Thursday, July 12, 2007
Summer Holidays
Here are a summary of the daycare photos we received, we were happy to get such an unexpected gift. The crowns were for their second birthday. Dad has survived 2 days at home with the girls this week (lots of time at the park - especially on the swings) so things are looking up for the longer home stays in August. We are going to try some water play in the back yard this afternoon (they like playing in the cat dish so much, you know it will be a hit). Bye for now.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Daycare Done!
Today was the last day of daycare for a month so the girls will be spending some quality time with Mama, then grampa and gramma then the G clan at the cottage, then Dada, you get the idea. Our daycare lady gave us a CD with quite a few pictures on it which is great. We will get around to posting some of them soon. For now I couldn't resist posting this one, I smile every time I see it. We have already taught the girls that pots are only to be used as props and should never contain actual food...
E has turned into a real helper around the house. As you can see below, she is helping to distribute the food she drops on the floor around her chair more evenly around the kitchen.
A doesn't have time to be domestic, she is all about the snazzy footware...
Below the girls relax with their new best friends - Pandas from uncle P.
Yesterday A said her first sentence "I want that" and pointed at a healthy nutritious carrot (OK so it was a timbit - would you waste your first sentence on a carrot?) After the elation passed I realized this might not be the best sentence to learn. By the time they turn 16 and get their drivers' licenses, I can see the shiny new red Mustang convertible in the driveway after the umpteenth practice of "I want that". In case you think they will have me wrapped around their collective fingers you are wrong - I am sure they will have asked for a Porsche (Mommy has expensive taste) so they will have learned to compromise. I am all about teaching life lessons...
E has turned into a real helper around the house. As you can see below, she is helping to distribute the food she drops on the floor around her chair more evenly around the kitchen.
A doesn't have time to be domestic, she is all about the snazzy footware...
Below the girls relax with their new best friends - Pandas from uncle P.
Monday, July 02, 2007
Happy uh, Gotcha, day.
Hi everyone.
It is one year ago today that DoT and I were handed twin girls in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China. It feels like about 5 years. Today, in honour of the day, the girls decided to let DoT and I sleep in until 7:35 a.m. It was wonderful. I think I can count on one hand the number of times E has slept past 6:30 a.m. And, in fact, she's up almost always up at 6:00 a.m., like clockwork. So this morning was a real treat.
So, I'm not really sure what to call this day. In the world of international adopters (and maybe domestic adopters too, who knows), most people refer to it as "Gotcha day". I'm not sure I like the term because it sounds to me a little bit possessive... almost like you're acquiring a new car or some great piece of property you've been eying for awhile. I've heard a few people call it "Forever Family Day", and I like the idea of reinforcing to the kids that this time when they were handed over it was for forever. But still "Forever Family Day" has a bit of a cheesy, 'after-school special' kind of sound to it. So, I'm taking suggestions for a name for the day. If I can't come up with anything better, it will probably end up being "Gotcha day", so please help me out and give me some ideas.
On one of the blogs that I visit regularly, the author puts a picture every year, on the anniversary of their referral day, of their child holding up her referral picture. I really liked this idea, because you have a picture every year taken at the same place and holding the same 'prop' - so you can see how the child grows and changes. Well of course, referral day rolled around and I was unprepared. I had the referral photos, but hadn't had them enlarged to a size that would have been okay for being in another picture. So I decided to do it on "Gotcha Day" (seriously, help me here) instead. So, below you will see pictures of E and A holding photos of themselves taken when we got them in Nanchang. Obviously they're not happy in the Nanchang photos, but the pictures really do reflect their state of mind at that time. Happily, it has changed. And yeah, while I may have had the foresight to get photos developed and enlarged for this picture, clearly I didn't have the wherewithal to comb their hair before taking these pictures. And they could both use a haircut.
In other news, some of you may remember a post I put up awhile ago about a young Vietnamese orphan who needed lifesaving surgery to remove a tumour from his face. Well, last week he arrived in Canada to spend the next four months at the Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, where they will be doing some tests and hopefully performing surgery to remove the tumour. There was an article in the Globe and Mail last Thursday, which I've copied and put in below (hopefully I'm not breaking any copyright laws here...)
