Life Lessons from Rover and Fido

For Oscar's birthday this year he got a hermit crab habitat.  Eventually, we bought him 2 crabs to go in it (took awhile because - we're kinda busy).  One of the first crabs we bought died the day we brought it home, so we replaced it.  The crabs were named Rover and Fido (why not).

Crab life was relatively uneventful.  They ate, they drank, they played at night (we found out they are nocturnal), they took a bath once a week in the bathroom sink.  Not a bad life for a crab.

This morning we awoke to tradgedy.  Rover had killed Fido.  No one could figure out why.  It all seemed so senseless.

Oscar took Fido and prepared him for a burial at sea (don't have to spell that one out do I?).  After said burial, he took Fido's old shell and was cleaning out what he thought were left over crab parts so he could put it back in the crabitat for future use.  Then he noticed that the parts were moving.  Then it all became clear - there were baby crabs inside the shell!  Unfortunately, he killed a couple of them before he realized what they were.  (Hermit crabs will allow themselves to be pulled apart before they allow anyone or anything to remove them from their protective shells.)

We talked about how sometimes male animals eat their own babies.  We talked about how Fido (I guess we should have named HER Fida instead) fought to the death to protect her babies.  We talked about how sometimes we have to be careful when we think that one thing has happened (because we rarely know exactly why things have happened) and that we sometimes cause more harm by making assumptions and moving too quickly without all the facts.

Now we have one adult male crab and one baby crab of unknown gender.  Oscar said, he has a lot of work to do now(having to keep them separated until the baby gets a little bigger).  It's rough being the new adoptive father of a baby crab :-).

Small Blessings

Diana started to say "right" instead of "cierto" this week.  Don't know where she was when it finally clicked, I'm just glad it clicked!  Just another small victory in the Spanlish war.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard "Cierto mommy?" over the past 22+ months... times four...

Saturday Kumite

Oscar was in his first karate competition this past Saturday in Topeka, Kansas (about an hour and a half from our house).  There were two other boys on his team there also.  Everyone did really well.  Oscar got 2nd place for his kata in the 12-13 year-old novice division (beat only by his teammate who is a green belt - which in case you don't know, is two ranks higher than Oscar's yellow belt).  He beat out another green belt and an orange belt from other teams to get second place.

He got 1st place (same division) in sparring.  Once again beating out the green and orange belts.  We think he did a great job!  He even had other kid's parents cheering for him :-).

Here he is getting ready to do his kata for the judges...

Here he is getting ready to get his 2nd place trophy...

Here he is getting ready to accept his 1st place trophy... notice orange belt isn't clapping - Oscar beat him twice and he was a real sore loser about it.

Here's the team:  Marcus (in the white), Sinsei (Tony), Conner (red helmet) and Oscar in front.

All together they got five first place trophies and one second place trophy.  Conner got disqualified in his sparring match, so only got 4th place there (should've gotten 1st, but the brown belt - higher rank - he was fighting had a huge football-esque looking face-guard on his helmet and Conner got called for face contact because he kept clipping the kid's face guard with his kicks - he's got a killer hook kick).

I actually had a pretty good time and I'm not a sports fan :-).

Oscar & Diana's "School Pictures"

Today all the kids were out of school for Thanksgiving Break.  Mayerly went to our developmental optometrist for an eye screening in the morning.  She has been having some trouble with reading, so we made the appointment last month right after parent/teacher conferences.  She'll be getting glasses soon.  She has a problem similar to Oscar's (a convergence insufficiency - sees double at close range).  Hopefully, the glasses will help her with her reading.  She is supposed to wear them anytime she is indoors according to the optometrist.  We should get them in a week or two.

Hanai went to the groomer.  She isn't crazy about it because it is in the vet's office.  But she looks (and smells) really good now. :-)

I ran several other errands which included picking up pictures we had taken at the beginning of the month of the kids and all their cousins on my (Anne's) side of the family.  I bought a CD of them with copyright release so I can post them.  Since Oscar and Diana's school is so small, they don't get school pictures like Mayerly and Claudia did - so I had the photographer take some of those two by his/her self.  Here are the ones I chose:



The rest of the pictures are Christmas gifts, so I can't post them now.  I will post one that didn't make the final selection cut:

Thanksgiving dinner is at our house tomorrow, so I need to get the kids in bed so I can start some stuff tonight!

Cursed Auditory Processing Disorder

I've read on other blogs about other parents being saddened by their children's loss of their first language (usually Spanish).  I have to tell you, I can't relate to those feelings at all.  We have now been home almost 22 months and we still often hear several Spanish words used in the middle of otherwise English sentences.  And often the sentence in English is still structured as a sentence in Spanish.

