Five Weeks Home

Saturday it will be five weeks home! That is really hard to believe. It will also be Joey's 27th birthday. Happy Birthday, Joe! We all love you here and are so proud of the father you are tuning out to be!

I thought I would do an update on how things are going around here.

Mia is really stepping up to the plate. She love loves loves being a big sister. At the park the other day a little girl asked her what her name was and she said, "Mia Collins. I'm a Big Sister." She is able to use self-control now and only touch Anna when Anna is comfortable with it, which is more and more often. If you know Mia's exuberant personality that was a VERY hard thing to accomplish.

Mia started swimming lessons once a week last week and loves it. She will start gymnastics in two weeks. I think that is enough for her at the moment. We fiddled around with sending her to preschool, but decided two structured activities were good for now. She sees her friend Lorelei once a week and also has friends Sophia and Logan that she gets together with. We do preschool activities every day here at the house. She knows all her colors, numbers to 12, about 10 letters and all her shapes. Most importantly she is now learning to share, take turns and wait with a sister around. She empties the trash can in the laundry room and puts the placemats on the table every day for her chores.

Anna is doing great. She is become less fearful every day. That girl loves to eat! We have finally realized that we have to just take her plate away. She will just clean everything off it, for the most part, and wait for more. She is ALWAYS the last one done at every meal. She has a very sweet personality, not moody or confrontational at all. She is even going to sleep in her crib on her own without crying. That was quite an accomplishment as they always held her before she went to sleep at the healing home. If Dan didn't travel and I didn't have a three year old who is just now going to bed really well I would have continued doing that with Anna for quite a while. But we all have to make adjustments to make our family work! She seems to be bonding just fine, looking me in the eyes and wanting me to hold her often.

We were able to get Anna in to see the plastic surgeon on July 30th as there was a cancellation. She will see the ENT on July 26th and have her developmental evaluation on August 22nd. We think speech will probably be the only issue there. She says about 10 words, only two of them clearly. She can make the m sound really well.

These days we are busy going to either the park, pool or both every day. We go the library about once a week and usually do some other activity about once a week. Overall, things are going really really well!