Race against time to save Vietnamese boy's life
An Ottawa charity is inspiring hundreds to help in its quest to give an orphan life-saving surgery in Canada
HAYLEY MICK
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
June 28, 2007 at 4:35 AM EDT
Sitting on his bed in Hanoi, Hoang Son Pham plunged his small hand into the parcel sent from Canada. The 10-year-old Vietnamese orphan dug deep, past dozens of letters and cards addressed to him, and drew out something hard: a wooden airplane. Son Pham said nothing - the tumour in his face made speech impossible - but he gave a lopsided smile as he cruised the toy through the air: a sign of things to come. Late tonight, two months after receiving that goodwill package, Son Pham is expected to step off a jet in Toronto. Waiting for him will be a small group of elated Canadians who, for more than a year, have raced against time and a growing mass of blood vessels to bring him here for surgery.
"We want to welcome him," said Tan Ngo, a staff member with the Children's Bridge Foundation, an Ottawa-based charity that provides funding and support for international orphans. "But we have to be very careful."
Hoang Son Pham, a 10-year-old from Vietnam, will remain in Toronto for the next four months as doctors try to remove a tumour from his face. Next week, Son Pham will undergo diagnostic tests at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Doctors will determine whether the boy is fit to undergo a life-threatening operation that would remove the massive knot of blood vessels - called hemangioma - and save him from starvation.
But this is not only a story of an unlucky child who may be rescued by Western medicine. It is also about a small group of Canadians who decided to make a difference in a boy's life, and the snowball effect that decision is now having across the country.
It began last March, when Kate Maslen, a 25-year-old manager with Children's Bridge, delivered equipment to an orphanage that houses about 800 children about an hour's drive north of Hanoi. Dozens of children pushed to get close to the tall, blond Canadian woman, but it was a boy elbowed to the back of the crowd - the one with the giant tumour on the left side of his face - that she could not forget.
"This little guy snared my heartstrings," Ms. Maslen said. She learned that Son Pham was dropped off by his parents when he was 3. Staff at the Hai Duong orphanage said the parents were likely too poor to care for the boy, or afraid that his deformity would bring bad luck - a local superstition. Over the years, the tumour grew. Now, it was obliterating Son Pham's nose and shrinking his mouth to the size of a walnut. Orphanage officials feared that without treatment, he would soon be unable to eat or even to breathe.
Ms. Maslen brought photos of Son Pham back to Ottawa. She wanted to help, but her resolve was steeled when she received a handwritten note from Son Pham. "Dear Aunt Kate," he wrote with someone's help. "Please help me."
Others came on board, deciding to fundraise and seek out medical care for the boy; one of those people was Mr. Ngo. Mr. Ngo understood rough beginnings. Thirty years ago, Canada scooped him out of a Vietnamese refugee camp and gave him a new life in Ottawa. His two children grew up to be a pediatrician and a teacher, and Mr. Ngo dedicated his life to helping others. Mr. Ngo returned several times to Hanoi and visited Son Pham. During one trip in March, Mr. Ngo fell ill eating 50-cent soup from roadside vendors because he wanted to donate the rest of his food stipend, provided by his work, to Son Pham's cause. He also brought the boy a present from Canada: Halls cough drops, which he melted in water, and gave him to drink. Halls are available in Vietnam, too, but "I wanted to send him a message, that people in Canada loved him," Mr. Ngo said in an interview with The Globe and Mail from Hanoi.
In Canada, Children's Bridge was appealing for funds. Son Pham touched a nerve: This spring, more than $125,000 was raised from hundreds of families, much of it from Canada's Vietnamese community and parents of children from international adoptions. A six-year-old boy from Halifax donated all $8 from his savings: "I hope that's enough for your surgery," he wrote in a note to Son Pham, which Mr. Ngo delivered to the boy, along with dozens of other letters of support and the toy plane. Still, no one at Children's Bridge knew whether surgery was even possible. They had faced a setback in March, when a team of U.S. surgeons visiting Hanoi said local hospitals weren't equipped to support a complex surgery.
