Christmas Letter - 2006

I’ve always resisted the idea of writing a generic Christmas letter, instead writing notes of various lengths, but too much has happened this year and it’s not all the sort of thing I feel like writing 20 times.

To begin with, cards didn’t happen last year. I bought the cards, which had an adorable picture of Laurel, and I’m sticking them in this year’s card because I hate that so many folks missed seeing the picture (not that I’m not very fond of this year’s picture as well J).  But, they didn’t get sent out before Christmas, and after Christmas (actually, I think it was on Christmas, but the blood test was afterwards) I found out that I had had an early miscarriage, and I wasn’t in the mood to send out “Celebrate the Season” cards.  Something that I have not shared with a lot of people is that we have been trying to have a little brother or sister for Laurel since before she turned two.  After 3 ½ years of increasing technological assistance, last December we did in-vitro fertilization and had this brief pregnancy.  With its ending, we decided that that was the end of our attempts to have another biological child as well.  The good news is, that we have decided to adopt a daughter from China!  We have completed the paperwork, which went to China on September 1 and was logged into their system on September 26.  Unfortunately, there is currently a long wait for adoptions from China, and it will probably be about another year before we get our referral.  Assuming we do – we have some concern about new Chinese regulations that will be coming out soon that would eliminate us as prospective parents, although we are hoping that we will be “grandfathered” in.  We should find out within the next couple of weeks.

The other piece of news that I couldn’t bring myself to write over and over is that my mother died in April.  After a bout of pneumonia in January (for which I dropped everything, raced up to Pittsburgh and took her to the emergency room), my sister Marie talked her into moving near her in California.  Marie completed arrangements quickly, and Mom moved President’s Day week.  The last time I saw her was on President’s Day.  I was astonished to get the news on April 14, just two days before her 80^th birthday, that she had died in her sleep and been found by one of the staff of the senior living community to which she had moved.  I know she wanted to go that way, so I’m glad for her that she did, but of course the suddenness has made it hard to find closure.  We had not had a chance to do anything with the house in Pittsburgh, either, so that still had to be dealt with and Marie and I spent Mother’s Day and much of that week going through the house.  The last time I saw the house, which we had moved into when I was 6, was on Father’s Day, when Bob, Laurel and I went up for the last load of stuff.   The house closed in October. We still have a storage unit full of stuff that I need to deal with.

In happier news, we went to San Francisco in August (as we did last year), where we stayed with friends for two weeks while Laurel attended a wonderful program for children with cerebral palsy at the Avalon Academy.  The Avalon Academy offers a unique combination of therapy and a school setting.  There is a year-round program as well as a summer program, and I envy the families that are able to send their children there through their school systems!  Of course, moving to San Francisco is not affordable for us, but we have really been enjoying these trips – our friends are wonderful hosts, Laurel seems to find being surrounded by other kids with similar disabilities but who have achieved more as a result of the therapy very motivating, and we also love having six hours a day while she’s at the program to see the sights of the Bay Area.  Because we’ll be trying to save both leave time and money for our trip to China, I’m not sure if we’ll go back next year, but I’m sure we’ll be back again sooner or later.

Laurel has been generally thriving in kindergarten!  We also put her into the after-school program, which we felt rather guilty about at first, but it turns out that she loves the other kids and many of them love her.  Figuring out how to adapt her homework has been challenging, but we have learned that Laurel understands a number of kindergarten-level concepts, including telling time, sorting, identifying words that start with specific letters, and telling the difference between a letter, a word, and a sentence.  The biggest problem has been that Laurel has been in increasing amounts of pain, as her left hip has become partially dislocated, which is making it difficult for her to participate some days.  She is scheduled for surgery January 8, which we are nervous about, especially as she will have to wear casts with a bar between them to spread her legs for four weeks afterwards.  Bob keeps saying he wishes he could just fast-forward to the end of February.  But hopefully it will take care of her pain, and also help with her ability to move that leg, which has been very limited lately.  She has nevertheless been enjoying going into a crawling assistance device (called a Creepster Crawler) at school, so hopefully once she is out of the casts she can really get moving!

Laurel has also been doing well with her feeding therapy lately.  She is learning to drink small amounts of juice with a straw, and starting to eat some things that haven’t been pureed – including, for the first time, her birthday cake!  We have also been taking Laurel to Northern Virginia every 4-6 weeks for Anat Baniel Feldenkrais therapy (which is one of the types of therapy used at the Avalon Academy as well), which we think is helping her get more comfortable in her body and make some of the progress we’ve been seeing.

In other news, well, there isn’t much.  Bob and I are both still working at the same places.  I work 30 hours a week, about 2/3 of that on environmental planning and the other third staffing the Disability Services Board, a responsibility I took on last year.  It’s been a fascinating learning experience, but challenging to get all that done in 30 hours a week.  We have a couple of potential new funding sources in the new year, so although I have mixed feelings about it, I’m mostly hoping to go full time.

2007 will also be the year, I think, in which we will have to reach a decision regarding whether we will try to modify our current house for handicapped accessibility or buy land and build an accessible house.  So you can look forward to that news – and hopefully, some adoption news – in next year’s card!

Wishing you a holiday season filled with love and joy!