What's been on my mind...

I'll start with an update and then move on to some things I've been thinking about lately.

We finished our dossier a little over 2 weeks ago and it should be on its way to Russia soon if it isn't already.  We didn't quite finish up as quickly as we had hoped.  Because of the volume of documents, we needed to leave them at the Sec of States office and then picked them up the next week.  All was well and our adoption coordinator had no changes after her review.  This was really great news and if all goes well it sounds like we could get our travel dates some time in March with a trip in April???.  I am over the moon happy about this and hope the timing works out because April is shaping up to be really busy.  So far we have a 10K the first weekend, Nick's birthday party the second weekend and his actual birthday the third weekend.  It should be interesting to see what happens!

In other news, there are two things that have been consuming my thoughts lately.  The first is that I am having a really hard time figuring out how to talk about the pending addition of a brother or sister with Nick.  I think the main reason I'm having a hard time with it is that there is so much uncertainty about timing that I'm worried about setting up expectations with him that could end up taking longer than we think.  I feel like until we meet our future son or daughter, it is less "real" and still a dream.  Nick can get really focused on upcoming events and I suppose my reluctance is for both ours and his sanity.  If anyone has any thoughts or advice on this I would love to hear it.

On the second topic, let me open by saying I really hope this doesn't offend anyone.  I'm just venting and getting things off my chest.  The second thing that I have been thinking about (too much) is my age.  A little background may help give context to my issue.  My mom was 39 when she had me, which at the time (back in the day), was fairly unusual.  But, I was the last of 5 kids with a spread of 18 years between myself and my oldest sibling.  For whatever reason I was very aware that my parents were not really friends with my friends parents and it bothered me (I don't know why, small town...).  In retrospect this was not too surprising, they were 10 - 15 years older than many of them and were in a different place in their lives I suppose.  I chalked up the fact that my parents weren't in the "cool" parents group, to their ages.  Growing up I always thought to myself that I would never be the "old" mom. 

Fast forward to my early 30's and beyond and I realized those things you tell yourself when your a kid are not so easy to control.  Marriage in my 30's, unexplained infertility, and decisions about adoption ate up those precious years and here I am, in my (almost mid) 40's adopting a young child.  So, aside from the normal adoption worries and concerns, I'm worried about fitting in with the other parents.  I know this probably seems silly and superficial to many of you.  I can appreciate that at some level it is superficial, that I should concentrate on what really matters and be happy that I even have this opportunity.  Being a parent and growing our family far outweigh whether I am in the "in crowd" with the moms.  But, this doesn't stop me from thinking about it.

On that note, I will say bye for now.

Making Progress!

During and after our first adoption I was very involved in keeping in touch and following the progress of all my blogger friends.  By Fall of 2009, it had became harder to find the time to blog and the changes in our lives with Bill working/living out of town during the week, coupled with Nick's age and his reaction to the situation made it really hard to keep up so I stopped.  I stopped blogging, I stopped reading blogs (regularly) and I pretty much withdrew from the community.  Granted, I would check in here and there but rarely commented.  I feel guilty about disappearing for 1.5 years and then coming back on the scene.  The good part about it is that I am slowly getting caught up on all the wonderful events that have gone on since I checked out.  So many families have gone back to Russia to build their families and it is just wonderful.  Late last summer, as Bill and I began talking about going back for a second adoption, I found inspriration in those of you that had started the process for a second (or third) time.  Thank you all!

Now, with our homestudy complete in early January, it was time to work on our Dossier.  We received the list of documents from our agency, 65 to be notarized and apostilled.  On our first adoption it took us 2-3 months to pull everything together.  We can't figure out why it took us so long!  This time we set a goal of 2 weeks and almost made it.  We have all the docs in hand and by tomorrow evening everything with be notarized.  Hopefully by Tuesday or Wednesday we'll have everything apostilled.  It feels really good to have this part of the process almost done!

I'm closing with a picture of Nick from Christmas as he anxiously awaited Santa's arrival at brunch.

Here We Go!

I am so excited to begin our second adoption.  If you had asked me 2 years ago whether I could do it again I'm pretty sure I would have said no way.  The emotional toll of our first adoption was pretty hard for me but the good news is that I have forgotten.  And, I'm not going to reread the blog.  At least not now.

We have made several decisions and are pretty deep into the process.  We are going back to Moscow, we have a new Agency (Woo Hoo) and we are done with our Home Study.  The paper chase begins now with Notaries and Apostilles and many trips to the Secretary of States office.  I wonder if they will remember me?

I will write more soon but decided this morning at 5am, when I woke up and couldn't sleep, that today was the day to start the blog up again.  It should be a fun ride! 

Happy Gotcha Day and Blog Bye Bye!

