Updates on Laurel (and other stuff): November 2008

Too many pictures of Laurel's party...

I realized, I didn't get the beginning when they were picking out their animals, because I was too busy helping Laurel pick hers! She told me definitively that she wanted another dog before we went, but when she saw the cat, she changed her mind. Here Bob explains what happens next:



And helps her to stuff her cat:



Before they sew the animals up, they have a heart ceremony. Laurel's cat got a heart from every girl (as a biology minor I have some problems with that, but I'm trying not to think about it too hard):



Here's Laurel's kitty. Laurel's friend Abbey suggested Laurel name it Lily, and she did. We didn't get it any clothes (although later we got it a cat of its own). We'll go back for those, we were going to do it today but she was feeling kind of crummy:



This is Laurel's friend Kelsey cleaning Lily for her. Kelsey is the friend who went to see Kit Kittredge with her last summer. Kelsey gave her a copy of the Kit Kittredge DVD and the world's softest stuffed monkey for her birthday:



Abbey likes to give hugs a lot. Which may be one reason she says Laurel is her best friend, because Laurel generally doesn't mind:



Here's the whole group in front of the store:



At Build-a-Bear, they sing "Happy Birthday" with a "cha cha cha" between each line:



After some confusion while the signature bear was being passed around, we made our way down to the food court. Abbey pushed Laurel for a while (until she cheerfully announced, "I'm done!"):



As you can tell from the pictures, the Build-a-Bear part went pretty well. The Sbarro's part...well...we got through it. I think Laurel got kind of overwhelmed after a while. By the end of the present opening, Bob had pulled Laurel out of her chair and onto his lap and she still wasn't totally happy. (Not to mention that I had nearly killed him for letting her flop forward onto one of the pizzas!) But this picture was early in the present opening, and she was doing OK then:



So, there it is, our big venture into birthday parties. Laurel said she had fun at Build-a-Bear but not at Sbarro's. (I tried to feed her some spaghetti sauce and frosting there so she could have some part in the eating, but she wasn't having any.) I think in the future I really would like to skip the food part, although otherwise, the 10:30 AM time was good, I think. One of the other moms said she totally thought it was the way to go because she'd been to another party at Build-a-Bear later in the day and it was awful because the store was so crowded. Anyway, I think probably no party next year...don't know about 10...but we'll have to figure a party out for the big one-one when she turns 11 on 11/11/11. Good thing I've got three years to work on that...

Today is both Laurel's birthday and a milestone in our adoption journey.

We have had a lot of discussion, including exploring the available domestic options with our Virginia social worker, and having Laurel's pediatrician look over the special needs checklist (what needs we would accept) for China's Waiting Child program. This morning, with some additional research and a few more deletions of our own, we submitted the checklist to our adoption agency. We decided that we would rather deal with a need that's correctable or cosmetic than to give up on adoption altogether. Waiting the additional three years that it's currently projected to take to get a child through the non-special needs program doesn't feel like a choice to us. The Waiting Child coordinator at our agency told me that, if we were willing to accept surgically correctable conditions (we are), it would probably be just a few months (she said it's typically about three - eek! ). We did put a couple of conditions on it that might slow it down a bit - knowing someone who's had a ton of heartache adopting an older child from China with Reactive Attachment Disorder, we put 0-2 years as our acceptable age range, and we both admitted that we still kinda wanted another girl so we specified that as well. From what the coordinator said, though, it still sounds very likely that we will get a referral in 2009 going this route. If only we could sell our other house!! That's our one big worry about speeding this process up.

Meanwhile, I understand the birthday girl is having a good time at school today! The special ed teacher told me that they decorated her chair, and she got to go down to the Scholastic Book Fair and pick a book out. I talked to the SPED teacher because I wanted to confirm our team meeting for today. I read Laurel's progress reports last night and it sounds like she is still struggling a lot mechanically with her switches, but doing great with the content when they test her using eye gaze - the graph that they sent home showed this big straight line of 100%s! They've been working on identifying continents and oceans, addition and subtraction, appropriately filling in blanks in a story, and states of matter. She got 100% on her spelling test at home last week, too. We're so proud of our girl - we just wish she could have the breakthrough she needs to use the switches, because then she could really use the computer and it would open the world for her...

Well, here's my confessional - I lost it on Laurel last night...

