Pictures from a past life

We recently received a CD of pictures from when Grace was with her foster family. There are well over 100, plus photos of the city and surrounding areas. It's a valuable record of her life before she came to live with us. These are just some of the best ones that we wanted to share with everyone.

Welcome to work at LaSalle Bank this morning. You are now Barclays of London! No, wait. Make that Bank of America!!! Hold on, hold on, now we're Royal Bank of Scotland!!!! That's what it's like for Dave to go to work these days. Nobody's sure what will happen in the end. We're just hanging on for the ride and hoping for the best.

Since we've been back from Florida, Grace has made even more strides in her speech. She's added several new consonant sounds and is producing her known words more and more frequently and on command. Her therapist was pleasantly surprised at how much progress she had made since we saw her last. Along with the progress she is making in the speech department, comes "progress" in the sibling rivalry arena. Basically Grace and Lily can't be left alone in the same room without WWIII breaking out. Each of them is just lovely on their own; happy, joyful, playful, but put them together and the scenario usually goes like this: Grace makes noise, Lily whines about it, Grace makes noise even louder, Lily whines louder, Grace goes over to Lily for greater effect, Lily grabs whatever Grace is holding, Grace hauls off and hits Lily and pretty soon everyone's crying. It's a lovely scenario that plays itself out many times a day in our household.

So usually I try to go and get Grace and remove her from the situation, like yesterday when I had a raging migraine and was trying to lay down until Dave got home. I took Grace upstairs with me and several dozen books. That was all well and good until Lily, being the middle child that she is now, came upstairs looking for some attention and tried to lay down next to me. Grace didn't like that one bit, hauled off and hit Lily and there we went again. So we're working on a little more peace in our kingdom, and if any of you BTDT parents out there have some suggestions, we'd love to hear them.

Otherwise, all is well and we are enjoying Spring. The tulips survived the blizzard!

Florida...and snow

So, there you have it. A week in Florida. We drove to Amelia Island, near Jacksonville, where my parents are spending a month and very graciously offered up their extra bedrooms to us for the week of spring break. Sun, sand, waves and pools. 80 degree weather and did I mention the sun? We had a wonderful time swimming, playing on the beach, eating out, collecting shells and the like. The picture of the girls standing under the cannon (in case you were wondering) is from pre-Civil-War era Fort Clinch on the island that we had fun exploring one afternoon. We also staged an Easter Egg Hunt on the beach on Friday, since we were going to be driving on Sunday. How often do you get to do that in Michigan?

Now we are home and yesterday we had a blizzard. Not just a little spring snowfall, but a bonafide, dyed-in-the-wool, 35 mph winds, white-out conditions, with an accumulation of about four inches of snow, blizzard. Welcome home. Apparently we were quite lucky to be gone last week, since the weather has been like this the entire time we've been gone. I had to go dig out the kids' snow pants and boots, which I had dutifully stowed away for the summer when the 75 degree weather hit a few weeks ago.

Sophie had her first soccer practice today, to which she wore snow pants, a winter coat, hat, mittens, and the aforementioned winter boots. It actually would have been fun to see them all practice like that. Too bad practice was cancelled...but not before the fathers who were there got to plan out who was going to bring the alcohol to spike their coffee during the Saturday morning games.

I read up on Grace's speech therapy over vacation and feel like I have a better understanding of how we can work with her on a day-to-day basis now. It's really fascinating to see how her brain is going about the process of learning to talk. She's actually at the babbling stage of a younger baby right now, so instead of trying to get her to imitate or repeat after us, we have to try to get her to make as much spontaneous noise as possible, and then imitate her back to herself. There are several other little tricks we've learned, most of which involve Grace making lots of noise, none of which is very intelligible right now. It should work, if it doesn't drive the other kids over the edge first. She is saying "Mama" and "Dada" even in the right context and referring to us when we're not around. She's also making many new consonant/vowel combinations like "la-la," "na-na," and such. From what we can tell about apraxia, her brain just isn't ready yet to hear a new sound and know how to tell her mouth to repeat it, just like a six-month-old can't repeat a new sound, but can produce a lot of spontaeous babbling that eventually turns into speech. We're still confident that by the age of six or seven, she'll be caught up with her peers.

Right now we're all engrossed with the Discovery Channel documentary, "Planet Earth."
If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must find it and watch. There is some jaw-dropping stuff there.

Oh, and for historical reference only, our original group of fellow adoptees, with whom we were scheduled to travel to China, finally got their referrals this week. I've kept track of them on the adoption groups on Yahoo. The trickle of matches has slowed to a pace of two days worth of dossiers coming back each month. At this pace people will be waiting over three years for these girls. As it stands, it's been close to a year since we switched over to the special needs program and petitioned for Grace. She's been home for over eight months now, and had we not gone with her, we would just now be seeing a picture of our daughter, probably traveling in a month or so. It's sobering how long the process has become. Hopefully it will either speed up soon, or if not, it truly means that there are fewer little girls being abandoned in China. Either way, we're very happy for our former travel mates. Many of them were referred very young, healthy infants and they have waited a long time for their new daughters. We wish them all the best.