We also hear words that are not English or Spanish ("made up" words that I now know came from not being able to correctly decode phenomes in Spanish before, and in English now).  For example, there is the word "unday".  Huh? you say - well me too... for over a year.  I even tried to look it up in dictionaries and on BabelFish with no success.  Only when the Spanish slowly started to give way to more intelligible English was I able to figure out what this mysterious word was supposed to mean.  It is actually supposed to be "cuando" in Spanish ("when" in English).

Communication continues to be an issue at our house after almost two years - albeit on a much lesser scale.  Memory and sequencing problems continue - and are also part of the auditory processing disorders we are battling.

Before we brought our kids home, I thought that it was important for them to become bilingual.  Now, not so much.  Now, I just want them to be proficient in English.  I want them to be able to read in English.  I want them to be able to write in English.  I want them to be able to speak in English so that others can understand what they are saying.  Yes, my vision of what is "important" has changed dramatically over the past couple of years.

We have been attacking the APD on three fronts:  Therapy for the APD itself, speech therapy and through the special education school that we send our older children to - where they understand the roots of the problems our children are up against.  The director of the school and his wife have a disabled biological daughter and a son (from Colombia) that they fostered when his adoption disrupted after his arrival in the US.  Their son had undiagnosed learning disabilities too.  Their experience with LD is first-hand.

So where does APD come from?  'No one knows for certain,' is the less-than-satisfactory answer to that question.  Our audiologist (and APD therapist) believes that our kids had "unresolved" recurring ear aches/infections at very young ages.  Our orthodontist says that the discoloration in Oscar's teeth is due to recurring high fevers.  These (especially the recurring ear aches) are often listed as likely causes for APD.

So why did I devote an entire blog post to APD?  Well, before adoption, I had never even heard of APD.  We knew we were adopting one child with strabismic amblyopia.  We thought we were prepared for a certain course of treatment and ended up going a completely different direction.  We were briefed on tantrums and PTSD and RAD, but not APD (or VPD's) or learning disabilities that could have been caused by early neglect.

Post-adoption, I believe APD quite possibly may be linked with many educational/behavioral issues that many older adopted children have.  For a long time, we summed up our kids' slowness at acquiring English to being able to speak Spanish to each other and being older and therefore having more "first language" already ingrained.  As the months went by, and the English that was being spoken was poorly articulated (sounds added where they shouldn't be and left out where they should have been - or both) we started to realize that there must be something else going on.  The public schools attributed any issues I brought to them were due to "language acquisition issues".  I determined that I wasn't up for an uphill fight with the school (times four), so we took the path of least resistance and put our kids in their various therapies (the school refused to provide speech therapy for the reason stated above) and then pulled them from public school and placed them in private schools.  We are blessed to have the means to afford these options.

It's still been uphill, but I don't feel like it's nearly as steep a hill or that I'm trying to push a boulder up that hill in front of me anymore.  God created us to be incredibly resilient - if we choose to be.  Incidently, our kids have all begun reading within their first semester since making all these changes.  Coincidence?  I don't think so.

More examples of "APD words":
peep = peed
hun-gedd = hundred
no brilly = not really
bi = bite
fi = fight
tie = tight
fodder = father
code = cold
hay-ope = help

Article in Our Local Paper About Oscar and Diana's School

Click here for the story.

Day of Final Post Adoption Visit

I was off work today for Veteran's Day - no husband, no kids.  I get two days like this per year.  I never accomplish as much as I want to on these days.

Today I:

• took the kids to school
• rushed home to get Hank to the vet by 9:00 for his annual shots and to have them check a new lump he has on his belly (couldn't confirm or rule out a new tumor, we'll just be watching it to see if it grows any more)
• cleaned the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and ran it
• sorted through and somewhat organized paperwork
• went to Walgreen's to buy shampoo, cough drops, toothbrushes, etc.
• drove thru Mickey D's for lunch
• came home, fed the dogs, gave them pills from the vet to kill fleas, took them outside and then back in
• put stuff in the bread machine to make bread for dinner
• cleaned the downstairs bathroom
• unloaded the dishwasher and started dinner
• left to go pick the kids up from school
• came home and continued getting dinner ready
• our social worker Nikki came over for our final post-adopt report (showed her how to make lasagna while we talked)
• Tim came home, finished post-adopt visit
• ate dinner
• kids did homework and listened to each read for a little bit
• watched Andy Griffith DVD Tim got from the library while checking my eBay auctions and researching items for my next auctions
• turned off TV to go start showers
• checked dogs for fleas (only found dead ones, yay!)
• hugged and kissed everyone goodnight
• downloaded picture for blog

Here is a picture of Nikki and the kids on our last visit.  Tonight, I still need to make lunches for tomorrow and get myself ready for bed.

I really need a day like this about once a week, just to stay caught up... but I get 2 per year.