroughly wrapped around her finger. She's starting with the potty, and tomorrow is her first day of part-time daycare. We needed care for her during Geri's therapy appointments, and she needs the socialization with kids her own age. Oh, and next Wednesday is her second birthday. Where did those two years go??

"Hello, gorgeous!"

Geri: Wowie wowie wow! Since she started at the Anchor Center, Geri has made leaps developmentally. She is starting to walk independently. She can easily cross a room, pause, change direction, all of that. She can sit on a "big kid" swing and kick. She crawls now. In gross motor, she's really more scared than incapable, but her confidence grows daily. The Anchor Center has been such a powerful force for her, and this week she starts one-on-one PT so I'm stoked.
She babbles a lot, and her speech is expanding. Here's a list of her words
mama, daddy, doggie, up, down, please, amen, kick, bye bye, hiya, eat, hungry, yummy yummy, pee-pee, potty, walk, no, moo, hee-haw, cup, play, outside, try, thank you, toss, ball
That's 26 words... in a new language... from a previously non-verbal child... in four months!!! It's amazing. Granted, her enunciation stinks, but we can understand her words now. And she clearly understands everything we say.
She's like a sponge, and she imitates us all the time. Her newest thing is wanting to look into our mouths while we eat. Sometimes she does it when we're not eating, just checking our teeth I guess. Me and Nick joke about her becoming a blind dentist!
Emotionally, the bond with us is growing beautifully. We have to cuddle in the morning or she throws a fit. When she gets upset I hold her close and tell her to "hug your mommy" and it's working. She calms down quickly that way. She is curious about other people, and she tends to be a bit "touchy", but I think that's her visual impairment rather than an attachment problem. She touches other people and then comes looking for me or calls for me. Sometimes I still have to remind her, and it appears that women of a certain build or appearance throw her for a loop. She remembers the orphanage workers, and she seems to "recognize" anyone who fits their mold. But I just remind her that she needs to stay with mama and she is happy to come back for a cuddle.
She's still scared to death of her sister, although she does accept the occasional hug or kiss without complaint. She tenses up, but no fit.

My LEAST embarrassing pic...

The Commish?

Mom and Dad: We're missing each other, but generally doing fine. I was sick for, like, forever with this horrible viral thing that turns bacterial around day 8 and lasts about 3 weeks. Fun. Poor Nick was stressed by worrying for me and trying to keep the kids going while I was incapacitated. But I'm well on the mend now, and it seems to have made him and Geri closer. Our anniversary is coming in June, and we're already making plans for how to phase in the idea of a sitter for Geri so that we can have a date for the big event. I'll have to share those plans so that I can tell you later how miserably they failed! ;) jk We're still very much in love, we really lean on each other to get through the rough stuff and we celebrate together when it all comes up aces in the end. As it always does, because God is so very good.

Gator and Oakley: Poor dogs. Mera beats them, I ignore them, and daddy is too busy to walk them. They get food and water, soft places to sleep, treats and such... but no real leadership at this moment. As a result, they are becoming rather naughty. Sometime, soon, we'll have the energy to truly meet their needs... I hope.

And when Daddy is available, he makes them play dressup... poor guys

So that's about it. We're still here, still standing, and I'd say we're starting to move from survival to flourishing. Which is a very nice change of pace.

Saved!!!!

I am so excited I could just bust. Tonight, at bedtime, my son asked me if he can be baptized! I told him that he can definitely be baptized, and we talked about what baptism means to us. Then I led him through the sinner's prayer. My son, just tonight, officially accepted Christ in his life and asked Him to be the Lord of his soul!! My son is saved!

I've been praying for this since the day I was saved, and I'm so excited and happy that it's here. Honestly, it's earlier than I thought it would be. And yet, not a moment too soon!

The cutest part, in my mind, was hearing him say, over and over again, that he has God and Jesus in his heart. That he always has them in his heart. That he wants to live the rest of his life with them in his heart always. That just takes my breath away.