Yes we’re still alive…
It’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything… and there’s probably no one following us now, but here I am anyway. 
The end of the semester is winding down now, I finished the tedium of putting together the final exams for my students today and submitted them to the copy center. Now it’s a matter of picking up the exams, administering them on Tuesday, and then grading (and grading, and grading…). Lately I have been the most disorganized (unorganized? anyone?) person on earth so I’m sure it is going to take me at least a week to gather all the little scraps of paper on which I’ve jotted down my notes on who deserves an A from Santa this year and who deserves a C (or worse). Grades are not due until after Christmas (thank goodness for little miracles) so I have a chance to take a deep breath and….
do all my Christmas shopping!! Yes, folks, I have not even started. Here we are, 13 days until Christmas, and I don’t have one person finished. I just started last week because my mom wanted to check out a local fair they were having while she visited here. I found a couple of nice gifts for Jaden’s teachers at his day care center, and maybe a couple of things for some family, but that’s about all I have done. This, unfortunately, is the usual story for me. I get caught up in the end of the semester and don’t start making my shopping list until after finals.
The more I think about it the more I realize that I’m basically caught up in a tornado from the start of the semester until the end of the semester, and I’m very thankful for those little “breaks” in between that allow me to do things like brush my teeth without simultaneously trying to remember if I already photocopied the handouts for class later the same day.
As for Jaden – he is doing TERRIFIC. He’s really come a long way in the last couple of months. He enjoys going to his ’school’ three days a week. Sometimes he does give me a hard time about leaving, but on other days he goes straight to Miss “coco” and happily waves to me while he says “bye-bye” in his hilariously cute, toddler-phase, word approximation style accent. He must know close to 100 American Sign Language (ASL) signs (I’ve lost count)— believe it or not. I stopped having to teach him new signs — he actually teaches us signs now! His ASL-fluent teacher at school signs as she talks, so he picks up signs up from her and then comes home assuming we’ll know what he’s ‘talking’ about when he repeats the sign. It took us weeks to figure out that he was signing train, and another for helicopter. He kept giving us an evil stare when we showed we obviously didn’t know what he was talking about – it was as if he was thinking “YOU taught ME this language, why are you feigning ignorance?!”
We’ve been working weekly with early intervention on Jaden’s verbal skills. He’s coming along – he has approximately 20 word approximations now. Things like mama, dada, papa (grandpa) and bye-bye are really clear now. Today he said water and I couldn’t believe how much better it sounds than it did just a week ago. I have a feeling he’s going to start rattling off words as he rattles off signs. The funny part is that the words he speaks are also signs he knows — he’ll sign at the same time he says the word, so I still think, although it has taken him a while to speak, the signing was a godsend. Without it I’m sure we’d be having (many more) temper tantrums out of frustration. He’s been able to communicate with us really well with the signing even though the words are coming more slowly.
Interestingly, the word approximations he started with are less likely to be word approximations a child born in the U.S. would start with — for example he learned the sound of g’s and k’s first, which are usually later in an English speaking child’s language development (according to the literature early intervention gave me). My theory is that because Jaden spent 9 months listening to Korean, his tongue was learning to form Korean language sounds, and those were the first sounds he started babbling. Although, now that he is learning more and more, his language development is starting to appear more closely related to an English speaking child’s language development.
I have to wonder how our little nephew who is expected on 12/24 will fare with language development. My brother and his wife are going to bring him up bilingual. My sister-in-law will only speak Portuguese in the house, and my brother will only speak English (at least that’s the last they mentioned to us) — so it’ll be interesting to watch their son develop from that perspective. We are all SO excited about the new addition to our family – and of course the grandparents are nearly bursting with joy. Two years ago it seemed they’d never have grandkids, and here we are, with my brother and his wife expecting the 2nd (grandchild).
As for us, we always wanted two children, but I’ve been dragging my feet about putting in another adoption application. It was such a long wait for Jaden, and such a stressful process with Vietnam closing and not knowing what was going to happen with our application, etc, etc… so I think that’s what has me procrastinating. I also can’t imagine how I’ll get all the paperwork and running around done now that I have a toddler at home. It was hard enough to do it while it was just me and Neville. Plus I worry about our ages. Oy. Maybe I just need to have faith, and go with the flow. So I should just fill out the darn paperwork and leave it in our Creator’s hands, right?
We took this picture on Thanksgiving day before heading to my in-laws:
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