I realize its been a while since I have provided an update on our adopted kiddos. Some of you have kindly requested an update, and I would like to say I genuinely appreciate and am humbled by the continued interest and support of our family. I am completely terrible at making time to update here. As I mentioned in one of my last posts, if you would like to follow the more day to day happenings and pics of the kids, please feel free to send me a "friend request" on
Facebook with a personal message of "blog follower" and I will happily confirm! For those of you who prefer to read my infrequent updates here or are not interested in FB, I recently had an idea. Over the last few weeks, I have been working on the embassy updates for Julia, Aaron, and Avery and I got to thinking.....why not copy and paste them here? I know the language and flow may be a bit "sterile" but at least they will be very thorough, detailed, and comprehensive. I hope it is does the job ; ) Here is Miss Avery's update:
Avery is in very good
health. She has experienced no major
illnesses or hospitalizations since her adoption. She has grown remarkably. In a little over a year, she has gained 7 pounds
in weight and grown almost 5 inches taller!!
She is on no medication for behavior issues at this time.
Avery is a child who
has mental, emotional, and developmental delays. She is an extremely curious child and
struggles with learning not to touch everything. She tends to be destructive with physical
things, various adults in authority, and herself. She can be very angry and violent. We believe most of this is due to frustration
over difficulty with communication and being very strong-willed. A developmental pediatrician witnessed and
described her having oppositional defiant behaviors. Despite her struggles, she
loves to learn and is becoming very smart. We believe she behaves inappropriately as a
way to engage in any kind of personal interaction, whether positive or negative. She is extremely attention motivated.
Avery had an IQ test
administered and she scored 79. This is
above the 70 mark for intellectual disability.
The plan is to repeat the test in three years, and her score is expected
to be higher.
Avery has come very far over this year, particularly in three areas. The first and most obvious is her increased
ability to communicate. A year ago,
Avery was completely non-verbal. She can
now verbally communicate almost every need to us and her teachers. She still has a lot to learn, but it is
amazing how her vocabulary is expanding every day. We are sure this has much to do with the second
area of improvement, which is her behavior.
A year ago, Avery was constantly angry, frustrated, combative, aggressive,
destructive, and violent. For a period
of about three weeks, out of complete desperation, her developmental
pediatrician prescribed her Clonidine to help her calm down. This helped with the calming down, but we did
not like some of the effects of her being on this medicine. It made her so tired, she wasn’t herself and
behaviorally she acted like a cranky two year old. We discontinued the medicine and decided to
be patient and hope that by ignoring negative behaviors and only giving her
attention when she was behaving appropriately, she would eventually come
around. Though she still has her
moments, she is a completely different child than she was a year ago. Her “episodes” are farther and fewer between. She has improved enough that she can be
worked with and taught. Though she has
not been officially diagnosed with autism, she attends school in an autistic
environment, where she is one-on-one with staff who are trained to handle
aggressive situations. She continues to
learn how to behave and exhibit better self-control through consistent
consequences for negative behavior and positive rewards for good behavior.
The third area of improvement is academics. Avery’s
achievement scores in school are great, considering she had had no formal
education prior to her adoption. Though
she is 8 years old, they have her placed in 1st grade. Among her peers, she is scoring in the
average range in some areas. This is
incredible! Interestingly, she shows more
aptitude in the language areas over math.
Avery has also been doing gymnastics since September 2013. She started out in a special needs
class. By November, the teachers and I
felt comfortable transitioning her to a regular class. She does very well in class, has a natural
ability and is extremely flexible. She
follows instructions with minimal frustrations.
We believe this is because she enjoys this activity so much. She frequently inquires if she is going to
gymnastics that day, as she does not have a clear understanding of something
that happens once a week.
Avery eats a balanced diet and is not a picky eater. Occasionally she stuffs her mouth full of
food and then has a difficult time chewing, especially with treats like
chocolate chips or M&M’s. But for
the most part, reminding her to put one in at a time helps. She loves to drink water. There were a few bad habits we needed to work
on in regard to table manners. She
constantly wiped her mouth and hands in her shirt. In the beginning, we put a bib on her and
taught her to wipe in the bib. Then we
transitioned her to napkins. Now she
will even ask for a napkin if we’ve forgotten to give her one! She has learned to wash her hands before and
after eating.
Avery had a very difficult time with sleeping when we first brought her
home. She would not go to sleep very
easily at bedtime, staying up for hours.
