Not always butterflies and rainbows! :)

Well, we had our first real foot kicking, tear-streaming, tantrum this morning.  He got told "no" twice in a row and that was just too much!  Baba was talking to me and wouldn't stop mid-sentence to play and then I had the bad judgement of saying no "Despicable Me"  before breakfast.  In fact, the tantrum was probably partly due to the not having had breakfast yet but to a 3 year old, sometimes 2 nos in a row is just more than they can handle.  I held him in my arms and let his little heels drum the couch while I sang "Jesus loves me" and "Amazing Grace" until he settled.  Which he eventually did. 

Now, three hours later and a bowl of cereal, 2 apples and some trail mix later, he is finally getting to watch his movie.  I wonder when he watches it does he understand that the girls are living in an orphanage and that they get adopted?  It is one of his go to movies when he is upset with me and each time I wonder if he understands that plot of the movie on some level.

In two days, Jaden will have his surgery.  It looks like he will now be the 9:15 spot because a child younger than him is now on the surgery list.  He will have to be at the hospital at 7:45 am, which means leaving home at 6:50 or so.  I am worried that without food we may get to see tantrum #2.  Honestly, I'm more worried that he will think we are withholding food arbitrarily and that that may damage his trust in us some.  Praying that he sleeps until right before we have to leave and that he doesn't have one of his ravenously hungry wake-ups. 

When Laura was little and had surgery and found out she couldn't have breakfast, she tried to negotiate:  "Cracker?"  nope, "Water?"  nope...but we could explain it a little better to her.  She doesn't seem scarred from it, hopefully Jaden will adapt as well as his sister.  :)

8 Weeks post-Gotcha!

It's very hard to believe that we are now 8 weeks into forever. 

In some ways, it feels like Jaden has been part of the family forever and in other ways it doesn't seem like it could already be 8 weeks.  Weird, huh?

He is doing exceptionally well.  He is working to learn English and doing much better in 8 weeks than I did in 6 months of Mandarin lessons.  He understands much more than he can say but has learned lots of words.  I have a hard time sometimes knowing what he knows the meaning of and what he is just repeating but he can mimic almost anything that we say now. 

We've begun letting him have some time at the office while we see both patients.  Our long term goal is for him to be able to spend time at the office playing or watching movies while we see patients for 3.5 hours at a time.  This summer Jaden will spend his days with his GeGe and JieJie and then in the fall he will start Pre-K.  He loves our staff and is being spoiled rotten by them.  Today Karen brought in a bag of clothes for him.  One of the shirts had robots on it and he loved it!  He insisted that we put it on him immediately and didn't take it off until PJ time.  He has a little desk that he enjoys but really likes to sit at Baba's desk since it has the computer.  He has had such a wonderful reception to the office and to the community.  The other day a wonderful prayer warrior brought him a "happy" as a welcome home.  We got to listen to "Jesus loves the little children" on the electronic book about three hundred times that day.  He loved seeing a Chinese child in the book.  :)  At a church meeting, one of the women asked which Dr Suess book he doens't have as she wants to get one for him.  Marsha (my office manager) is constantly finding things that Jaden "needs" for his time at the office.  Just this week, he has started to let some of the ladies at the office pick him up.  Tonight, after NaiNai and YeYe had dinner with us, as they were getting ready to leave, he told his NaiNai that he loved her for the first time.  He has just been showered with attention and well wishes since we have come out of hibernation.  He can't help but feel loved.  Everyone that sees him smiles at him; he's a hard kid not to love.  :) 

We went to Six Flags Over TX this weekend and he had a blast.  He went on all of the kiddy rides multiple times each.  He isn't tall enough to do many of the adult rides but he did all that he could.  He loved the Pirate ship that rocks back and forth and he talked JieJie into the Sombrero ride 3 or 4 times.  She wins big sister points for that.  He enjoyed the ride was wasn't very sure about the soaking at the end of Aquaman.  He loves the bath but doesn't like his clothes to be wet.  Unfortunately, Six Flags frowns on naked boys, even if they are just 3 years old!  He is really going to love the park when he gets just a few inches taller.  We also went to a local park to meet with my niece and her family and he had a great time.  He got knocked down by a big boy once and an adult once and didn't even give them a dirty look (I did that for him btw).  In truth though, both guys were really nice about helping to pick him up and asked him if he was ok.  He did amazingly well on the trip.  It was a total of about 9 hours of driving and he never cried or complained at all.  He did do the happy dance when we got home and was very happy to see his "housie." 

While we were out of town, Dan (our Rent a Guy friend) and his son put our cedar Sky fort together.  He had had so much fun on the playground we thought he would be thrilled and we waited until morning to show him.  It didn't have the swings up yet but had the slide and the crows nest and the fort.  When he saw it this morning, he looked at me and said "Jaben's housie?"  and when I agreed he went out to look at it.  He checkout out all 3 levels of it.  He then got upset and kept telling me "no, no!"  I finally figured out the problem.  He thought we were making him move out.  Once we got the swings up and it looked more like a playground, Tim told him (through google translate) that this was where we could play but we would all still live together in the big housie.  That made him very happy and he spent several hours with various family members playing and exploring.  All is well.

