Inga's Toe Walk

We are going to look into enrolling Inga (and possibly Elena) in a dance school next year. Inga has a peculiar talent for dancing on her toes, the very tip ends of them. It's uncanny.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ever since Anne Marie gave me the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire a few Christmases ago I have had a soft spot for the Wicked Witch of the West. Especially since her younger sister was born without arms. However, I have never seen the musical because, silly me, I figured that once you read the book you knew what it was about and how could a musical possibly be better than the book when the book came first? Then I heard a song from the musical and I can't get it out of my head and I really want to see the musical. This particular blog post is in honor of Jaime, since she sent me an e-mail full of handy tips and tricks for doing all the things I have been very un-subtly hinting at needing help on over the past several months (and she hit every item, so she must have been keeping a list or something!). I am about to use one of those tips and actually paste a real live YouTube thingy on here. It is of my favorite song, called "What is This Feeling". If it doesn't work, then you know who to blame (I learned this after years of being a teacher...it is never the student's fault, but always the fault of the teacher and I might add that this rule still remains in effect in spite of any technical issues the student may have with just about any website she has ever visited):




If you want to listen to a really good recording of the music (which I do, because I don't necessarily like the way this particular YouTube version acts it out nor do I care for the sound quality but I couldn't get the other one I know of to work properly), then you have to go to this guy's blog I found who somehow posted the audio track directly to his blog. He also posted the lyrics, which is very helpful. His story is interesting, since he is ex-LDS (Mormon) and he ties the entire musical into his journey into adulthood and out of the Latter-Day Saints. Anyway, don't watch his YouTube version, it's British and the singing isn't as good (not that one is a cause of the other, mind you, I just don't prefer it). Just listen to his incredibly good audio track (I really need to buy this CD for myself.)

N.B. The above testimony is a good example of how YouTube and the ability to post tracks to blogs actually encourages the sale of music legitimately--that was a plug for any economic gurus that happen to drop by my blog anytime soon while policy is still being debated

Happenings

I didn't know what to call this post, because it is basically just a random selection of happenings around our house recently. Hopefully of the sort that is vaguely entertaining to relatives who don't live nearby (which is all of them).
Dan and I are into House recently. Jaime already posted the Valley Girl House takes from the second disc of the second season (OK, I'm going to try this link thingy, Jaime, let me know if it works!), but Cameron's "That's hot" at the end makes us go into conniptions!
Elena has a kidney ultrasound tomorrow, so she couldn't eat anything with fat tonight from dinner time on. I had no idea how many things have fat in them! Yes, Mandy, I know, but I am not the incredible dieter that you are. Speaking of, I think I will be "en regime" while I am in Maine this summer and one of my reasons for choosing that time to lose a little weight is because I am hoping you (still talking to Mandy here) will encourage me to stick to counting calories. Feel free to make me feel guilty constantly. Anyway, Elena had dry rice and stewed tomatoes with peas for dinner, can you imagine? I was practically gagging just watching her eat it. But I gave her jell-o for desert (wow, the computer actually made me put that hyphen in for "jell-o"), so my Mommy rating isn't too low...yet. Wait until she can't have breakfast or even drink a glass of water in the morning, then we will have cries of impeachment. I am comforting her with the promise of French Fries after the ultrasound is over. This picture I have of her is from Hilton Head on a Gregg Russell boat tour and she is watching the dolphins playing in the water. It was really hot that day, so her sunglasses were sliding off her nose.
Alex has new glasses. Actually, he has had glasses for months and months now but he keeps eating key parts and so we had to break down and buy a second pair for him, one for wearing and one for fixing after he destroys it. This has worked well for him, but not for our budget. I am amazed at how expensive and annoying poor eyesight can be. I know lots of people go through the glasses/contacts thing every day and pull it off with style and grace but I'm not sure it isn't up there with missing limbs on the disabilities list...just more common, so no one thinks much of it.

Today is father's day (happy Father's Day, Dad!!), and we gave Dan a shirt from St. John's College that says, in Greek, "If you can read this you are over-educated". Obviously Dan loved it! He decided that he wanted to go camping with the kids in the back yard tonight, so they set up the tent and we all went out and played "hot potato" and now everyone is sleeping peacefully. It's sad, really, because we have to work ourselves up to using this thing properly. The first time we set up the tent Dan and Andrei slept in it. Tonight everyone is sleeping in it except Pavel and me. Next time we will all try it together, and then hopefully the next step after that will be to actually go somewhere with it. I remember all those camping trips to that lake (in Kentucky?) when Sam had the earaches and Anne Marie and Mandy were little and Ben I had the raging nightmares and I guess I am really happy to go slow with the whole tenting thing.

