December « 2009 « American Family

Goodbye 2009

This year hasn’t been particularly noteworthy for good or bad things. Since no drama is a good thing, over all this year has been pretty pleasant.

The first thing that happened this year was Mr. A took a new job with better hours (yay) and less pay (boo). It hasn’t been perfect, but having him around more has improved our lifestyle substantially.

The other main thing I remember from this year begin with L’s stomach problems. That drove me to distraction until we finally figured out that she is EXTREMELY lactose intolerant and maybe even slightly allergic to milk too. Now that milk is verboten for her, she is a much happier girl.

Then we decided to sell the house. Despite three full price offers and being in contract not once, but twice, we didn’t sell the house because selling the house made both Mr. A and I total freaks. Apparently, I only posted on my blog twice in June too. Is that possible?

My old friend D contacted me this year. She is the sister of the boyfriend who killed himself. I hadn’t talked to her since he died. That sent me into a spiral of re-grieving, but I am oh so glad we are talking again. We have only visited in person once, but I plan to see her again in the near future. I have missed her all these years.

In the fall, M went to 1st grade and L started preschool. Can I get a big Hallelujah? Four mornings a week, I am all alone. Oh, how it does me such good to be ALONE sometimes.

I have also made some great new friends and gotten closer with some lovely old friends this year. I love my afternoons at the park and monthly pub nights. I am crossing my fingers that we will continue those traditions for the foreseeable future. A group of us are also going to try a sprint triathlon in 2010, so cross your fingers for us.

M started Chinese Club in the fall. So far, it is the best language learning program we have found for her. L has continued on with her tutor and really likes learning chinese…on days when she has taken an adequate nap. Other days, she is a terror in size 2T during her chinese lessons. Their teacher may never want to have children after teaching three year old L.

This year some adoption related things also happened. I briefly considered adding a third child to our family. I have thanked my lucky stars almost every day since that Mr. A dissuaded me from that plan. We are DONE. No more children in this family. Finito. L started processing the loss of her first home and her birth family this year. It is just the beginning, but I can see the wheels in her head beginning to turn. We also finally started actively searching for her birth family after several years of research and mentally preparing. I am very hopeful that 2010 will be the year we find out some answers.

And finally, it seems fitting that are sending off this low-key, not much change year by kicking of 2010 with the very opposite. Today, we signed the papers today to sell our house. We will most likely be renting for a while (maybe until we get back from our 2011 trip to China) unless the prefect house at the perfect price becomes available. (Very Unlikely.)

In 2009, we worked on perfecting the art of no-drama, low-stress living. It is a little bit scary to be heading into the new year without knowing where our home will be, but as long as we are all healthy and safe in 2010, I am sure we will be ok.

Busted.

For Christmas, we gave M a Nintendo DS hand held video game thingy. In general, I think video games are kind of evil, but the feminist in me made me agree to buy one. Over the summer, I kept finding M literally hanging over the shoulder of various boys watching them play their DS games. The image made me flash forward to her future high school years and I don’t want her standing by while boys get to have all the fun.

So M got her DS and a pokemon game to go with it. (She LOVES pokemon.) Once school starts, she will get 7 chips a week that she can trade in for TV or DS time. Each chip equals a half hour.

Over Christmas break, we have been a little more relaxed. The other day, M and I made a 4 hour car trip and I let her play the entire time. She also played for at least 3 hours on Christmas day. Yesterday, I cut her down to only an hour, then I made her put it away.

Last night, around 10:30, Mr. A saw M sprint from her room to the bathroom. He noticed she did not look like a girl who had been sleeping. She looked surprised to see him and said “Uh, when I have to pee, it wakes me up!”

He came up stairs, told me what happened and said “I think M has been playing DS in her room. I don’t think she has been to sleep at all yet.”

I was immediately outraged. Ok, that isn’t exactly true. I wasn’t outraged, I was highly amused. M rarely breaks rules, and the idea of her staying up THREE HOURS past her bed time to play illicit video games was almost unimaginable. I thought surely Mr. A must have been mistaken.