The group then pinned their hopes on two Canadian hospitals for children - one in Toronto and one in Halifax. In early May, the group received hopeful news. Doctors at The Hospital for Sick Children had given them the green light to send Son Pham to Toronto. Sick Kids spokesperson Lisa Lipkin said yesterday that doctors will perform Son Pham's first tests next week. "Over the next few weeks, a team from Sick Kids will evaluate his condition and determine what treatment is possible," she said.
A Sick Kids charity called the Herbie Fund, which provides children with operations not available in their home countries, will foot the surgery bill if doctors decide they can do it. A Vietnamese family living in Markham, a north-Toronto suburb, has agreed to host Son Pham and his nanny for the four months he will stay in Toronto. "It's a little surreal," Ms. Maslen said. "It's wonderful he's here and that we're one step closer, but we're not quite there yet."
It is one year ago today that DoT and I were handed twin girls in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China. It feels like about 5 years. Today, in honour of the day, the girls decided to let DoT and I sleep in until 7:35 a.m. It was wonderful. I think I can count on one hand the number of times E has slept past 6:30 a.m. And, in fact, she's up almost always up at 6:00 a.m., like clockwork. So this morning was a real treat.
So, I'm not really sure what to call this day. In the world of international adopters (and maybe domestic adopters too, who knows), most people refer to it as "Gotcha day". I'm not sure I like the term because it sounds to me a little bit possessive... almost like you're acquiring a new car or some great piece of property you've been eying for awhile. I've heard a few people call it "Forever Family Day", and I like the idea of reinforcing to the kids that this time when they were handed over it was for forever. But still "Forever Family Day" has a bit of a cheesy, 'after-school special' kind of sound to it. So, I'm taking suggestions for a name for the day. If I can't come up with anything better, it will probably end up being "Gotcha day", so please help me out and give me some ideas.
On one of the blogs that I visit regularly, the author puts a picture every year, on the anniversary of their referral day, of their child holding up her referral picture. I really liked this idea, because you have a picture every year taken at the same place and holding the same 'prop' - so you can see how the child grows and changes. Well of course, referral day rolled around and I was unprepared. I had the referral photos, but hadn't had them enlarged to a size that would have been okay for being in another picture. So I decided to do it on "Gotcha Day" (seriously, help me here) instead. So, below you will see pictures of E and A holding photos of themselves taken when we got them in Nanchang. Obviously they're not happy in the Nanchang photos, but the pictures really do reflect their state of mind at that time. Happily, it has changed. And yeah, while I may have had the foresight to get photos developed and enlarged for this picture, clearly I didn't have the wherewithal to comb their hair before taking these pictures. And they could both use a haircut.
In other news, some of you may remember a post I put up awhile ago about a young Vietnamese orphan who needed lifesaving surgery to remove a tumour from his face. Well, last week he arrived in Canada to spend the next four months at the Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, where they will be doing some tests and hopefully performing surgery to remove the tumour. There was an article in the Globe and Mail last Thursday, which I've copied and put in below (hopefully I'm not breaking any copyright laws here...)
Race against time to save Vietnamese boy's life
An Ottawa charity is inspiring hundreds to help in its quest to give an orphan life-saving surgery in Canada
HAYLEY MICK
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
June 28, 2007 at 4:35 AM EDT
Sitting on his bed in Hanoi, Hoang Son Pham plunged his small hand into the parcel sent from Canada. The 10-year-old Vietnamese orphan dug deep, past dozens of letters and cards addressed to him, and drew out something hard: a wooden airplane. Son Pham said nothing - the tumour in his face made speech impossible - but he gave a lopsided smile as he cruised the toy through the air: a sign of things to come. Late tonight, two months after receiving that goodwill package, Son Pham is expected to step off a jet in Toronto. Waiting for him will be a small group of elated Canadians who, for more than a year, have raced against time and a growing mass of blood vessels to bring him here for surgery.
