Treasued Friend, You will be missed

The world lost a bright soul this weekend. 

My dear friend and fellow adoptive single Mama to two beautiful little girls, passed away sometime late friday night.  Cindy was an amazing person, a wonderful mama, and a treasured friend.  Our community is reeling as we all worry over her beautiful children and the impact this will have on their lives.  There are clear paths as far as who they will live with, but the path is not clear as we think about all these poor girls will go through.  This is not the first mother they have lost, but the second. They are too young for such tragedy.  Cindy was someone who could light the room with her happiness- when she smiled, when she was happy, joy simply radiated from her.  We will miss her terribly.
With love dear friend, we will always think of you.

Creeping and Crawling and Gummies, Oh My!

We had our Neuro-Reorg intake appointment a bit over a week ago, and now this is what our "oh so early" mornings look like:

It’s in the dark, but you can kind of see Violet tummy crawling in the video. We have our schedule from Nina, our NR Practicioner, of all the things we need to do each day. If you look at the paper she gave us, it seems relatively simple- Vestibular activities for 15 seconds 8 times a day, brushing 5 or 8 times a day, bony joint stimulation (hand held massager on bony joints) for 30 seconds 10 times a day, tummy crawling 5 minutes 4 times a day, patterns, regular crawling, etc. But when you actually lay that onto a schedule and fit it into your day between waking up, eating, daycare, making dinner and getting girls into bed, it’s pretty much every waking moment that we are together.


To call it “grueling” at this point is a bit of an understatement. 5 minutes of Tummy crawling does not take 5 minutes. It takes 10-15 minutes, because she takes breaks, it takes HUGE amounts of cheerleading on our part, tummy crawling ourselves, etc. Everything takes much more than the 15 seconds or 5 or 10 minutes that you actually need to DO the things for. As she gets used to it, and we get used to it, it will get easier. Already after a week and a few days, there are things that are easier, but also things that are harder. For example, we started off too optimistic with patterns- this is a thing we do with her where she lays flat on a table and we stand on either side and move her legs and arms alternately (cross patterns) as though she were crawling (but flat on the table) or hand up and knee bent at right angles one side and both straight on the other side (homolateral). We are supposed to be doing 60 of each of these 2x per day. The most we got out of Violet so far was about 6 each side of ONE type of pattern, and she is way overwhelmed by them. So we are taking a few days off and will start slow again tomorrow or the next day, first just being comfortable laying on her tummy- something we found out she has no experience with!!! Then just turning her head back and forth after another day, then moving an arm and leg maybe 1 or 2 times each side the next day, and hopefully getting up to a few each side after another day or two. We’ll get there. It’s more important to do them correctly than to do the number you need to do. Of course BEST is to do how many you need, all correct, but we’ll have to work our way up to that.

As far as the tummy creeping goes, we had a very rough start last week. Then one day I thought…okay, I give….everyone else uses bribes, I’ll get out the gummies. MIRACLE. That day she did a full lap of tummy crawling (the FIRST one) when there was gummy at the end!!! So we rotate between various rewards- orange slices, gummies, gold fish crackers, yogurt sticks that we keep in the freezer (for the last one of the night), tomatoes, M&M’s, whatever works. This morning we had one lap for a gummy (I have said “On your tummy for a gummy!” more times in the last week than I can possibly count), one for 2 goldfish crackers, and two for two orange slices each. If orange slices would work everytime, you know I’d be doing it, but these tummy crawling rounds are TOUGH, and they are tough emotionally because they are working that pre-verbal part of your brain. They are working those segments where the dark scary stuff is buried, and they can cause kids to become very emotional. Violet so far will sometimes get very angry and not want to do anymore, and sometimes need to stop and cuddle between rounds, and sometimes just need to lay on her back and suck her fingers. She has even laid on her back a few times to play with her feet like little babies do. Very interesting. The thing that both girls love though is that after any creeping or crawling, you need to do a “pillow squash” or a bear hug. A “pillow squash” is where they lay on the couch and you put a big pillow over their tummies and lay on them- it puts pressure on them like a big bear hug and they LOVE it. Bear hugs do the same, and they both love them!

The VERY FIRST blog of a single adoptive Mama I ever found when I started my paperwork for Maddie was My Chinese Dream -Alison and Mali- and a few years back, upon checking in on her blog (because I still check in from time to time), I saw that she had taken a semester off from teaching to be at home with Mali to concentrate on some attachment stuff they were doing. It was Crawling….spinning, etc. I now know that they were doing Neuroreorg- how interesting that it was the first blog I ever found on Chinese adoption and I followed it so religiously for a long time, and now…look…here we are…in the same place….