Tomorrow he has pre-op for his surgery.  We have to go to St Francis for a visit and then over to the pediatric dentist for more paperwork.  We did his lab at the office today and drew a half million tubes of blood.  He was a trooper!  I told him before we left (again, thru google translate) that he would have blood work done today.  He clearly understood and got sad.  When we got to the office lab, he crawled up in my lap and behaved beautifully.  He cried giant tears but never wiggled and never tried to pull away.  He stroked my nurse, Karen's hand while she was holding that arm still.  Donna did great!  One stick, no searching and we were hopefully able to get everything we need.  There are lots of tests that we need to get.  He got a Buzz Lightyear sticker afterward and settled down immediately.  He didn't seem to hold a grudge at all.  :)
That was a big worry for me; I didn't want him to hate to come to the office. 

Prayers for normal lab work.  No lead problems, no hepatitis, good titers on all of his vaccinations, well you get the point.  After this lab is back, we can know with confidence that his health is clear. 

He is still really enjoying his book time!  He is currently asleep on "Brown bear, Brown bear"  He'll wake up, turn the page and put his head back on the book.  He is already learning the reading through osmosis technique that med students use.  :) 

Five weeks home. :)

It is 5 weeks ago today that Jaden became a US citizen.  He has made so many strides since then; it is hard to even keep up.

He is becoming more "Americanized" with his eating, well sort of anyway.  He loves Mexican food and gives the double fisted "Yea!" when he hears we are going to El Charro for lunch, he loves pizza as long as Baba will cut it into little pieces for him and he loves home cooked meals at NaiNai's house.  He still isn't enthused about chicken or beef but most other things make him happy.  When he first got to the US, he avoided the M&M's in the trail mix and preferred the nuts and raisins, now he still loves the nuts and raisins but the M&M's are the first to be eaten.  (I justify it by saying we are practicing our colors with them. (:  )  He eats pretty well non-stop while awake but still isn't gaining much weight.  I suppose if I was as busy as he is, I wouldn't worry about my weight either.  He is up from 28 lbs to 31.2 lbs.  At almost 4 years old, that's pretty skinny but it is better than he was.

Behaviorally, he is a pretty normal 3, almost 4, year old.  He is clever and cute and sometimes umm, determined?  He loves to watch movies and some of his favorites are "Toy Story," "Beauty and the Beast" and "Shrek."  He has an incredibly long attention span at times.  He will spend 90 minutes at a time, entertaining himself with his building materials or Mitch's train set if he is in the mood.  He loves Disney things, but as a Sanford, could he have avoided it?  His current favorite character is Buzz Lightyear and I wish you could hear him say it!  Precious.  As I type, he is wearing his new Buzz Lightyear pajamas in bed and he and Baba are reading "The Very Busy Spider" together.  He saw his first in theater movie this week, "Wreck it Ralph" and was engrossed the whole time.  We followed that a few days later with his first play at the Performing Arts Center, "Peter Pan."  He had some belly laughs and a few "wow!"s but seemed to like Cathy Rigby's flying the best. 

He got to spend a few hours together alone with his big brother Friday night while we were at an Emmaus meeting.  We found out that he knew a new word in English.  Mitch called us while we were on the way home and asked what "Pea Joos" meant.  (Sometimes Jaden speaks Jadenese that only mom and dad understand.)  Well, the only thing that we knew that sounded similar to that in Mandarin was "beer" and we hoped he wasn't asking his brother for a trip to a bar.  When we got home we found out what he wanted .  Since Mitch couldn't understand "Pea Joos" he said "car shirt" instead.  He wanted his Cars PJs.  I love watching him learn to put words together.

He loves books and loves to be read to at night.  He can say the names of some of his favorite books to include, "Go Dog, Go!," "One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue Fish," "Caterpillar" and tries very hard to say "Cinderella" although in truth it sounds more like "Kahuna" for some reason.  Like I said, he is proficient at Jadenese but at least we know what he is trying to say.  He typically wants to read 5-10 books every night before bedtime and any book that has a cat, even peripherally, in the story gets preference.   He likes to end with "Sam's Rainbow" (which we read as "Jaden's Rainbow") and "Goodnight Bear" most nights.  He is so funny about bed time.  When he gets tired, he will flip to the end of whatever book we are reading and say "The End!" and shut the book.  At that point, he cuddles in and is usually asleep within minutes. 

He still wallows all over us at night, his skin hunger is evident still.  Perhaps he will never outgrow that need to be comforted with frequent touch.  He doesn't yet want strangers to hug him but will give high fives now.

He has almost completely gotten over picking necessities as his precious objects for the day.  Tonight, his picks were:  the 4 gingerbread men from the Candyland game, the felt basket that Joyce got him for Valentine's day, some matchbox cars and a lint roller (ok, we do have 2 cats and a dog, I guess I can see why that would be precious.)  I love knowing that he feels that he will be fed and cared for.  He hasn't included fruit with his precious objects in several weeks now.

We came to a new realization today.  One of the very key factors in Jaden coming to join our family was the influence of another adoptive family, the Nichols.  Gael probably arrived in China to get her little girl on the very day that Jaden was left in a stairwell, waiting to be found by his family, us, 3 years later.  When his birth mother was making what had to be a devastating, heart-rending step, she had no idea that the woman who would lead her son to his forever family was somewhere in her country.  I can't imagine the helplessness she must have felt that day, knowing that she couldn't give him the medical care he needed and having to make an impossible decision for her tiny son.  I can't be sorry that she made that decision but I can feel sad for her that it had to be made.  The choice she made will be a good one for Jaden; I hope she has found peace.  I just wish I had a way to let her know that her son is healthy and well loved.