"We want to welcome him," said Tan Ngo, a staff member with the Children's Bridge Foundation, an Ottawa-based charity that provides funding and support for international orphans. "But we have to be very careful."
Hoang Son Pham, a 10-year-old from Vietnam, will remain in Toronto for the next four months as doctors try to remove a tumour from his face. Next week, Son Pham will undergo diagnostic tests at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Doctors will determine whether the boy is fit to undergo a life-threatening operation that would remove the massive knot of blood vessels - called hemangioma - and save him from starvation.
But this is not only a story of an unlucky child who may be rescued by Western medicine. It is also about a small group of Canadians who decided to make a difference in a boy's life, and the snowball effect that decision is now having across the country.
It began last March, when Kate Maslen, a 25-year-old manager with Children's Bridge, delivered equipment to an orphanage that houses about 800 children about an hour's drive north of Hanoi. Dozens of children pushed to get close to the tall, blond Canadian woman, but it was a boy elbowed to the back of the crowd - the one with the giant tumour on the left side of his face - that she could not forget.
"This little guy snared my heartstrings," Ms. Maslen said. She learned that Son Pham was dropped off by his parents when he was 3. Staff at the Hai Duong orphanage said the parents were likely too poor to care for the boy, or afraid that his deformity would bring bad luck - a local superstition. Over the years, the tumour grew. Now, it was obliterating Son Pham's nose and shrinking his mouth to the size of a walnut. Orphanage officials feared that without treatment, he would soon be unable to eat or even to breathe.
Ms. Maslen brought photos of Son Pham back to Ottawa. She wanted to help, but her resolve was steeled when she received a handwritten note from Son Pham. "Dear Aunt Kate," he wrote with someone's help. "Please help me."
Others came on board, deciding to fundraise and seek out medical care for the boy; one of those people was Mr. Ngo. Mr. Ngo understood rough beginnings. Thirty years ago, Canada scooped him out of a Vietnamese refugee camp and gave him a new life in Ottawa. His two children grew up to be a pediatrician and a teacher, and Mr. Ngo dedicated his life to helping others. Mr. Ngo returned several times to Hanoi and visited Son Pham. During one trip in March, Mr. Ngo fell ill eating 50-cent soup from roadside vendors because he wanted to donate the rest of his food stipend, provided by his work, to Son Pham's cause. He also brought the boy a present from Canada: Halls cough drops, which he melted in water, and gave him to drink. Halls are available in Vietnam, too, but "I wanted to send him a message, that people in Canada loved him," Mr. Ngo said in an interview with The Globe and Mail from Hanoi.
In Canada, Children's Bridge was appealing for funds. Son Pham touched a nerve: This spring, more than $125,000 was raised from hundreds of families, much of it from Canada's Vietnamese community and parents of children from international adoptions. A six-year-old boy from Halifax donated all $8 from his savings: "I hope that's enough for your surgery," he wrote in a note to Son Pham, which Mr. Ngo delivered to the boy, along with dozens of other letters of support and the toy plane. Still, no one at Children's Bridge knew whether surgery was even possible. They had faced a setback in March, when a team of U.S. surgeons visiting Hanoi said local hospitals weren't equipped to support a complex surgery.
The group then pinned their hopes on two Canadian hospitals for children - one in Toronto and one in Halifax. In early May, the group received hopeful news. Doctors at The Hospital for Sick Children had given them the green light to send Son Pham to Toronto. Sick Kids spokesperson Lisa Lipkin said yesterday that doctors will perform Son Pham's first tests next week. "Over the next few weeks, a team from Sick Kids will evaluate his condition and determine what treatment is possible," she said.
A Sick Kids charity called the Herbie Fund, which provides children with operations not available in their home countries, will foot the surgery bill if doctors decide they can do it. A Vietnamese family living in Markham, a north-Toronto suburb, has agreed to host Son Pham and his nanny for the four months he will stay in Toronto. "It's a little surreal," Ms. Maslen said. "It's wonderful he's here and that we're one step closer, but we're not quite there yet."
