Irish Stew

I see the first official day of summer coming quickly and the hot weather is now here as well. It's supposed to be 92 today. Yuck. Time to settle in for some air conditioning.
Since life is in fast forward these days, I can see how almost a month can go by without having time to post anything. There's been a lot to do. We've had family visiting, a wedding, barbeques, graduations, and birthday parties. At least, that's been our weekend activities when I haven't been working, and some of it when I have been, too.
We have decided that our Caleb Wu is going to be starting preschool this fall. The main reason is that he will receive a lot more speech therapy than he is getting now. We took him to Boystown for another follow up appointment--we usually go about every 6 months--and they checked his hearing and we talked with the pediatrician there and the speech therapist. Both were a little concerned about his lack of language. Obviously, being 2-3 years old, he's not going to be a linguist right now. I've had many people say things to try and explain it away, trying to be nice, and say things like, "he's probably still speaking Chinese!" Ok, no. Actually, Caleb has been in the US almost as long as he lived in China. And, he was never babbling "in Chinese" at all. I know that he heard a different language for the first 18 months, but he completely understands English. He just can't say the words. I thought it was maybe related to the cleft, but the craniofacial team didn't seem to think so. Without a lot of extensive testing, it's hard to diagnose exactly what is going on. So, we'll just bump up the speech therapy for a while and go from there.
The process for Baby 2 is coming along also. A month ago, we mailed our immigration paperwork, and two weeks later received a letter confirming that it had been received. The letter basically said something like: thanks for applying, your application has been received. It hasn't been approved and it hasn't been denied. We're just telling you that we got it (so, I'm paraphrasing a little here). Please wait some more and, if we do approve it, we'll let you know when you can go to be fingerprinted. The next day, we received another letter from immigration: your application has been accepted. That's quite a turn around! Our fingerprint appointment at the Department of Homeland Security is a week from today.
Someone recently complained to me that "they make it so difficult for anyone to adopt! Why do you have to do all that stuff again!?" I find myself having to defend the process. We get fingerprinted again in case we decided to commit a felony since the last time we did it. We know we haven't, but the US government does not. Also, I know the whole thing sounds drawn out and frustrating, but obviously, it's worth it. We get to see this smiling face daily:

So, I will keep defending the process, although I wish I didn't have to. And we'll keep going, because it's not too bad, and some day it will be done.
Finally, my niece, Maesa turns 4 today. We went to my sister's new house last night for her birthday party. They had a great turnout and my other sister made all the very tasty food. I got to make her cake and I had fun putting it together:

Maesa was very excited and, since it wasn't her birthday yet, still telling people she was 3. ("I'm not 4 until tomorrow!") I will reminisce here for a minute and say that I remember very well the night she was born. My sister was in labor at our hospital and she had a small complication that required a NICU nurse to be present at the delivery. I was still working on the transport team then, and, it was my sister, so I went to stand by at the delivery. It seemed that there were a thousand staff people in the room, between the doctor, labor nurses, nursery nurses, and NICU nurses. A little overkill in my opinion. But she was great, and a cutie from the first moment:



And still a cutie today. Happy Birthday kiddo!