Not counting Grandma G and Matt, we've reached the final birthday of the year as Mira turned 15 the day before Thanksgiving. In the spirit of giving thanks, we are so grateful for how generally healthy Mira has been over this past year. Especially this year with all of the limitations, it's been very nice to not have her spending weeks at a time in the hospital. Just two years ago was when she spent her birthday not only hospitalized, but in the PICU. (pediatric intensive care unit)
Oh, wait! Looking back at photos, it was three years ago that she was in the PICU on her birthday:
It was Bobbi who was in the hospital on Mira's birthday two years ago:
And since I'm reminiscing about late Novembers spent in the hospital, it was ten years ago that we had our first hospital stay with any of our kiddos when Reuben first got his diagnosis of epilepsy.
That diagnosis was one of two events in my life that break all of my experiences into "before" and "after." Reuben's diagnosis forever changed the direction that our lives would take, including being a major piece of what led us to the events (Krassi's, and then Bobbi and Mira's, adoption(s)) that led to the existence of this blog. Ten years.
[Deleted is the start of some other thoughts that were developing deeper, but I've got to just post this and move on - time is limited!]
We're not back on full lock-down here in MN like we were in the spring, but we are on "pause" where we can go shopping and all of that stuff, but no socializing of any sort with anyone outside of your own household is allowed for the next four weeks.
For most of us, that's not a super huge deal, since we do all of our socializing with people who ARE part of our immediate household, but since it's also coupled with school reverting back to full distance learning, it means that we are all just really home most of the time, so it feels more like the spring lock down than anything else we've had in the months since.
So, the kids very quickly thought we needed to bring back Ice Cream Mondaes. What's for supper? Ice cream, and anything you can think of that you want to put on it.
No ice cream (left) - she just wanted to share her smiling face!
Makes for easy meal planning! Tonight we had apples, mandarin oranges, pretzals, peanuts, pecans, frozen blueberries, mini chocolate chips, peanut butter, sprinkles, bacon, and graham cracker crumbs. No parsnips. :)
After the school year beginning with some of our kids (Owen, Krassi, Reuben, and Bobbi) in our public school district's hybrid model (two days of distance learning, one day at home with no formal stuff, and two days in class...though for Owen, his start date was the last to be phased in...) we are now in a fully distance learning scenario, which started the week that Owen was supposed to finally get to go to two days of classes in person! Poor guy.
Our academic goals for this year are pretty simplistic:
learn something (by spring 2021 know *something* more than you did fall 2020)
do stuff you wouldn't normally get to do in a normal year.
For our physically capable kids, item number two has included some nice long bike rides, ranging from 6 miles (in which the younger girls did all of their own biking) to 29 miles (in which we left the younger two at home, put Ebby in the trailer, and Mom, Owen, Leah and Rinnah biked to Hudson, WI!)
One thing we all learned from that experience (so goal number one!) is that a 12 or 13 mile bike ride is really nothing, so we did that with Gloria and Evania along as well, though Owen rode Huckleberry so the little girls could swap back and forth between riding with Owen and riding their own little bike so their legs had a chance to keep up! After a few technical difficulties...
...we were back on the road. There they are - six of my ten, clambering all over a little trickle of a stream running under an abandoned railroad trestle.
As much as I treasure these days together, they are not without a pang of longing for the ones I've left behind. And not that it's not *possible* to get more of them out with us - Krassimir can ride Huckleberry, and Reuben has a bike that can be converted to trail behind me or Owen, but it needs adjustments that didn't make it to the top of the list this summer, and some days it's just more work than I can get myself geared up for.
The accomplishment of this year's goals is still happening for the others, but it just looks different.
Here's Krassi doing some of his homework: self-feeding! For a guy for whom eating is still a hateful part of the day, having him participate is pretty fantastic. As you can see, he requires a lot of coaching, but he can do it! I'm particularly proud of the way he manages to finish each bite in such a way that he can get every last bit off the spoon - that's not easy to learn!
Tsvetomira's days are still just a back and forth between her cozy cushion corner and her chair, between contended sleeping, and the sometimes-agony of voiding and stooling. But she's been enjoying her once a week trip to PT, and Dad has learned a few tricks that every now and then he has time to put to use with her. Here she is doing some weight bearing on her elbows at the table.
Ebenezer continues to take great delight in Mira's nurse who comes in four mornings a week. "Hi, 'tine!" he says, "Check on Mira, check on Mira?" They have a daily routine of him helping her "chart" while Mira gets her "shake shake" (vest treatment for respiratory function).
Bobbi's obviously had an interesting year with starting her new job - it's already been two months that she's been working at Kwik Trip! Also new just last week is a Foods class she's taking at the local technical college through her post-high school transition program. Even though all of the students have been transitioned to full distance learning with the increasing cases of COVID in our state and county, the technical college students are still able to do some of their learning in person. Here she is making a pumpkin pie. She still needs a lot of help, but has also continued to develop her skills. My favorite thing lately is when she's helping to bake anything and we're practicing math by having her work with the quantities, she almost automatically doubles or triples everything...because that's just how we do it around here!! Multiplication skills, here we come.
And I realize that this has turned into a little update on almost everyone except Reuben, so in the interest of him not being left out, here's a recent shot of Reuben:
Twinning with Dad. :) Although we've seen a lot of good changes since the introduction of his new diet in Feb and March, he's still just got a lot of rough spots that he deals with. We'll have weeks (like this one) where vomiting is a daily (or more!) occurrance, and nights where his default-tooth-grinding is nearly non-stop...and he insists on sleeping in our bed...with his head resting on my skull...and we let him because sometimes you get more rest with a tooth-grinder on your skull than you do when he keeps climbing out of his own bed and needing to be put back in. It's also easier to monitor for seizures when he's on top of me. Hard to miss.
One of his new frequent words is, "river." We've taken as many chances as we can to get him to a variety of moving bodies of water over this unusual fall where winter keeps pretending to come and then fall returns. It's so good for him to have something to do that is active and doesn't involve his iPad.
So there's a little view into some of what's happening around here!
Hello, readers! One of you sent me a contact this morning through the blog, and I just sat down to reply to it, and apparently the reply email address was entered incorrectly, because my reply bounced back to me! So, "L", if you want to try again, I'll send the reply that I wrote!
(And I'm starting a simple little update with some photos and a video to hopefully be up tomorrow!)
She's no longer a teenager! And we will never again have *five* teenagers in the house at one time. Bobbi is officially 20 years old.
Although we did not have the big party that's always meant so much to her in the past, we had just a nice pleasant day with a variety of little things that she appreciated fully, which in itself is a testament to some of the growing up that she'd done.
It's a day off school! (End of quarter)
She and Dad went out for dinner at the place they've gone for three birthdays in a row now.
She baked brownies to share with her physical therapist (whose birthday is the day after hers).
She helped bake a cake (chocolate-coffee layer cake with coffee buttercream frosting, bananas in between the layers, and Reese's peanut butter cups chopped on top) which we ate with ice cream after she and Dad got back from their supper.
She got not a lot of presents, but I don't think I've ever seen her as genuinely happy about the gifts she got than she has this year. In (roughly) her words, they're all things that she's going to use and they won't just sit on her shelf!
Her favorite gift was a HUGE set of nice colored pencils from Grandma and Grandpa F. Now she has every color she could possible need.