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Happy birthday, happy birthday
2 YEARS OLD TODAY!
No time to blog right now, but here are a couple of pictures of the girls heading off to Jane's this morning. They'll have a little party there before being picked up just after lunch so they're home in time for our 1-year report visit with our social worker.
Have a great 'E&A birthday', everyone!
No time to blog right now, but here are a couple of pictures of the girls heading off to Jane's this morning. They'll have a little party there before being picked up just after lunch so they're home in time for our 1-year report visit with our social worker.
Have a great 'E&A birthday', everyone!
Sunday, June 17, 2007
No news is.. just no news.
Hi again all! So here we are. Another two weeks has passed since my last blog entry and still I have nothing exciting to tell you. Life marches on in Ottawa. What's new, you ask? Well, that would basically be nothing. A is sick today, has been for the last couple of days actually, but nothing serious. Both girls have runny noses and coughs, but A also has a bit of a fever. We haven't had to give her anything, though, for the last four or five hours, so hopefully she's past it. (Generally when either of the girls has a fever we have to alternate Advil and Tylenol every few hours to keep their temperature anywhere near normal.)
Last week we got an email from our adoption agency reminding us that we needed to complete our 12-month post-adoption report with our social worker. Wow, it's almost 12 months already (it will be 12 months in early July). I can't believe it.
Last weekend we had a babysitter stay with the girls while DoT and I went to the last Orpheus theatre production of the season. J, the teen girl who looked after the girls, had no problem with them, and they went to bed fine for her. So, its official, the only ones who these two give any trouble to is DoT and I. J actually said she thinks these two are the easiest of all the kids she babysits. Or maybe it was just beginners luck. We'll see, I guess, since J will be babysitting again this weekend.
I don't have any pictures for you today. A and E are getting harder to photograph since they can move a lot faster these days and don't seem to want to stand still. But I'll try to update again soon, with some pictures.
Oh yeah, for all of you who urged me to see a doctor about the lump on my hand... turns out it is a ganglion cyst, nothing to worry about. And just as my doctor said it might, it seems to be going away on its own.
K...
Last week we got an email from our adoption agency reminding us that we needed to complete our 12-month post-adoption report with our social worker. Wow, it's almost 12 months already (it will be 12 months in early July). I can't believe it.
Last weekend we had a babysitter stay with the girls while DoT and I went to the last Orpheus theatre production of the season. J, the teen girl who looked after the girls, had no problem with them, and they went to bed fine for her. So, its official, the only ones who these two give any trouble to is DoT and I. J actually said she thinks these two are the easiest of all the kids she babysits. Or maybe it was just beginners luck. We'll see, I guess, since J will be babysitting again this weekend.
I don't have any pictures for you today. A and E are getting harder to photograph since they can move a lot faster these days and don't seem to want to stand still. But I'll try to update again soon, with some pictures.
Oh yeah, for all of you who urged me to see a doctor about the lump on my hand... turns out it is a ganglion cyst, nothing to worry about. And just as my doctor said it might, it seems to be going away on its own.
K...
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
So, uh, anybody out there?
I know, it's been a really long time since I've posted, so you've all probably scurried on over to more interesting, and certainly more 'au courant', blogs. What excuse can I use... hmmm.... um.... yeah, okay, so I've got nothing. But to make up for it, I'm going to fill this post up with pictures! Because hey, what's better than pictures?!
First a couple of shots of the girls looking oh so cool in their new shades...
Then a bunch taken a couple of weeks ago at the Tulip Festival...
As you can see, they had a blast running around with DoT...
Okay, so that's it for tonight. Does that make up for my long absence?
In any case I'm off to Google me some medical diagnoses (always fun). I have a really cool bump moving around under my skin on my left hand. Doesn't cause me any problems, but it does kind of put in mind of horror movies, or the X-files, and I kind of expect to see thousands of little alien bugs come streaming out of my hand at any time now. Well that certainly would give me fodder for my next blog post. :-)
First a couple of shots of the girls looking oh so cool in their new shades...
Then a bunch taken a couple of weeks ago at the Tulip Festival...
