Summertime

Well, Monday was my last day of work for the summer, so I'm off for the next two and a half months. It's a definite perk of working for the public school system. We're already feeling the hot, humid weather around here, complete with thunderstorms. A few days ago, I woke up to find what looked like a moderately sized tree in our side yard. It turned out to be a very large branch that had snapped off of the neighbors tree during the previous night's storm and was lying across the corner of their roof, taking up most of their yard, and part of ours. Caleb is doing great. He had a great time staying with my parents during the days that I was at school. We've got some plans lined up for the summer, but no big vacations or trips at this point (going to China was probably enough traveling for one year, I think). The next several days, though, we are busy with appointments. Tomorrow, we will have our first post-placement visit with the social worker. I'm not really nervous about it, except for maybe the behavior of our dog. He just gets a little too excited to see people sometimes. This social worker will be the same one who did our homestudy and visited us here a year ago. We were pretty nervous back then because we thought she had the power to make or break this adoption. In retrospect, it wasn't too bad at all. And this time....well, considering Caleb is now home, I don't think we have much to worry about.

Friday, we have a meeting with the craniofacial team at Boystown Research Hospital. The team consists of a plastic surgeon, an oral surgeon, audiologist, ENT doctor, speech therapist, nurses, and probably a few other people that I'm forgetting. Since a cleft lip and palate can affect several different functions, all of these will need to be evaluated and then a plan will be drawn up. We should be able to have his first surgery (palate repair) sometime this summer. So, that will be another part of our summer plans. While I'm not looking forward to seeing my little guy deal with post-op pain/recovery, it will be great to have it done. And, we won't have so much food coming out of his nose as often!

Here's a story related to his open palate: he doesn't really have the capacity to suck when drinking, so every time we get a sippy cup, we take the valve out so that he can just drink out of it. Recently, someone gave us some new-fangled ones that he really likes (complete with pictures of Lightning McQueen on them) though they don't have a valve. I don't know what it is....just a different kind of opening. Well, I put some milk in one and gave it to him to see if he could use it and I saw some milk in his mouth, so I figured hey, it works! Later in the day, we went to lunch at Chipotle. My friend Kris was putting green tabasco on her burrito and Caleb kept reaching for the bottle. He really wanted that tabasco. So Kris put a small drop on the end of his finger and let him try it. His eyes teared up, his face was red, he didn't know what to think. She offered him his sippy cup and he grabbed it and drank. It wasn't until we were home, several hours later, that I went to refill it. It was still full. Turns out, he wasn't really able to get much out of it at all. I felt terrible!! No wonder he was frantically trying to eat ice out of one of our empty cups at lunch. Once I switched it out, he guzzled two full cups. Poor thing!

In spite of that, he really is doing well, and we're looking forward to summer. We already have a toddler sized swimming pool that hasn't even made it to our backyard yet. Someone gave it to us as a gift and it is currently inflated and sitting in our living room. Caleb is excited even just having it like that--wait until he sees what it is really used for! I'm excited for his to have his first summer here and experience all the stuff that goes with it!