Mr. A and I tiptoed to her bedroom and burst through the door. Sure enough, the DS was on her bed. In the glow of the blue DS light, M was trying to pretend she was sleeping (she had heard us despite our tiptoeing.)

“You are SO BUSTED!” I said, “Have you been awake this whole time?”

“Noooooo?” said M.

“Are you lying?” I asked, “Did you just wake up to go to the bathroom or have you been playing DS the whole time.”

“I was kind of yawning a few times,” said M, “I was almost sleeping.”

“Well, you are busted now.” I told her.

She looked at me, then at Mr. A. “What does that even mean?” she asked.

“You are in big trouble!” I said, “You broke the DS rules. Maybe I will take your DS away for a week! Maybe we will have to cancel your playdate with Annie tomorrow!”

M did not look impressed with my threatened punishments. It probably did not help that Mr. A and I were doubled-over giggling because the whole situation was so amusing.

“Oh, Mom, you can’t cancel my playdate! Think about poor Annie! She will be so confused!” said M.

“We will talk about your punishment tomorrow.” I said, “Give me your DS. I am going to turn this off without saving your game. You know playing after bedtime is against the rules.”

This morning, Mr. A and I discussed an appropriate punishment: No DS today and tonight M has to go to bed very early (6:30) because she stayed up so late last night. We will also keep the DS ourselves rather than allowing someone with such poor impulse control to have access to it whenever she thinks we aren’t looking. If we catch her playing without permission again, I will delete her entire saved pokemon game (a crisis of major proportions!!).

M looked somewhat contrite when we told her the news.

Then Mr. A gave her a lecture about responsibility and trust. I think he said something like “Honesty and Responsibility are the KEY to TRUST. If you don’t have the KEY, we can’t TRUST you and then you won’t have privileges.” She had to listen to that lecture until her eyes glazed over. Then she even more chastised and very bored.

(Actually, I just asked Mr. A to tell me what they said. He spent at least five minutes trying to explain it to me and MY eyes are glazing over too.)

So there it is. The story of the first time M tried to pull one over on us and how Mr. A and I learned that adolescence is closer than we thought.

Wishing you…

From our family to yours,

Wishing you peace, love and laughter this holiday season.

phpzrposIPM

phpzr2ZMnPM

phpTPpRzFPM

phpaeWoVdPM

Ok, that last one doesn’t really demonstrate peace, love or laughter. I just think it is really funny and needs to be memorialized for the whole world to see. Have a very merry couple of days.

xoxo, our American Family

Do-Over Day

Today was supposed to be the day when I finished all my outstanding Christmas tasks. My mom was going to watch the girls and I was going to wrap gifts and finish my shopping. I was giddy at the very idea of such unencumberedness.

Sadly, it was not meant to be. At 9:00 a.m., I found out my mom was sick. Not only was she sick, but she was also babysitting my two nieces today too. So instead of shopping, I ended up picking up my girls and my nieces too. The only good thing about that is I had a fleeting thought about how nice it would be to have a third child this morning. 8 hours with four kids cures me of that notion, let me tell you.

As if babysitting on my day off was not enough of a bummer, in early afternoon, my 6 year old niece crashed out on the couch and when she woke up two hours later she had spiked a fever. I fear that the chances that my girls will both be healthy for christmas after spending the past couple days with my mom and their cousin is almost nil.

THEN, when the nieces went home and I thought I was home free, M totally lost her shit. She devolved into a colossal low-blood-sugar tantrum in which she stomped around for 20 minutes yelling over and over that she DOES NOT LIKE SUSHI! and she DOESN’T WANT TO GO TO HALF PRICE SUSHI NIGHT! and THEY DON’T HAVE CHICKEN TERIYAKI THERE, ONLY SUSHI AND SHE WON’T EAT IT AND YOU CAN”T MAKE HER!!! (Which is completely false. They DO have teriyaki chicken and about 50,000 other things she would like, but M was too worked up to acknowledge it when I showed her on the sushi restaurant’s website.)

