December 22, 2007
All right, I admit
now that I’ve gone over to the dark side.
Doing that typed letter last year was just too darned easy and so
I’ve been sucked down into the temptation to do it again.
It’s been a jam-packed year, anyway.
We started off with a bang, or maybe more of a sawing noise, as
Laurel had surgery on her leg on January 8 in order to put her partially
dislocated hip back in place. It
went well and she was feeling good and back in school within a week –
and then two weeks later her leg fractured, right above the metal plate.
Took her back to the hospital, had to get a different cast that
kept her from bending at the waist (now THAT was fun), and three more
weeks in the cast. Thought
that getting the cast off would mean the end of our troubles, but not
hardly – turned out after a total of six weeks in casts, she was
SCREAMING every time we moved her – and that went on not just for a
day or two, but for weeks. Also,
her immune system was way down and she was catching every bug that
looked at her cross-eyed. It
wasn’t till the end of May that things were pretty much back to normal
with her.
Starting to feel like we were getting our feet back
under us, we took our cat, Jenny, to the vet, only to discover that she
was hyperthyroid and would need to be given pills twice a day.
Whee.
In June, we discovered that the therapeutic dose of
the pills made the cat stop eating and dry heave.
We decided that we would rather spend gazillions of dollars on
iodine treatment than watch her slowly starve to death from
hyperthyroidism. We spent
more gazillions of dollars on testing; she was deemed a worthy
candidate, but they found a mass on her lung x-ray. We don’t know what it means, but turns out we couldn’t
afford to do anything about it anyway, so we are just going to have to
hope that it means nothing. In
better news, she came through the treatment just fine and her first set
of post-treatment tests went well.
In a few more weeks, we’ll finally be able to throw away the
currently-still-radioactive box of cat litter we’ve had to save from
her first weeks home. Yep,
we oughta pop open the wine for that event.
In July, I finally got to my New Year’s
resolution of making a decision once and for all about what to do about
making our house accessible. I drew up some ideas and we had a contractor out.
She said it would cost $250,000 - $300,000 to do everything I
wanted (which involved some other stuff like remodeling the kitchen and
bathrooms and adding a screen porch as well), and $150,000 - $200,000
just to make the house accessible.
Later in July, we got a realtor.
In August, we put in an offer on a house.
It was a nice big ranch house that would need some work to make
it accessible, but not as much as ours (part of what’s killing us with
this lot is the topography). It
had a screen porch, gardens with lots of potential, and an enormous
basement. Best of all, it
was within walking distance of Laurel’s school!
But the bad news
So off we went on our vacation.
We were not able to get Laurel into the program in the San
Francisco area that we’ve taken her to for the last couple of years,
so after lots of soul-searching (I really wanted to go to Yellowstone,
having promised myself a nice trip with some of the money I inherited
from Mom, but
became
too afraid of wasting the money if Laurel didn’t do well) and research
we hit on the Berkshires and I found a nice rental house for amazingly
little money. It was
something of a good-news/bad-news trip – the good news was that Laurel
loved the butterfly conservatory (I’ve since ascertained via eye gaze
– my usual way of communicating with her at home, looking toward me is
yes, away is no – that butterflies are her favorite animal), the bad
news was that she got severe stomach pains and we had to leave; the good
news was that she enjoyed the bike with the carrier for her on the
front, the bad news was, except when it went over bumps and she shifted
and the strap cut into her neck. And
so on. Overall, though, we
rate it as a successful effort at a “regular” family vacation –
the first we’ve tried to take in a long time.
Fall went well for us.
Laurel has done wonderfully in school this year – we think a
lot of the improvement is because she really was in a lot of pain, which
the surgery ultimately did fix. The
staff at school have just been raving about how hard she’s working and
how well she’s doing with choosing between two items and using her
communication book, and they have blown way past her IEP goals in terms
of the concepts they’ve been able to go over with her and determine
through her correct choice-making that she’s mastered.
She has also been able to spend much more time with her class,
which she has said via eye-gaze is her favorite part of school At home,
she has been able to do most of the homework her class does as long as I
can boil it down to two choices. She
is still confused by adding larger numbers and I can’t tell exactly
how well she can read (although I’m convinced – and she insists –
that she can read some words), but overall, we are incredibly impressed
with our girl and how much she understands given both her limitations in
taking information in and the sheer fact that she does still miss a lot
of class due to all the therapy she does.
