Thursday, May 22, 2014

11 Months as a Family

It seems impossible to believe that this time last year we were consumed with planning a trip to China! This weekend marks the 11th month that we will have had Davis as part of our family.

The last few weeks have been busy ones where Davis is concerned. He is now officially registered for VPK through the Early Learning Coalition and setup to attend VPK at Carousel Early Learning Center where he already attends daycare.

Davis certainly made good use of all the time at the ball fields with his brothers this spring. He became Mr. Adventure - running around playing with friends, heading over to the playground without us, and even climbing the fence. 





We are making great progress with potty training. Davis can stay dry most days at daycare and sometimes in the evenings at home. We've even had a few overnights where he has stayed dry. 

Wednesday of this week was our 1 year post placement visit with our social worker Debra Hewitt. She was impressed with how well Davis is doing in transition, attachment and language. She a called him the poster child for adoption. He ran around the house with his brothers doing his best airplane imitation and his best Spider-man impression. We are now officially halfway through our post placement visits in terms of number - 3 down (1 month, 6 month, 1 yr), and 3 to go (2 yr, 3yr and 5yr). 

Today was time for a follow up visit with the Cleft Team Clinic at Shands in Gainesville. We cannot emphasize how much these people care about children and how easy they make this process. We happened to run into the clinic coordinator in the elevator headed up to our appointment and she knew our last name and started talking to Davis using his first name. The last time we were at clinic, Davis had been home for all of 5 weeks. Now ten months later they were amazed by the little boy who talked and laughed and played with his Mickey Mouse and Jake the Pirate. Mickey Mouse even got to have his ears checked out by the audiologist! That was our first visit and Davis' hearing tested out fine. The next two hours were spent seeing the social worker, the clinic coordinator, the pediatric dentist, the maxiofacial surgeon, the pediatrician, the psychologist, the geneticist, and the speech therapists. Most of our visits were short and sweet. We spent the most time with the pediatrician, the dentist and the speech team. The pediatrician just wanted to go over his general development as well as discuss his allergies. The dentist just warned us there would be lots of dental work in our future but she's confident in our local dentist Dr. Rosanski. The speech therapists had much more language to work with this time. They showed Davis all kinds of pictures of objects (ball, baby, dog, cat, table, car, etc) and he could name everything when they pointed to it - although he insisted on calling the cat "Meow!" They thought we had him in Early Start language intervention somewhere because of how well he did with speech. They wren't recommending any speech therapy for him now; we just need to continue working to ensure  he's saying his hard consonant sounds. 

We're looking forward to celebrating our full first year with Davis soon. 

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