As you can see, they had a blast running around with DoT...
Okay, so that's it for tonight. Does that make up for my long absence?
In any case I'm off to Google me some medical diagnoses (always fun). I have a really cool bump moving around under my skin on my left hand. Doesn't cause me any problems, but it does kind of put in mind of horror movies, or the X-files, and I kind of expect to see thousands of little alien bugs come streaming out of my hand at any time now. Well that certainly would give me fodder for my next blog post. :-)
Monday, May 07, 2007
Blogger's block...
Uurrgghh. I have blogger's block. I know I should update the blog, but I can't think of a single interesting thing to say. Oh sure, I could tell you about the boring, old stuff going on, which I've already told you many times before (oh, will we ever leave the sleep saga behind?!) But I'm getting sick of typing about it, and I'm sure you're getting sick of hearing about it.
Now that the girls are running around, there is not as many new and exciting "firsts" to tell you about. Although on Sunday of this week we all went to their first birthday party. Our neighbours little girl turned 2 on Sunday and we went to one of those indoor play places. You know the kind... there's a big play structure that requires lots of climbing and contortions for anyone with little kids. DoT and I followed A and E around, and around, and around, helping them over some of the hurdles that were just a bit too big for kids their size. Anyhow, they had a great time, and DoT and feel like we did the circuit about a hundred times. I know it wasn't nearly that many, but still, I'm a bit sore today. (Sorry, no pictures since I forgot my camera.)
Also, April 28th was the one year anniversary of when we got the referral for the girls. In honour of the occasion I went back and read the post we made that day, and some of the posts over the weeks following that. Wow, it took me right back. I can't believe it's been a year. It's flown by. Looking back I remember that my biggest fear of that time was that they wouldn't sleep well. Huh, I must be psychic. Well, as worried as I was about that, I now know that when you don't have a choice you somehow manage. And I'm betting that years from now I won't even remember all the sleepless nights...
that's why I have proof on this blog. Yes, A & E, you will have some serious making-up to do one day!
Well, that's it for tonight. I'm too tired to go downstairs and get the camera, even though I know there are some cute pictures on it. My sister's family gave us a Little Tykes picnic table that her boys have outgrown, which the girls sat at for quite awhile yesterday and I've got some good shots. Maybe they'll make it on to the blog next time
Happy spring everyone. Oh, yeah, it's Tulip Festival time and we're always happy to have visitors, so come on to Ottawa if you feel like a get-away.
Now that the girls are running around, there is not as many new and exciting "firsts" to tell you about. Although on Sunday of this week we all went to their first birthday party. Our neighbours little girl turned 2 on Sunday and we went to one of those indoor play places. You know the kind... there's a big play structure that requires lots of climbing and contortions for anyone with little kids. DoT and I followed A and E around, and around, and around, helping them over some of the hurdles that were just a bit too big for kids their size. Anyhow, they had a great time, and DoT and feel like we did the circuit about a hundred times. I know it wasn't nearly that many, but still, I'm a bit sore today. (Sorry, no pictures since I forgot my camera.)
Also, April 28th was the one year anniversary of when we got the referral for the girls. In honour of the occasion I went back and read the post we made that day, and some of the posts over the weeks following that. Wow, it took me right back. I can't believe it's been a year. It's flown by. Looking back I remember that my biggest fear of that time was that they wouldn't sleep well. Huh, I must be psychic. Well, as worried as I was about that, I now know that when you don't have a choice you somehow manage. And I'm betting that years from now I won't even remember all the sleepless nights...
that's why I have proof on this blog. Yes, A & E, you will have some serious making-up to do one day!
Well, that's it for tonight. I'm too tired to go downstairs and get the camera, even though I know there are some cute pictures on it. My sister's family gave us a Little Tykes picnic table that her boys have outgrown, which the girls sat at for quite awhile yesterday and I've got some good shots. Maybe they'll make it on to the blog next time
Happy spring everyone. Oh, yeah, it's Tulip Festival time and we're always happy to have visitors, so come on to Ottawa if you feel like a get-away.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