Andrei has new Spiderman sheets. I have this thing about waiting until Christmas and Birthdays to get my kids anything they might actually want, but my oldest son was sleeping under my comforter from college that has flowers on it and when I saw the Spiderman bedding on sale I rethought the whole thing (Christmas is a long way away) and went ahead and got it for him. Now his bed is the most popular spot in the house. Pavel plays in it rather than playing with toys like a normal human child, and even Alex will slip under the bedcovers every once in a while and pretend he is the lucky one. It's a good thing Andrei is pretty easy-going about sharing his things.
And now an Inga story. We had a storm here, and Inga and Dan ended up stuck in Blockbuster while the rest of us huddled in our basement during a tornado warning (who was it that hates tornados? Jaime? I still have nightmares about them from my childhood!). Inga, being Inga, made fast friends with a little girl named Anna she met there and managed to get herself invited to this little kid's birthday party the next day. She in turn invited Anna to her Adoption Day party, which was the day after. They exchanged phone numbers and then began to work on their parents. I have never seen Inga beg so hard for anything in her life, and from what I understand after calling Anna's mom the same thing was going on at the other end. So we went to the store and bought a gift for this kid we didn't know and then I spent 4 hours at this party with about 12 girls who were all in the first grade. Inga and Anna were inseparable. Inga made several other friends and exchanged more phone numbers and tried to invite more kids to her own party the next day (I put my foot down, though). Life will never be dull with this kid...

Doctors

This is the season of doctors.
Today Sam went in for an MRI, and did all the things I had really hoped he would not do. He fought with the nurses when they put an IV in, and then he fought with them the other two times they put the IV in (because the first two times didn't work). He fought with me when I told him to go to sleep, then finally when they had given him so much medicine he had maxed out and his eyes were forced to close against his will he continued to fight it, which was really funny because the nurse kept thinking he was truly out and got ready to move the bed and then he would rise up and start talking and swinging around some more. The cute thing is that toward the end he turned all sweet and started giving me kisses and telling me he loved me very much (with his eyes closed).
When he woke up he was a grouch. He scream-cried at everything, and demanded cookies and water and then cried when I gave them to him and choked on the water because his muscles wouldn't work right. I put him on the couch for just a moment to fill his cup and he fell off in slow motion (didn't really hurt him, in other words) and couldn't raise his head up--it was like watching the chickens at the Boneless Chicken Ranch on Far Side. He's fine now, sleeping like a log, and hopefully he'll be coordinated tomorrow because he is really getting heavy to carry!
Anyway, I never want to do that again, at least not with this child, so I hope they got everything they needed. Now I just need to get through the next week and a half, which involves Andrei getting an MRI (general anesthesia for that one!), Elena getting a kidney ultrasound, Alex getting his hormone levels checked, Inga going to dentist for possible teeth pulling (her adult teeth are growing in behind her baby teeth, which is why she isn't losing any), Elena and Alex getting immunization shots, Andrei spending the night at the hospital for a sleep study, Alex and Andrei having speech evaluations with a new speech therapist (the public schools are not doing a good job, so we have to go private), Alex getting an intensive hearing test, Andrei and Alex getting evaluated by an ENT for surgery in August, and Sam's first opinion hand surgeon appointment. Then we go to Maine to live with Dad for the next 6 weeks, free of all doctor visits but enjoying the company of the one doctor that doesn't ever want to operate on them. Although it would be fun for the kids to try on some fake casts like the good ol' days...

OK, fine, I'll call him Pavel!

Pavel is getting baptized this Sunday. Kind of fitting that it's Pentecost Sunday, isn't it? In honor of the occasion I pulled out these REEEAALLY cute outfits my mother got all the kids and made sure everything fit and then I couldn't resist, I had to take a few pictures. Getting five kids to all look cute at the same time is impossible! Honest. I cleared my camera, took over five hundred photos of the kids, and not one has all five looking good at the same time. The one I put on this post is the best it gets.



Inga asked if she could read tonight before she went to bed. Andrei asked if he could practice the cello tonight before he went to bed. They are growing up! (and they don't want to go to bed).

