A litte something.. and I do mean little.

Our Family, of course everyone can't have a nice expression at once.

Rub-a-dub-dub two boys in a tub

Igor decided this was a GQ outfit one day and nothing would do but for him to wear this combination!

Hello my faithful blog followers. I know there are a few of you out there still, my counter moves and friends say " I saw XYZ on you blog" though I'm not getting the massive hits that I did when we were traveling, but hey even I admit things are pretty boring when you get back home to the daily grind.

The economy is in the forefront of our minds now. Hubby's job tends to be one of the areas a corporation starts trimming fat from first, so we are nervous as the last quarter's profits were not good. Hopefully his department will be considered an essential evil and continue on with little or few cuts.

The quest to get Igor into the specialized feeding clinic is on. I've taken care of the PILE-O-Paperwork they sent in what had to be record time, called and asked them to place us on a waiting list to get an appointment asap. Hopefully we'll get in and get some insight as to why meal times are such a battle. The meal battles are the only thing that truely stresses me about this child, otherwise he's easygoing, loving and catching on to things so fast. He does have his quirks, don't get me wrong. I think Igor is the most pilfering child that ever lived, he's in my purse, coat pockets , any drawer that he can open etc and so forth so there is a constant vigilance there I would have thought would be able to relax by now. However it gives makes me be more consistent with putting things away so there is a plus because no one has ever accused me of being a neat freak.

Sonny Boy is really taking off in his reading lately. I have to run him off because he reads over my shoulder when I write e-mails. His most annoying habit is erasing our Wii scores on the games. Today he even erased my little charachter! Just play the stinking games kid and quit monkeying around in the Mii area.

I myself have been busy with my civic group. We had our year end banquet Friday night which turned out really nice if I say so my self ( I chaired it). I won member of the year award for the second year straight. Honestly I think I'm chosen as I'm the only one who will voluntarly clean the bathrooms at our big Memorial Day Festival.

I would really love to start the road to another adoption and have researched and found where I'd like to go. It seems like a good program and I can find little complaint about it on the internet which is rare. However Hubby says "NYET, NO, negative etc) until we see what the economy does. I understand his thinking and he's right, however it doesn't make thing any easier. I hope Obama has some magic up his sleeves to pull us out of this mess.

I guess that's all for now!

What a waste of time - but it's fun!

Ok, I must confess I caved to peer pressure and set up a facebook page. So if you happen to know my real name you can "facebook me" evidently that's a verb? I never knew it could be so addictive. I set the page up with a few little things last night and it snowballed. I had a couple of people wanting to be my "friend" as soon as I was member, I don't understand how that worked. Anyhow I've gone through and contacted people I haven't seen or spoken to since graduating high school, or college. I've spent tons of time looking to see if friends are on there but have quickly figured out that if your name is even somewhat common there will be too many John Smiths and half won't have a picture - or one you can tell who it is on it. The thing that is driving me crazy though is my inability to remember people's last names, especially people from college, I guess they were not drilled into my head like high school friends were since first grade - like one of the friends- we were two of the three that graduated together who had attended a little private school in my town.

Well I must go, the natives - aka Sonny Boy and Igor are restless, hubby is on his way home and I haven't even decided what to cook for supper tonight.

OCD or Latent Orphanage Behavior

One of the things on notice on the International Adoption boards when people ask parenting questions is the fact that it's hard to determine if a behavior our children have is "normal",
due to being post-instutional, or just some weird quirk our children have.

Igor has some "quirks" which are just so bizarre for a two year old to have, you tell me orphanage hang up or just him?

Loves to put things in garbage, if the kid finds lint, piece of paper, candy wrapper etc on the floor you can bet it's in the garbage. Don't drop anything important in my house. It has it's perks but why he's so crazy about doing it is beyond me. Wish he'd decide vaccuming was that much fun, there's tons of dog hair.

Food on his face is a major issue for him. Most two year olds I've met could run around with spaghetti ear to ear for two weeks and care less, not this one. If he gets food on his face while eating he'll take his spoon and scrape it off, much like you do when you feed an infant.

MUST have his coat zipped up and the hood up whenever it's on, don't dare just unzip it and take the hood off when you are in a store, the whole coat must come off and don't just slip it on w/o zipping it up.