When we finally got to half-price sushi night(very late due to the tantrum) , we discovered that there was a line out the door. We had to come home and eat hot dogs for dinner.

Today sucks, yo. I am going to have a beer now.

The Eyes Have It

When L came home from China, she had a variety of delays, but didn’t qualify for Early Intervention. I have been keeping an eye on her milestones and while she is still in the range of normal for most things, I have always wondered if maybe– just maybe– she is still struggling to catch up a little. The problem was that I could never exactly pinpoint what exactly the problem was. In most things she is fine, but she had a few nagging issues that never seemed to have anything to do with each other at all.

When it came time to select a preschool, we enrolled L in the preschool is run by our local school district as a developmental preschool. Kids with all kinds of developmental delays go there, but about 50% of the kids are typical peer role models. We thought this would be great for L. Even though she was a peer role model, there is a lot of developmental work going on in the class for all the children.

About a month ago, I had L’s very first parent-teacher conference. L’s teacher clearly likes her a lot. (Maybe too much, actually. She tends to think everything L does is charming even when she is not doing what she is supposed to do.) I think if you asked the teacher, she would say L’s conference was a good one. She had lots of good things to say about L.

I, on the other hand, thought that L’s conference was a warning shot across the bow. In particular, there was on comment that set off all kinds of warning bells for me: “Well, L has a hard time staying on task…She is too young for a diagnosis, but she really doesn’t pay attention as well as the other kids her age. Especially when we are doing table work.”

Huh.

Too young for a diagnosis, but clearly the teacher was implying that she thought L was leaning toward ADD.

We also looked over some developmental tests that all the children were given. The teacher mentioned a few unusual results that came up with L. In particular, in one she was supposed to trace a cross. At her age, it is expected that she would trace it from top to bottom and left to right ( or the opposite). Instead, L traced each of the four sections of the X by starting about an inch from the center and drawing outward. She missed the middle entirely. The teacher also told me that she evaluated L has being slightly right-handed. I thought that was crazy because L has been favoring her left hand for eating and drawing ever since we met her. We also discussed L’s rather unimpressive fine motor skills.

I went home from that conference quite bothered.

Armed with those test results and Dr. Google, it didn’t take more than about 15 minutes to make an amateur diagnosis. I decided that L had a visual processing disorder which is one kind of Sensory Processing Disorder. The information I found could explained all the random issues that had been niggling in the back of my brain and the comments from her teacher. I was also not surprised to learn that visual processing problems can be related to a lack of tummy time and stimulation in infancy.

I got busy finding a pediatric/behavioral optometrist who could do the full spectrum of vision testing necessary to figure out what was going on. Regular eye exams just cover eyesight. This exam looks at how the brain processes the information the eyes are gathering.

Long story short, today L completed her eye screening and they confirmed that she definitely does have a visual processing problem. More specifically, she has a pretty significant problem with tracking. Her eyes skip and hiccup when she tries to follow moving things. She also showed at least a 9 month delay in Visual Motor Integration. Add those issues to L’s reluctance to cross her midline and not so great fine motor skills, well, it is clear we are going to be spending time in therapy.

The eye doctor is recommending Vision Therapy. Twice a week for a minimum of three months and maybe as long as as TWELVE months. I was shocked that the monthly cost is going to be about $575. I was not shocked to learn that neither our vision or medical insurance will cover that therapy. (Let’s just say I am glad we aren’t going to have a mortgage payment in the near future! Yipes.)

I am also contemplating an Occupational Therapy evaluation. I might wait until we do a couple months of vision therapy to see what kind of results we get, but I feel that sooner or later OT might be in the picture as well.

I am surprised that I don’t feel upset by the results of L’s testing (though I am decidedly unthrilled about the cost). I am actually quite relieve that we have finally put the pieces of the puzzle together. I am also really glad we figured this out now, rather than when she started having problems with her reading skills in kindergarten. Hopefully, we can whip her brain into shape and nip these problems in the bud.