Today marks the one year anniversary of Nick being part of our family! YAY! It has been quite a year and we feel so blessed. Because Bill isn't home during the week days, we will have our family celebration when he comes home later this week. I am hoping to leave work early this afternoon so Nick and I can go for a special after school swim. Then we'll have a quiet dinner together, complete with chicken nuggets and cupcakes (two of his favorites!).

I thought I should post a picture from Gotcha Day last year and then one from this year to see how much Nick has changed.


Gotcha Day 2008 and 2009

I have been really bad about posting lately. I don't want to go into details but suffice it to say that it is the culmination of several stressful personal events that have taken my focus away this summer. The most obvious of which is our recent lifestyle change (Bill's job out of town). It's now been about two months since Bill started his new job (and he loves it) but we are still working through the transition with Nick.

Don't get me wrong, Nick is doing great and thriving, he just misses his Daddy. We talk on Skype almost every night and Nick gets to see Bill, which I think has helped alot. But he continues to cling to me in the mornings and act out when I pick him up. The other slightly upsetting side effect is that he has been really stingy with the hugs and kisses for me. I don't understand this but I'm sure a psychologist could tell me why.

I say all of this because I think its time that I close up the blog. It makes me sad because it has been so great, especially meeting all my bloggy friends out there, and I don't want to lose touch. I just don't think I can do it any more.

I don't know if anyone is even still reading this, but if you'd like to keep in touch, please email me and we can do the email thing, or FB (gasp!), although I've been pretty apathetic on FB too!

Its been fun and take care all!

Scattered...and Nick's Development

My plan this morning was to blog about Nick's recent developmental evaluation, which I'll get to shortly. But I have to open with a little anecdote from this afternoon.

My drycleaning has been at the cleaners for almost 3 weeks. I forgot about it for about a week, and since then haven't been able to find a good time to go since stopping after picking Nick up at daycare isn't usually the best plan. Today I decided to stop before picking Nick up. I go in and while they are looking for my clothes I realize my credit card is in my purse in the car. I run out to the car to get my purse and proceed to search through looking for the loose card. (The night before Nick and I had attended a going away party for some friends and I left pretty quickly after paying because Nick was heading in a bad direction, thus dropping my card in the purse, not in my wallet). I basically unload my bag in the cleaners and my card isn't there. So, I give her my other card. She runs it through and to my shock and dismay she tells me, "It says its cancelled". I think about this for a minute and remember, oh yeah, when I was on my way to Chicago 2 weeks ago and tried to get cash it was denied. Did I do anything about this 2 weeks ago? No. Totally embarassed, I tell the teenager behind the counter that I'll have to leave the clothes because I have lost my card and the other one is no good. I felt so silly, for many reasons, but mainly because I should have followed up on the issue I had at the airport and also, I really had no idea what I did with the card the night before. This type of thing has been happening to me alot lately. This is just one little example. I have about 5 from my Chicago trip, and many more from recent weeks. I'm just wondering when did I become a scatter brain?

OK, back to the subject at hand which is Nick's recent developmental evaluation.

I worry. And after a very concerning language "screen" (I think the screener spent 10-15 mins with Nick), we decided it was time to have a full evaluation of Nick's development. Prior to the screen I thought he was doing great and making alot of strides, but the screen cast doubt on that.

The evaluation took 2 hours and included observation in the following areas: Cognitive, Expressive Communication, Receptive Communication, Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Social/Emotional and Adaptive. There were 3 specialists observing Nick and a student. Basically, Nick played for 2 hours straight with the various toys they provided and he was observed by the professionals. It was slightly nerve wracking for me. I don't think any one is surprised that a two year old will not perform on command. So, of course I worried when Nick wouldn't do the chunky shapes puzzle and when he wouldn't make the sound a cow makes. There are countless other things that he wouldn't do that I knew he could do. It was frustruating. But then he surprised me a few times too. He responded to the 1 - 2 - 3 consequences every time he was on the verge of a conniption and he threaded beads on a shoe string, an activity we have never tried at home.

I had no idea what the outcome would be. My main reason for wanting the evaluation was to make sure that we weren't missing a big red flag and to be sure that he is on track. In order to qualify for services in our county (and I think Virginia) a child has to have a greater than 25% delay in one or more areas, or an atypical development in one of the areas, or is diagnosed with a condition likely to result in a developmental delay.

In the end they "score" the children with the present level of development in terms of age for each area. Relatively, I wasn't surprised by the results of each area vs. the others. Nick had his most positive results in Social/Emotional, Adaptive, Cognitive and Gross Motor, where he was either at or close to 26 months (his current age). The areas where he needs more focus are Expressive Communication where he is at about 22 months and Fine Motor where he has scattered results ranging from 18 - 24 months.

