Ordinary Time

As I was getting H.'s work out yesterday morning, I happened to flip through her work and took a look at the very first exercise she had done in that particular series. I was just amazed at the transformation, so I thought I would share. She has been using Draw Write Now  series (which I love), and it has been a good fit for her. Here is her very first effort when we started. Don't get me wrong. I was very pleased with what she had done. She works extremely hard and at first, copying the step-by-step pictures was very difficult for her. Here is what she did last week. She did it quickly and easily and even better, she could pretty much read it on her own with just a little help from me for a couple of the trickier words. I am particularly struck by the improvement in her printing. Now, we move onto some pretty random pictures. Just because. First, D. drew this on a dry erase board and was rather proud of it, but realized the medium did not make for longevity, so h...

A good friend had given G. and L. some new summer dresses and I wanted to take a picture of the girls in them to share with her. Sometimes they cooperate for this and sometimes they don't. This turned out to be one of their 'don't' moments. Here is what I got... B. was walking by and I asked him if could jolly the girls into cooperation. They love their B. (and vice versa). I love watching these three together.

About a month ago, J. and I spoke to one of our church's Sunday School classes about our experiences with adoption. The time went by very quickly and we weren't able to get to every topic we wanted to discuss. Since one of these topics seemed rather important, we were asked to write something that could be shared with the member of the class. I thought perhaps this could be of more general interest, so I share it here. (Plus, it's sort of like a free blog post.) One of the things we never got a chance to discuss on Sunday was ways that the church can support adoptive families. Before I go on with my list, I want to first say that J. and I feel incredibly blessed to be a part of this church family. We have felt supported and uplifted in prayer and have never had difficulties due to the differences and needs of our children. In talking with many adoptive families from across the country, we realize this is no small thing. Sadly, our very positive experience is rather unusua...

Today H. and I trekked an hour and a half to see the hair stylist who specializes in surgical hair design. I had no idea what to expect, but really felt as though we needed to do this. Becky turned out to be a lovely person who really knew what she was doing, plus she was great with H. As you know, the one thing H. really, really wanted to do when she first came home was to have long hair, so that is what we have been doing. The trouble with having waist-length hair is that when you have surgery and half you head is shaved, it makes for not a great look. I had warned H. that we would probably have to trim her long hair or else the short hair would never have a chance to catch up. H. was OK with this... not thrilled, but OK. Becky did a fantastic job of showing and explaining to H. what she was doing and why. H. has ended up with shoulder-length hair (which I think suits her quite well), and even better, when she was done, H. announces, "I love it!" She even felt confident e...

There was a question on yesterday's post and I thought I'd take a moment to answer it. I had mentioned cross-brain patterning and someone asked what that was. The comments also mentioned crawling and EMDR, thus giving me a chance to roll all that information into a blog post. (Hooray!) (First, my usual disclaimer. I'm not a brain-scientist and neither of my degrees relate to brain science at all; I'm just well read. Take my post as a starting point and do your own research.) As I said yesterday, our brain has two halves. The left half controls the right side of the body and the right half controls the left side. As well, there are certain functions which are usually housed in different sides of the brain, though the brain is continually talking back and forth between the two halves. In fact, we function best when the brain is easily able to do this communication between each half of the brain. Sometimes, though, the communication isn't always that great and thin...

I'm not sure I have ever explicitly mentioned this, but since H. has linear nevus sebaceous syndrome, it also means that she has left-brain hemiplegia. That sounds dire, I know, mainly because anything diagnosis which has the word 'brain' in it kind of makes everyone's stomachs do a flip-flop. There's a couple of things to know (which I certainly didn't) about this and about syndromes in general. Having been given the diagnosis of a syndrome is really just having a name for a particular group of medical issues. The syndrome itself isn't a disease, but a description. The actual physical difficulties that a person has are each their own 'thing'. Having a syndrome doesn't mean you will have every possible diagnosis that can go along with the syndrome. It also doesn't describe the severity of each of these diagnoses. It took me a while to wrap my head around what a syndrome is and isn't. So, back to the hemiplegia. Because linear nevus seba...

The weather is lovely, the big events are nearly over, and we are getting closer to having everything finished. Thus, we have been enjoying the day and each other and I haven't written anything. (Which is not really good because I have two conference sessions to write and they need to be done immediately.) I also have a few blog posts brewing in my head (adoptive families and the church; another teaching/homeschooling idea; a book review about a book that chronicles how the internet changes our brains), but they still need to sorting out before I can write them. Instead, I will resort to a cheap and easy post that sends you to past posts that I've written and you might not have seen. (It's been pointed out to me that I write a lot and its easy to miss some things.) So if you still need something to read, try one of these. Some of these are really old and some have books or things listed that you might be interested in. I'll put current links to those couple of things ...