September 4, 2007
Odds and ends:
Nothing yet on the house estimate - we were supposed to hear today,
but nothing so far.
I'm so happy to report, I seem to have managed to avoid the cold
(knocking on laminate). Laurel still has an icky cough, though.
I did hear about the cat - the vet who does the thyroid treatment is
willing to treat her, and our vet says it's quite possible that she
could live for years with that spot on her lungs, so we are going to go
ahead and do it.
On the adoption front, for those of you wondering, it recedes further
away every month. China only processed four months' worth of referrals
in the last 12 months. Every month, the projection for when we will get
a baby goes back by several more months, so that now they are saying the
end of 2009!
We are so caught up in the house thing right now that we have decided to
sit tight for a couple of months and see if anything changes, because we
couldn't handle anything else at the moment. But if we get some
breathing space and things aren't moving any faster in China, we're
thinking we will at least look into what it would take to switch to
another country (more money and more paperwork, I'm sure - it's a
question of how much...).
Just a quick note to say that our visit to Laurel's school went very
well today! She was tired when we got there (it being her third therapy
session in a row) and as Bob said, it was clear they were leading her on
some of the questions they were asking her (moving what she was looking
at toward the switch for the correct response). But at the end, they got
into some free choice, and I just had to laugh at the very end at how
quickly she pressed the "no" switch when they asked if she
wanted to do "more" and the "yes" switch when they
asked if she was "done".
Everyone who is working with her is so excited and upbeat about how
she's doing this year! How hard she's working, how attentive she's
being, how much she seems to be getting, how much more mature she's
being. Her speech therapist was nearly in tears talking about her
excitement at finally having an actual "conversation" with
Laurel. We've never seen so much excitement about Laurel - it was a real
thrill.
Oh, and I forgot to say that Laurel's got a new vision therapist this
year who seems a lot more familiar with cortical vision impairment than
her previous one, and she seems optimistic that she can help improve
Laurel's vision further. And her special ed teacher seems optimistic
about teaching Laurel to read. Really, it was probably the best visit to
the school ever! 
News on the house front...
We finally got the estimate from the builder today, and were
disappointed at how high it was - $312,500 not taking into account
modifications for accessibility or including the lot price. The total
with the lot price would be $442,500. That's way off on the upper
end of what we can afford, and again, not including any modification
costs. The one hope here is that they only ran the estimate with the
garage finished off as a room, so maybe if we did it the other way that
would bring the price down enough. We asked the realtor to look into
that for us.
Meanwhile, we went out and looked at a house this morning that almost
works - and it's $310,000, so that leaves us plenty of money to fix it
up. And the necessary fixes would be relatively minor - widen a couple
of doorways and reconfigure one bathroom, replace the carpeting, and
repaint a couple of rooms. There are only a few problems with it:
1) It looks like a freakin' Pizza Hut! I'm serious - the roof is a box
on top, and then it slopes down on all four sides. Bob and I used to
live in an apartment in this neighborhood, and when we went for walks we
called it "the Pizza Hut house" and wondered, what were they
thinking when they designed that?
2) It doesn't have a basement, so storage is limited.
3) It's not in Laurel's elementary school district (but it's REALLY
close, literally within walking distance of the line, so that probably
won't be an issue). It does feed into the same middle and high schools.
4) It has one of those annoying HOAs that regulates everything you do to
the outside of your property. Although, compared to another neighborhood
we looked at, it's not bad. For instance, you just have to tell them
what color you want to paint your house, not provide color chips of all
of the surrounding houses.
Overall, this is probably actually the sane thing to do. It's a nice
open floor plan like we've been looking for, a small but decent yard,
public water and sewer, convenient to things, a nice neighborhood for
walking around. I just wished I loved it more, KWIM?
Suffering from
procrastination and a vague sort of dread...the procrastination is that
I'm supposed to be typing up minutes for a meeting that happened a month
ago, and the next one is tomorrow. The dread is about (in no particular
order) a) the meeting - the last one was kind of a circus and not
exactly my best display of leadership; b) the amount of work I
have to do, and the things I've let slip; c) driving the cat down to
Richmond on Thursday morning, which as near as I can tell is just so the
vet down there can lay eyes on our cat (the thyroid treatment will be at
a later date) - nevermind that our vet has done multiple examinations
and hundreds of dollars of tests at this point; d) the whole house
situation; e) a sense there is no good way to replace the kitchen
flooring (long story); f) getting the house clean enough for my in-laws
to come next week when there is still part of the kitchen sitting out in
the living room and a giant pile of mulch in the driveway; g) Laurel's
seizures getting worse; h) Laurel's chest development getting worse; i)
my upcoming visit to the hand surgeon Friday morning; j) how I'm going
to adapt Laurel's math homework; k) when I'm going to get the laundry
done; l) remembering that I still need to pick another doctor from my
doctor's practice (my doc had to move to take care of his mom) so I can
get my physical updated for the adoption homestudy update; m) oh yeah,
and I have to make an appt for a check-up regarding my antidepressant,
and what should I say about that - frankly I've been kind of depressed
lately, but if I don't appear stable it could queer up the adoption.
So that's what's in my head - it's not a pretty place...
I just had to share this - a short note from one of Laurel's special
ed teachers that she sent me once we got the first "team"
meeting scheduled (all exclamation points are original
):
Boy, does the team have TERRIFIC progress to share!! We talk about it at
all of our special ed meetings just how much Laurel is able to
communicate her wishes to the staff these
days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One bit of forward progress in our adoption...
August 2006 is out of the review room! What this means is that all dossier reviewers at the China Center of Adoption Affairs are now working on September 2006 dossiers, so our dossier should be reviewed within the next few weeks. This is a "no news is good news" thing, so if we don't hear anything between now and when they announce that September 2006 is out of the review room, we'll have passed review! Now, just to keep us from being totally reassured, I understand they kicked a few prospective families out of the matching room on the last round of referrals. But it was a very small percentage of the total, so chances are good that if we pass review we can get a baby from China. We just have to wait...
Laurel's homework...
I'm pretty proud of how we got through Laurel's homework this week,
and also thought you guys might be curious about how that works
(although of course it varies a lot, and sometimes I'm just flummoxed
and have to ask for an alternative), so I thought I'd share my write-up
of her homework. The actual homework (mostly written hand-over-hand with
Laurel - I like to do that even though I know it's not teaching her to
write or anything because I think the kinesthethics are still useful) is
pasted at the bottom.
'We did a lot of improvising with the homework this week! For the
pattern blocks, we got nowhere with the homework as written. What we
finally did was to print the patterns on cards, color the different
shapes (purple triangles etc.), and then ask a series of questions about
the shapes in pairs ("Which one has nine triangles?"
"Which one has three hexagons?") She did well with this except
that I don't think she knows rhombuses from trapezoids.
'For "How Many Dots?", I made cards using sticky dots for the
patterns and first showed her the dots and then two numbers. She did not
do well with this until I hit on pointing at the dots one at a time
(silently) and that really seemed to help her count them. Then we got
through it well.
'For "Dots, Dots and More Dots" I showed her a card with
sticky dots in the pattern shown and then two other cards with dots
(many sticky dots gave their lives for Laurel's homework this week), one
with the right number of dots and one with a number one off (both with
different patterns). I pointed at each dot again and she sailed through
that one! Then we drew the dot patterns she'd picked.'
So there you have it, a week in the life of Laurel's homework (we also
have to either read or have her read - since we don't have a way to tell
if she can do the second yet, we do the first - for 15 minutes every
night).