Then when she would fall asleep, she would wake up during the night and
get herself into trouble, typically doing something destructive. Finally, she would be so exhausted by the
early morning hours that she would be difficult to wake up come sun up. We struggled for many months with this. One of the biggest helps was getting a video
monitor so she knew we could watch what she was doing. Getting her to stay in bed was also a major
struggle. We also began giving her
Melatonin. This was the answer. If we give her melatonin just before bedtime, she is asleep
within a half hour. And for the most
part, stays asleep. Occasionally, she
will wake up in the middle of the night, turn the light on, and start playing
with her toys. But for the most part,
she is on a regular routine. She takes
no naps.
In the beginning,
Avery did not know how to appropriately play with any toy. Her only goal if she got her hands on
anything, was to instantly break it.
She has improved greatly in this area, as now her three favorite
activities are legos, building with a wooden train set, and hand held toys that
she can play learning games on. Legos
are by far her favorite and she is quite precise in her architecture. However, if she plays too long, frustration and
aggressive behavior ensues. Sometimes,
we limit her time, although stopping her from playing her favorite toy, causes
almost just as much frustration for her.
She has a favorite baby doll that she sleeps with. She even gave her the name “baby Lisa.” She enjoys having the doll wear a matching
nightgown to hers. She gets a kick out
of “role playing” with the doll. For
example, when putting Avery to bed, we will tell baby Lisa to lie down and go
to sleep. Baby Lisa sits back up (just
like Avery gets reprimanded for) and we have to tell her to “lie down.” She finds this very funny. In the summertime, Avery LOVED the pool. She is quite the fish and would stay in the
water for hours. Every day she asked to
go in the pool and was very sad when it was time to close the pool up for the
winter.
Avery’s favorite foods
are pizza, turkey, macaroni and cheese, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Her favorite snack is pistachio nuts. She does not like spicy food or cooked bell peppers. She will gag tremendously over cooked bell
peppers. Of course, she loves chocolate,
particularly M&M’s.
Avery’s interactions
within our immediate family have improved as most of her behavior issues have
improved. Thankfully, all of her
violent, aggressive behaviors were aimed at adults who were in authority over
her. So though she attacked her dad and
me, she never hurt the other children in the home. Early on, she rarely interacted with her new
siblings. When they would attempt to
play with her, she ignored them, giving them no response whatsoever. If they persisted, she would do her best to go
somewhere else. She was clearly avoiding
any interactions with kids. In her
groupa in the orphanage, Avery was the highest functioning child. I believe she learned to ignore other
children she may have found bothersome.
She learned to avoid these situations as much as possible. Since she was always “on the move” anytime
any sibling wanted to give her some affection, such as a hug or a kiss on the
cheek, she would push them away and try to get away. We encouraged the other children, to
respect her boundaries, so as not to push her to behave aggressively toward
them.
Thankfully, she has
come around. She does not attack us
physically anymore. She still hits staff
at school once in a while. She still
prefers to play on her own. I have noticed
her asking her siblings to help her with her legos building. The kids see this as an open invitation to
play with her. She tolerates this for a
while, but eventually she gets frustrated and goes away from the activity to
sit somewhere nearby and cry. But this
is an improvement and a step towards interactive play. She is much better about accepting love and
affection from us, including the kids.
She loves to play wrestle. She
will even snuggle in bed with us on our lazy mornings.
Avery’s relationships
with our extended families have been a slower process. This is because of the behavioral issues
already mentioned, along with less day to day contact. Early on, we limited her contact to many
additional people outside of our immediate family and in public to encourage
bonding within our immediate family and for safety reasons. As this is not so much a concern now,
extended family has had some time to start developing a relationship with her.
She is particularly
fond of her Uncle Bret, who visits most frequently. He also accompanied me to Ukraine during the
second trip to bring her home. We are
not sure if she favors him because she remembers him as someone she met early
on, or because of the frequency of his visits.
He is the only relative she asks about when not present.
One of the first things we had to teach Avery was to use toilet paper
when using the bathroom. We noticed in
the orphanage she would urinate and simply jump off the toilet and go. Seemingly, this was not regularly monitored
nor corrected by the nannies. During the
first few weeks at home with us she was regularly pooping in her pants. This stopped on its own very soon. We assume this short lived problem was due to
adjusting to her new home with many new distractions that caused her to have a
difficult time getting to the bathroom when she needed to go. Over most of the first year, she would wet
and/or poop herself during the night. We
kept her in diapers and worked with positive reinforcement to help her learn to
keep herself clean and dry. As she
improved and kept herself dry for a solid week, we discontinued the
diapers. She has not soiled herself
since.
So there it is. Stay tuned.....Julia's or Aaron's will soon follow.......
