Some little bits

In no particular order, here's a bit about what's going on around here.

• Tsvetomira had a follow-up appointment at Gillette to check on her surgery site and go over the plan for moving forward with her care. 

The best part about the appointment was getting her weight. Two years ago she weighed 11.2 kg. We were told when we visited her in September that she was pretty much done growing. When we picked her up, her current weight was 11.5 kg. When she was discharged from Gillette, she weighed 12.2 kg. I wasn't going to make much of that until she'd been home for a while - she was still slightly swollen, and I didn't want to make too much of something that might have been temporary.

Well, on Monday's appointment, she weighed 12.3 kg. The little girl who was "done growing" after only putting on .3 kg over nearly a two year period, has put on .8 kg in a three week period.

• And that's on top of plenty of pooping! 

This deserves a bullet point of its own because when we picked her up, she had a large, solid mass high up in her intestines (the initial diagnosis of which we have Adam to thank). Nearly every day of her hospital stay we were working on moving that mass through and out, so her weight gain above is in spite of rigorous efforts (and numerous successes) in moving out significant amounts of matter.

She is taking Miralax daily, and something else at bedtime, but since her first three days home, we have not had to use an additional suppository, and she is staying regular. We know this is going to be something we have to be constantly vigilant about, but even with her severe constipation, her doctors at Gillette all doubted her diagnosis of Hirschsprung's disease. They all believe with proper management, her bowels will work just fine.

And an update, since this post is taking me many days to write - she did it again all on her own today! This may seem minor, but to us it's a big deal!

• Which leads me to a side point. The medical information you get with a child's profile when you're adopting all has to be taken lightly. 

Some things are mildly different, some things may be missing, and some things in there are just flat out wrong. Take this guy, for example. His medical information included the statement that he "rarely smiles."

Ha. They were wrong.

He likes to pick his nose, too. They forgot to tell us that.

In many ways it's the same whether you add to your family through birth or adoption: you never really know what you're going to get!

• Gloria, at 13 months old, is speaking a language we call "Bulgar-engliski" or "Englarian."

She is the first child I've ever seen for whom "yes" is one of her first words. However, it quickly became "das" which is a great combination of the Bulgarian "da" (for yes) and English "yes." We all smile and laugh when she sits there nodding her head saying, "Das, das, das." Bogomila still adores Gloria, so is particularly tickled by this. We're hoping Gloria in particular has a good chance of picking up some Bulgarian as she interacts with Bogomila in these days of intense language acquisition.

• Bogomila had her first visit with the doctor who will oversee the care of her cerebral palsy. 

Fun bit of trivia - he was adopted when he was nine years old! He has cerebral palsy, and he sympathized with Bogomila about the difficulty of the language barrier, although when he came home to his family 40 years ago, google translate, limited as it is, wasn't an option. He had a dictionary. And that was it. We did not have a real-life translator at the appointment, but through an iPad were able to access a live audio-only translator - definitely way better than any of our other options! It was useful not only for the appointment, but we also, while waiting in between doctor and nurse and x-ray, made use of a real Bulgarian-English speaker to go over a few other things that are complicated to do any other way, things like organizational techniques for the new music she wants to add to the mp3 player Grandpa gave her, or the eye exam with pupil dilation that we have coming up!

• Mira spent some time in the living room today and got to enjoy Grandma playing the piano...with help from some little sisters.

• Bogomila asked me while we were still in Sofia if she could get a hair cut. She wanted SHORT hair!

So we did. She had to wait until we were a bit settled and all living at home together, but on Sunday we went out and got the job done! (No pictures. ;) Bogomila didn't even like me taking the photos, so I'm definitely not going to share them here!) But here's a shot of the evidence, which she DID give me permission to share.

Her hair is now VERY short, but she loves it, and it's awfully cute on her. I kept a lock, and the stylist put it into a "baby's first haircut" envelope for me.

• Reuben just ended the longest seizure free stretch he's had since the beginning of 2013. 

He went twenty-two days without having any seizure activity!!! We had one 19 day stretch about a year ago, but nothing even close to this since the 3 month reprieve he had from late 2012 into early 2013. Our usual routine with him is about a week clear, and then he gets pounded, almost always needs his rescue meds, has a day to recouperate, and then is good for another week.

The fact that this break, both for Reuben and for us, happened to coincide with one of the biggest life-transitions our family has had does not miss our attention. And in case we were tempted to brush it off as *just* a coincidence, we keep records of all of Reuben's seizures. Guess what time he had his last one: 3:15 am on Monday, January 23rd. That was in Minnesota. Guess what time we were busy breaking Tsvetomira free from her orphanage? Good guess. 3:15 am plus an 8 hour time difference gets us to 11:15 am in Bulgaria, which is when we were busy signing that girl out of the institution.