Vulnerable

OK, I am about to be really vulnerable. You can tell because I began this post with the word "OK".
Last night I went scrounging around the internet looking for some information on FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, what Alex has). I was doing this because I know I have recently read many research studies claiming that even a little alcohol drunk during pregnancy can have adverse affects, and I was discussing it with some friends but of course this is a radical claim and I had not memorized my sources so I was trying to see if I could re-find those links. I found plenty of articles and lists and even some YouTube entries (the best one was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uip8sv9tCKw), and as I was calmly reading through everything I started to bawl. Not just cry, bawl. I think everyone who reads this blog knows me really well (I would love to know how Mandy knows who reads her blog, that sounds really handy), so you know that I don't do this crying thing often. The last time I cried was when I trusted a friend to watch my kids and she nearly killed them through willful negligence and the very real thought of them dying made me lose it (coupled with total and complete anger toward my friend the likes of which I have never experienced before). Anyway. Back to crying. I was crying for Alex. I was crying for what had been done to him, for how he struggles every minute of every day just to live life and how "normal" will forever be unachievable for him. As he gets older he is going to become more and more aware of the invisible gap that exists between him and everyone else he knows, and already I see him gazing around in bewilderment when he loses control or can't remember something he knows he ought to know.
I've read all these things before, I've even seen a few very moving videos on FASD, so what triggered this? And what is it that was triggered?
I know what triggered it--I have a friend that encouraged another friend to drink while pregnant, because it was really "no big deal" if you only drank a little each day. As for what it is that hits me so hard that I had this sort of reaction...I've been aware all along that Alex's birth-mother's drinking is the cause of his issues, of course, but I guess the total helplessness of my little guy in utero while his mother poured liter after liter of alcohol into her son just sort of hit me. For some reason when I saw the healthy and FASD brains compared side by side (also see YouTube video), the report of Alex's initial physical exam came into my head, the one where they did an ultrasound and there was so much fluid where his brain should have been that they called it "hydrocephalus" despite Alex's very small head. That was his mother's doing. I am sure she didn't mean to do it, I am sure she was struggling with her own awful life and she couldn't get up enough hope or energy to quit drinking and it is very likely that she was unaware of the awful effects her drinking was having on her unborn child. I have no beef with her. Just overwhelming pity for Alex. But my friends, the ones who were comparing notes on how much they drank and were saying these things in front of another friend of mine who was still pregnant (yes, everyone seemed to get pregnant this year) made me feel so frustrated. Alcohol is a known tetarogen (substance causing birth defects). They see that Alex and Sam are two years apart and yet Sam is taller and heavier than Alex. They see that Sam's speech development after two months home from his orphanage is already surpassing Alex's after he has had two years of speech therapy. They see Alex who can't sit still to save his life despite the fact that he is denied every fun or even typical food known to every other child in the church. Of course he had a lot of alcohol in his system during his development but his issues are extreme. By logical conclusion therefore a little bit of alcohol will give you a little bit of his issues...but which ones? Who knows where the boundaries lie? No one. Why do they have to push that envelope? Who says, "oh, a little thalidomide won't hurt this evening, honey." I am certain that Alex's mother didn't think these things through because she was ignorant. But my friends are not.
So I crept into Alex's room and held him and cried and he was so light and felt so fragile and that made me cry even harder because that, too, comes from his mother's drinking. Please don't misunderstand me. I am not crying for myself. We chose him, I am excited to be his mother, he challenges me in ways no one else can and I am grateful for it. I just needed that moment to grieve for him. And now I am finished, and can move on.
Don't drink when you are pregnant. http://www.come-over.to/FAS/LowDose.htm.

Tidiness

I have a new insight into Grandma Mickey. I have discovered, upon welcoming the fifth child into our family, that the ONLY way to keep things reasonably tidy (and by this I mean, "waist deep instead of neck deep") is to be in a constant mode of picking up after people. This is the first line of defense, and the only effective one. The second line of defense is to teach the children to pick up after themselves, but considering their ages and the fact that they are human beings this is a very weak strategy and only minimally lessens the havoc.
I came to this realization because we had guests last weekend, had a visit from the social worker this weekend, are having guests at the end of this weekend, and Mom is dropping by twice this week on her way to and from Ohio to visit Ella (oh, and Ben and Julie). So I would like the house to be presentable. This has been on my mind for a couple of days now, so I have had an eye toward getting the house clean and keeping it that way. As I was cleaning my room today (which I have to admit is by far the messiest), I would pause every minute or so to put an errant toy in its place or call a child to come put away its underwear, etc.--and I realized that I was acting exactly like Grandma Mickey. Exactly. And that is when I realized that she also had five kids (I never really thought about it before), and at some point they must have been young, and--judging from the way they are now--she must have been picking up after them all the time, just like I have to do. Like she still does, if you have ever noticed. This gave me pause, as well it should--I do not want to be neurotic. So if you come to visit and you notice it is not as tidy around here as it might be at your house, it is because I am practicing for when my children are all grown up and have left the house and I become normal again.