Six months!

This past week we celebrated the six-month anniversary of our "Gotcha Day", the day Ellie was placed in our arms.  Our travel group has kept in touch via Facebook, and it was fun seeing pictures from that amazing day as well as more recent photos of everyone's children.  What a blessing these children have been to their families!

Ellie recently had another minor surgery, this time for some dental work that needed to be done under anesthesia.  Both our pre-op and day surgery visits to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite were wonderful - their caring staff is top-notch, and the facilities are beautiful.  We are so lucky to have such a great resource for Ellie's care just 20 minutes from our house.  (And the ER is great, too, as we recently had the pleasure of experiencing once again with Samuel - two stitches above the eye after a run-in with the corner of the dining room table.  Never a dull moment...)  Ellie's dentist ended up doing less work than he thought he would need to, telling us after the surgery that her teeth are in excellent shape and she shouldn't need any additional dental work - other than standard cleanings - until her bone graft around age 6 or 7.  He extracted one badly-decayed tooth from the location of her cleft and "sealed" a couple of others - but no crowns, and her teeth are sparkling white after a good, professional cleaning. 

Ellie turns two on Friday and will be baptized on Saturday.  She loves playing with her brothers, more and more so Samuel - who hits her less and less as time goes on, but occasionally gives her a good wallop, leading to outbursts of dramatic tears not necessarily in proportion to the injustice that was done.  Samuel and Ellie's favorite activity these days involves removing their clothes and running around the house - Samuel in his new "big boy" underpants, Ellie in a diaper.  Samuel chants, "Tra-la-la!", imitating the title character in Patrick's "Captain Underpants" books - and Ellie echoes, "La-la!"  They are hilarious.  Ellie is talking up a storm, with no sentences or even combinations of words yet, but more and more single words and better and better pronunciation.  Her language development is so good, in fact, that she did not qualify for services through the state's "Babies Can't Wait" program, whose wonderful staff did a very thorough evaluation of Ellie right here in our home.  We'll follow up with the cleft team's speech pathologist in a few months. 

Ellie has gained three pounds and grown an inch and a half since we came home from China.  She has changed so much since that first day in our arms...

July 11, 2011

January 2012