As background, let me say that Bob has been at a conference in Texas since early Saturday afternoon, I've been skirting a cold by living on Zicam, I got to bed at 2 AM Sunday night because I had to provide eight pictures (one for each year of her life) for Laurel's turn as "Star of the Week" this week, only my photo printer wasn't working, went to bed after 1 AM on Monday night because I had to provide a big glob of salt dough (all of the second-grade parents did) so that the kids could make a map of the US out of it, only we didn't have enough salt in the big Morton's canister and I was ransacking every other thing in the house that had salt in it, and finally, that I could tell I was giving way physically last night when I went to lift Laurel onto my lap and collapsed (gently - nobody got hurt) on the floor instead.

So, my tale...like I said, Laurel is Star of the Week this week, and one of the things this means is that she is supposed to take something to share (show and tell) at her class' morning meeting every day this week. On Monday, she took the pictures, and on Tuesday, she took one of her Build-a-Bear animals (actually not the cat - the dog she made at the Brownie trip there still seems to be her favorite). But I needed to know what she wanted to take for Wednesday. I brought this up after we got settled after coming home from her speech therapy, but she was closing her eyes every time I talked to her. I knew she was tired, but she was opening them whenever I wasn't talking to her, so I was suspicious she was avoiding me. I told her OK, she could rest for a while, but she had to tell me before she went to bed. Got to be nearly bedtime (there was a phone call from Bob in there, otherwise I might have started a little sooner), and I said, "OK, Laurel, you have to tell me what you want to take to share with your friends at school tomorrow. Do you want to take another toy? Something you can wear? Music? A video? A book? A picture of something you can't take with you, like Peabody, your aquarium or the house? Something you got for your birthday? Something we've made together? Something in the living room? Something in your bedroom?" I ran through everything I could think of, putting it every way I could think of. Sometimes Laurel gets stuck so she can't turn her head, but I could see that wasn't the problem, because she was looking at me when I wasn't asking her questions. "Come on Laurel, it doesn't have to be your most favorite thing in the world, just something that you like!" "Laurel, when you were little I picked out things for you to take to share, but you're a big girl now and you can pick out your own thing!" "Laurel, we've done this sort of thing other times, like when you had to pick out things to put in your 'Me' bag at the beginning of the year. Why is this hard for you now?" "Laurel, I let you off the hook on your homework tonight, I'm just asking you to do this one thing for me!" "Laurel, do you want me to just write in your book [we have a communication book that goes back and forth to school] that you don't have a share item because you wouldn't pick anything?" The longer it dragged on the more ridiculous I got...I think we were 15-20 minutes into this (and now past her bedtime) when I got to "Laurel, I've been working really hard to take care of you all by myself these last few days, and I'm REALLY tired. You know, you're not easy to take care of. Come on, do this for me!" "Laurel, if you loved me you'd do this for me. Do you love me? [Finally get a look in response to a question.] Good, I love you too, but I'm REALLY FRUSTRATED right now!" In between all of this, I'm running through everything I can think of, over and over. At some point, I called her a name that I'm too embarrassed to admit to - the only thing I can say for it is that she may not have known what it meant. Finally it got to, "Laurel, I'm going to scream now. It's going to be really loud, and it's probably going to make you cry, but I really need to scream right now." And I let out a huge primal scream. Which did cause a pouty face. And I was like, "Fine, Laurel, cry, I don't care." (She didn't.) Then I let out three more. FINALLY, finally, I got her to agree that she would like to take a shirt. Couldn't get her to tell me which one by my describing them, so I went and got about eight. And she looked at me for the Hannah Montana shirt that one of her friends gave her for her birthday that lights up when you move. (She hadn't worn it yet, because it's short-sleeved and I just bought a turtleneck to go under it when we went shopping on Sunday.) At which point I said, "THANK YOU!!! It didn't have to be this hard, you know. I hope it's not this hard tomorrow," and I put her in her jammies and stuck her in bed (she typically gets some cuddle time first, but that sure wasn't happening).

So there's my tale. It's got to be up there with my least fine moments ever. You know, I usually pride myself on my patience, but I think a LOT of it stems from the fact that Laurel has a dad that does a lot of her care too. I typically don't take care of Laurel for more than a few hours at a time. Also, Bob does a lot of the routine stuff like getting her feeding supplies ready to go to school each day, so I can do stuff like print pictures, adapt homework or whatever without staying up till 2 AM. My hat is off to you folks who are parenting single-handedly on a regular basis! I'm so grateful that Bob is coming home tonight. By the way, I called off work today...and slept until 2 PM...and I'm still tired...