Mayerly's 8th Birthday

Well, this is where I would normally post pictures of Mayerly's birthday celebration. Unfortunately, there was no celebration last night. We have had an ongoing problem with Mayerly listening to us at home and to her teacher at school. Without going into too much detail, I'll just say that the past 2 weeks she has had more bad reports from school than good ones.

She had been warned repeatedly all week not to continue this misbehavior (and grounded from her favorite activities and has had added chores to do around the house when she received bad reports). Well, yesterday (which was her birthday) she had another bad report from school - so we had to follow through with our threat to cancel her birthday celebration.

We are more disappointed than many of you probably are about not having happy birthday, candle-blowing-out pictures (especially since this is our first birthday with her). But we couldn't make our threat to cancel her birthday celebration an empty one either. She WILL start listening to the adults in charge of her, or her life is not going to be very much fun for awhile.

So, instead of posting birthday pictures, I'm posting the girls' school pictures. We just got all of them back this week. I think they turned out pretty well (better than any of mine ever were).

One dentist, one doctor, one lawyer

Wednesday we went to the dentist. Oscar, Diana & Mayerly will all need sealant to be applied to their teeth. Diana will need a crown and Mayerly has a cavity. We go back in November for the sealants and will have to return for Diana's crown (she had a big old filling that fell out). Claudia was the only one who won't have to return until her next six month cleaning appointment.

Today Diana and I went back to see the eye doctor. She needed to do a couple more tests due to the communication barrier (even though we had an interpreter). Diana tends to want to try to give the "right answer" instead of telling the doctor exactly what she is seeing. We couldn't seem to convince her that there are no "right answers" to these test questions. Anyway, the doctor seemed to get the answers she had been looking for today. She also is a Christian doctor (which I didn't realize before). She made a comment to me about praying before this exam that she would be able to figure Diana's vision problem out - and this visit she was able to. The doctor believes that Diana can see out of her left eye and that the eye turn is likely developmental rather than congenital.

Tim and I will go to see the doctor on the 19th to discuss what we do next. First thing, Diana will be getting new glasses with a different prescription. Next we have a referral to an osteopathic doctor that Diana will see before she starts therapy. What more, I don't know...

I also called a lawyer this week about getting the re-adoption (actually it is a "recognition of foreign adoption" hearing) rolling. If we don't hit any snags, we may have that all done by Christmastime this year.

We also had another interesting thing develop recently. Unfortunately, I can't talk about it right now - mainly because we don't know enough to talk about it. Anyway, maybe someday soon we will know something. That probably doesn't make any sense... so, if you would, just pray for all our children and for us as parents.