One interesting factoid I picked up from the evaluation team is that it isn't unusual for a child that drools to also be behind in Fine Motor skills. Apparently it has to do with being placed on the back as opposed to the stomach and when a child is on the back they don't develop the strength through the upper body and face that is developed through play and placement on the belly. I hope I haven't butchered the explaination they gave me! Nick's drooling was identified as a potential issue in the original "screen" and it has improved considerably over the past month. But, it is still evident especially when he is really concentrating or if he is stressed out or uncomfortable. They referred to him as having a static face which they explained to me as child that isn't using his facial muscles as much as they would like. We have recently switched to cups with straws which I think are helping his strength. Some other ideas they gave me to improve his facial muscles are to have cotton ball wars on tables (blowing the balls around) and also work with bubbles and pinwheels. We have been working on these things more diligently since the eval.

The result of the day was that Nick does not qualify for services. I was so relieved and really thankful that he is on track. The women who evaluated Nick were so good with him and it was a very positive experience. They also put me at ease by telling me how impressed they were with how well he is doing after such a short time with us. I was actually shocked by this praise but ate it up, of course :-)

Finally, they armed me with many ideas for different activities to stimulate the Fine Motor development and also to increase vocabulary and language. I have to say it was a very well spent 2 hours and I was so proud of how well Nick handled it.

Aside from the developmental news, we are in week 4 of our lives without daddy being home during the week. The best thing we have done to help with the transition is to set up a camera for using Skype for video chats with daddy on most nights. Nick is starting to really enjoy and look forward to talking to daddy on the computer and it is a fun way to feel like we're not so far away from each other.

Have a great 4th of July all!

Outer Banks Trip and More

This post is going to cover a hodge podge of topics because I'm getting stressed about being behind and this is my attempt to catch up!

The most fun thing we have done since Nick's birthday is to spend a week in the Outer Banks. We loaded up Nick, Abby and all the beach toys and headed south packed to the gills. We had a wonderful house that was just a short walk to the beach. The best thing about the walk to the beach was all of the earth moving equipment working on the road near our house. Nick could have spent hours observing the workers. Luckily, we were able to coax him away with promises of the ocean and sand.

The ocean was foot numbing cold most of the week but Nick didn't seem to mind. The morning of Mothers Day was the first day we went down to the beach and Bill and I had to tag team to play with him in the water because of how frigid it was. It turns out that Carey and her family were staying very close by during the same week, and we saw them briefly down at the beach on Mothers Day. We also had the pleasure of spending a few hours together later in the week. We had a great time, Nick loved playing with Carey's children (who were sooooo sweet with him) and Carey and her family are awesome!

The week went by way too fast, the weather was great, and we were all sorry to leave. Here are some random pictures from the week.


Bill and Nick splashing at the pool



Mommy and Nick at the oceans edge


Good Times at the Beach!




Nick enjoying himself poolside


Fun with Carey and Family


Abby watching over Nick

The week after our trip, Nick had a speech assessment. Unfortunately, neither Bill nor I was present for this so we don't know exactly what went down. I will say I am quite concerned about the results and have contacted the early intervention people to have a complete language evaluation done. We hope to have this scheduled as soon as possible.

We have recently started back to our church. We took an extended break to transition Nick to being with us and felt like it was time that we return. We have been welcomed back with open arms but are still very new to the congregation and don't know many of the members. Despite being new, this morning was a special day for us because an Adoption Blessing was said for Nick after the baptisms. It was very nice, somehow I didn't cry, and we are thrilled that we did this. So many people congratulated us and made us feel welcome. One elderly couple told me that in all their years of attending this church they had never seen this blessing in person and how incredible they think it is. How sweet is that?




Have a great week everyone!

Nick's 2nd Birthday!

When I last blogged, over one month ago, I had every intention of blogging about Nick's birthday in a matter of days. Now, more than 30 days have passed and I'm finally getting back to business.

We had a really fun day celebrating Nick's birthday with family and friends. Everyone came over to the house for a cookout and party. In the end we had more than 40 guests, which in the past would have been no problem. But now, with one of us taking care of Nick the whole time, this was quite the undertaking. One thing I wasn't expecting was that Nick would want me to hold him continuously for the first hour (at least, it may have gone on for 90 minutes). I should have realized he would have this reaction to all the hubbub, but I didn't.

The good news is that my friend Anne brought a Nascar Bubble Car that Nick adored and that provided endless entertainment. We also broke out the bubble mower, singing mower and various other toys with bubbles!

Nick also got to spend time with his new friend Harper, who was not only adorable, but did her fair share of mowing the yard!

We had a Thomas cake because he is Nick's favorite, and Nick enjoyed the sugar high!

Above Nick is enjoying the icing on his "2".

Happy Birthday Nick!