The kid is fearless when it comes to many ordinary kid fears. During baths he'll take a cup and purposefully dump it right on his face, even I don't like that. Igor LOVES to have dad toss him in the air and catch him - lots of kids do- but upside down and facing away from the thrower? He says "GO" "GO" and would do it all day.

These are but a few of the odd things we've noticed lately. Mostly they are harmless and we hope he'll outgrow them. We do worry about the fearless on though, kids should have a little fear of stuff.

Well I'm trying to cook so I better cut this post short before I burn something.

Something that bugs me...

Why do people offer to do things and never follow through? A person offered a wonderful thing to me several months ago, it's the sort of thing that I didn't know to ask for, or that I even knew was a possibility, but it's the kind of thing that now that I know it exist drives me bats. Now several months later after gently asking and reminding that person about the offer it still hasn't happened. I know the person is busy, however I don't even get an up yours or I'm sorry I was wrong, I can't do that - I'm simply ignored. Unfortunately it's not something I can do, or purchase, or make, it must come from that person. The simple premise is that don't offer to do something unless you intend on following through, and if something happens where you can't follow through at least admit it.

Now that that is off my chest...

I'm now wading through the medical hoopla in order get Igor into the feeding team specialist at children's. I'm sure it's gonna take for stinking ever to get an appointment, he'll probably be able to explain to us using complicated language exactly why it takes him so long to eat and swallow by the time the appointment comes and it will be a moot point. However I must try as somewhere deep down I just think there is something more to the eating issues than my research on the the Internet can find.

Well I'm here, battling cabin fever. I saw on another blog that this is national de-lurking week so leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Last night hubby asked if there were anymore major decisions we needed to think about this weekend. I couldn't think of any, but I think we have plenty on our plate right now. It seems that these things always seem to crop up at once so not only do you have one important decision to ponder on but three or four.

I won't go into details here, but I will say the least of the decisions and probably the easiest is if we should refinance our house. That's basic math and easy enough to figure out. The other two can effect lifelong relationships with others and we don't know which path is we should take. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers that we make the right decisions for everyone involved.

I moved a few things around on the blog, the slide show of the Ukraine trip is now down at the bottom of the page, I figured I could do away with the counter now and added a recent pic of Sonny Boy and Igor for the header. I'd like to redo the background but I'm having problems with some stuff so look forward to a change.

If you happen to be an adoptive parent from the Artemovsk Baby House there is a new Yahoo group started, check it out. If enough gather on it you might find pics of your child before he/she came home. We all know how much those pics are worth to us.

Igor's eating issues are still around and driving us nuts. I plan on calling Children's hospital and talking to somebody about what we can do. The feeding therapy through the 0-3 program certainly helped but I think we have tapped their knowledge of the situation. Igor has gone from eating mostly pureed foods and will eat most table foods now. He can now chew and chew and chew and chew and chew but swallowing is not his forte at all. Meal times are similar to watching a cow chew her cud. That's when we spoon feed him, if we just put food in front of him he might eat two bites and not eat anything else at the meal. We know he has to be hungry as we are not a big snack family and he hasn't had food since the last meal. Our persistence is paying off though, I checked his weight on the growth chart the other day and he's over the 15% percent so we are making progress, he was less than 3% when he came home. It simply gets to be more than we can take sitting in front of him for at least 30 min, sometimes an hour at every meal to get a reasonable amount of food to go down and that is usually a battle. If anyone has a suggestion let me know, I'm willing to try most anything now. I really don't think letting him be hungry is an option since a few days ago he refused breakfast and lunch, had no snack but still had to be cajoled into eating supper even though he was begging food as supper was being cooked. There is some disconnect between his hunger and his ability or sensory perception of food.

Monday starts the normal routine again, Sonny Boy will be back at school, Igor will be back to his little speech therapy class and hopefully hubby's work schedule will land into a somewhat normal pattern (or normal for his job). Hopefully the worst of the season's snow is over as it's now been over a week with without significant snowfall. The '08 calendar year was the second snowiest on record for this area. I'm too good a friend with the snow shovel, I think if you look back to last winter's post I was complaining the same thing.

Well I hope the new year is good for you.