We continued in and out of the doctor’s office for the following 3 weeks each time Jaden was sent home from school with continued symptoms (needless to say I nearly needed a shrink over the stress of him being sick and also trying to get my work done), until finally one of the docs had the brilliant idea to try antibiotics in case it was a sinus or ear infection that was not showing itself via a full-blown fever. He was all apologetic about wanting to try the antibiotics until he saw the crazy look on my face that told him at this point I’d try just about anything!

Thank goodness this man had the sense to give in and prescribe the antibiotics because we FINALLY have our generally happy son back. He is sleeping through the night ever since he started the antibiotics, he’s having less trouble breathing, and he is much, much less cranky and much more like himself than he had been in months. I hope that once the antibiotics eliminate whatever the problem was that we’ll be able to back down on the asthma medications.

Neville’s parents and Aunt and Uncle came for dinner yesterday and to see the new swing set. My MIL just emailed us these pics of Jaden from their visit. I didn’t realize how tan he is from going outside twice a day during school days until I saw these pictures! Jaden loves the piano so much I guess it’s going to be time soon to look into lessons for him — how old does a child need to be before starting lessons?

On Monday he is supposed to start his five days per week schedule at school, but who knows whether or not he’ll be well enough to attend yet. I certainly hope so. It has been very difficult to get any work done while he’s home, and since he’s been home so much, well – need I say more?

Of course I have my usual guilt over sending him. But then I tell myself we do send him to a “school” and not just a run-of-the-mill daycare, and he is getting a lot out of it. They teach him a lot – they’ve even started to try to potty train him (good luck with that! hahaha). I know it’s good that he has contact on a regular basis with other kids his age – since right now at home it’s just us, or my parents, or Neville’s parents, and Jaden just doesn’t have the patience yet to talk about the weather, or American Idol, or the latest sports results. A friend of mine once said to me that she thinks sending her daughter to daycare makes her a better mother. So that means now that Jaden will be going to school for 5 days instead of 3, I should be 66.67% better as a mom, right? It’s nice to think that way.

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:

I’ve been blog-MIA again and I’m sorry it is taking me so long to get back into the groove. The semester is under full-steam now so I’m inundated with course preparation. My big goal (other than “publish, publish, publish!!!”) is to get back to a regular schedule for blogging – whether anyone is reading it or not, it is something I intended for Jaden to have as a part of his ‘lifebook’. I’ll get there…

I find this feeling quite ironic, considering most days when he’s home, by 4:00 I’m about ready to pull my hair out. As all you mom’s out there know, it is difficult if not impossible to get much done with a toddler at home. There’s the play dates, and the library visits, the books to read and toys to play with, the ‘pick me up mommy’ whines, and all the other fun stuff like feedings, walks and naps that take away the entire day. Nowadays our little angel has added a new trick to his repertoire: he can cling like a monkey to you when you try to put him down, making it all the more difficult to do things like use the bathroom.

So when I dropped him off yesterday at 8:00 a.m. I had mixed feelings. I could go home and actually get work done for 8 hours – YAY! – but I didn’t want to leave him.

So how did it go??? His teacher said he cried for a while after I left, didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to take a nap, didn’t want to drink his milk, and walked around most of the morning with his giraffe (favorite stuffed toy) in his mouth.

UGH

But then she said he warmed up to the other kids in the afternoon and was running all over the place, playing with everyone and everything…

Until his teacher had to leave at 3:00 and they sent in the afternoon sub. Then he cried until I got there, which was around 4:10. He must have cried so hard for that hour because he was doing that thing that kids do after they cry that’s almost like a hiccup but not quite. It took a little over an hour for those post-crying hiccups to go away. *sigh* I felt awful.

Jaden is very adaptable. He usually warms up to other people quickly. It’s just the change that throws him. I guess he had gotten used to Miss Christine, and felt safe with her, and then when she left it was like “first Mommy, now Miss Christine?” Ah well. I was worried that this morning would be awful. But it wasn’t too bad. After a little coaxing I pried his monkey-like claws and legs off of me and handed him to Miss Christine who took him over to read a book. He was fine until I started to say goodbye, and then he got a look of panic on his face. Miss Christine is terrific though, and she walked him over to the window and told him he can watch me go to the car and wave. I guess he did okay because by the time I drove past his classroom window he was already out of her arms, so I assume he was no longer crying, and probably running around trying to steal one of the other kids’ toys.

So I took another look today at the I171H approval and it seems that CIS received the I600 on July 22nd, but didn’t approve it until August 7th. Somehow I had myself believing that it was approved on July 22nd (wishful thinking!) – so my calculations are slightly off. That means that this Thursday will be 3 weeks since the approval, and according to the agency if we fit into the ‘average’ category we will have another week or two before we get “the call,” affectionately known as “TC” on the Korea adoption boards. 

I was sincerely (and selfishly) hoping that it would work out that we could go the first week of classes. This is possibly why I convinced myself our approval date was 2 weeks earlier. It would be so much simpler for me to go that week for a number of reasons, one of which is that there is not one college student in this universe that actually pays attention to anything a professor says on the first day of class. They are too busy figuring out which class is next, where the class is being held, how to get to the building, picking up the syllabus, making a judgement call as to whether this class seems like too much work to add to an already overwhelming schedule, determining which professors they like the best, dropping those they don’t like and adding those that they do like, changing their schedules around to match with their work schedules…. etc, etc. etc. So it’s pretty much a “Hi Professor, nice to meet you, give me the %@$! syllabus, and I’ll see ya next week!” 

In short, the first week of class isn’t a horrible one to miss, if you have to miss any. After that it gets stickier, and it screws up the entire schedule that you spent so much time putting into the syllabus in the first place. All the left-brained students hate it when the schedule gets messed up, so we try not to change the schedule at all, if possible. (All the right-brained students never realized there was a schedule in the first place, so they are usually okay.) 

The other reasons are also selfish, so maybe I should shut up – (but I can’t…  bloggers plight) – for instance, Neville is stuck going away for a week if we are not heading to Korea soon – and it’s not something that is really fitting well into our lives right now for a number of big reasons. Alas, we will manage, as we always do, but it really begs the question as to whether or not there are some things in our lives that we need to give serious reconsideration to, especially with our precious one so close to being home (yes, this is purposefully nebulous – sorry to those who have no idea what I’m talking about. If you PM me I’ll fill you in on all the gory details).

So I see I just went off on tangent number three  - odd numbers are considered lucky in Korea so three tangents seems like a good place to stop….

I wonder if anyone else is jumping out of their skin every time their phone rings this week?