Now that the special ed teacher has pretty much run through the
preschool/kindergarten stuff she was doing with her (not that I blame
her, now that they are finally communicating with Laurel of course they
needed to establish what she knew) and has moved on to doing a more
parallel curriculum with the regular class, that should help even more.
We also put a contract on a lot this fall that we
thought would be great. With
Laurel’s team finally communicating so well with her, we decided that
no way were we taking her out of that environment, so staying in the
elementary school district became very important to us.
Turns out there aren’t many lots in this district, especially
halfway affordable ones, but this was a pretty cool one, three acres of
woods full of dogwoods and mountain laurels and a stream at the bottom
of the hill, and easy to get to from the main drag through town.
If only it didn’t involve an “architectural review board” (ARB)
with a man who would do Scrooge proud.
We had settled on a design that was a modification of a modular
home plan – I did a lot of the modifying myself in one feverish
evening. Didn’t really
think it would give us any trouble with the ARB – the covenant (it’s
a tiny 17-lot one-street subdivision that has exactly two houses so far)
didn’t seem particularly forbidding and the builder we’re working
with had already built one of the two existing houses.
But we did, as a precaution, put in the contract that the ARB
would have to approve our plan before we closed on the lot –
and a good thing. They sat
on our plans for a month and then came back to us and said that the
house didn’t fit with the character of the existing houses (all two of
them), and it needed dormers, a steeper roof, more expensive siding, a
bigger porch, and a two-car garage.
We gulped but agreed to the $14,000 (plus an amount we never did
find out for the siding) for the porch, roof, and dormers, but drew the
line at the $29,000 for the garage. Since we’d have to fill part of it with a wheelchair ramp,
it wouldn’t even be all that useful to us.
Our real estate agent went back to them with that counter-offer,
but they said no, if it didn’t have a garage it had to have something
garage-sized because otherwise the footprint was too small.
We realized fairly quickly that the footprint was only 200 ft2
smaller and three feet narrower than the spec house down the street, and
our real estate agent got us a face-to-face meeting (it’s hard to
believe now that it was only yesterday – it feels like a lifetime ago)
to discuss the issue. We
actually got a pretty quick concession on the garage issue, had to
endure a bunch of nitpicking over the porch roof and the angle of the
main roof, and got worried when the member of the ARB who turned out to
be the one with the issues – who is both a) a relative of the seller
and b) the guy who built the spec house, and is starting another one –
insisted that we had to install complete, mature landscaping immediately
upon completion of the house, but we mostly thought we were moving
forward to another round of review.
Then suddenly out of nowhere, Issue Guy said, "Wally [that's
the seller], you said when we started building these homes that you
wanted homes in the range of $500,000 - $650,000.
Do we think that this home will sell for that much? Because you
know, if we let in a house that is worth less, it'll drop the selling
price of the other houses in the neighborhood."
I tried arguing that plenty of research indicates that this
isn’t true, but he shut me down, and it came down to the realtors
looking up prices of comparable houses and the ARB was supposed to get
back to us yesterday afternoon. Well,
got to be 8:30 PM today, and Bob and I decided enough was enough.
We are walking away. This
is like playing Calvinball where only one guy gets to make the rules. We think we may have found another lot anyway (not quite as
cool or in quite as plummy a location, but not bad and still in the
school district), but not having to deal with Issue Guy (quite possibly
for years on end, he will be on the ARB until every lot has sold) =
priceless. We are ready to
enjoy the rest of our holiday season without lot angst.
In
other news…Unfortunately, our adoption is actually moving in the wrong
direction. The Chinese have
been processing dossiers so slowly, that the projected time for us to
receive a child is now Summer 2010!
Deciding what we want to do about that will be a task for the
coming year. I did succeed
in following through with my other New Year’s Resolution for 2007,
which was to get Laurel on a Medicaid waiver; that has helped us out
some financially. Bob
hosted his first workshop in West Virginia in November, which went well.
And I wrote a proposal for a federal grant for my office for
$150,000 over three years to integrate environmental and transportation
planning, and we have received preliminary word that we will likely get
it. Finally, Laurel has
joined the Brownie Scouts! She
was enthusiastic to join after being told about it, but is not totally
sure about it now that she has found out how much Brownies shriek.
She’s sticking with it for now, though.
That brings the news up-to-the-minute…we are looking forward to going to Minnesota for Christmas tomorrow and wish you a wonderful holiday season and safe travels!