We've been quite busy here at home, now that Theo is in his various therapies and preschool on a regular basis. We increased both his time in the classroom and his number of therapy sessions per week in December, and that's kept me and the other rascals pretty busy. Even though his school is only 9 minutes from the house (according to Mr Google), and all of his therapists are housed in the same building, our life often revolves around his schedule. The older boys have gotten pretty good at packing up their schoolwork and hitting the road with me, and it's actually made for some fun schooling sessions in places like Starbucks. Homeschooling-on-the-road leads to great discussions with random strangers for the kids, which is fun to see.
How about I try to get you guys all caught up on Theo and what's happened since the last post, eons ago?
He's still doing well, settling in, here at home. He's definitely bonded with his siblings, especially Rascal #2. The two of them have a pretty tight relationship, and it's fun to see. I can tell that Theo's gotten more comfortable with us and feels more "at home" purely by his behaviour: he's started testing limits and asserting his independence. I'll admit, as trying as it can be to have a child hit the "I want to do everything by myself and my way and I want to tell you what to do, too" stage, it makes me smile to see Theo move into that behaviour. There's definitely a new level of confidence in his surroundings, and his place in our family, appearing.
Therapy and school are going really well. He's already made amazing strides, which I think also has to do with his newfound independence and opinions. He's physically able to do more, and he's very aware of his new abilities and is pretty proud of himself, I think. The biggest hurdle is going to be getting him to talk, verbally. He's communicating really well using ASL (he's picked up SO much sign language!), but we're struggling with getting him to vocalize his wants. We're making progress, but it's slow going.
We've now officially gotten through all of the doctor and specialists appointments for evaluations. Basically, we wanted to make sure that everyone had a baseline relationship established with our little guy, and we also wanted to check that there were no long-term side effects from medical treatments he'd received in his home country. He's managed to pass all of those with flying colours, so we're now just going to move into an annual visit treatment plan with most of those doctors.
All of his finalization paperwork was finally (haha) turned into the local probate office this week, after a couple of false starts. I'd gotten the paperwork way back at the 6 month home mark, but it'd taken me a month to fill it out. It ended up being a pretty big file of homestudies and official documentation from his country and our country, as well as a lot of forms specific to our state and county. We were sick for pretty much the entire month of January, which prevented me from dropping it off. Silly little boy and a weak immune system and all new bugs from this side of the globe meant that Theo was most often lounging in my arms on the couch, or sleeping off viruses. January was a tough month for his immune system, but I'm hoping that we're in the clear now - at least for a little while! While we were dropping off the paperwork, the secretary mentioned that she was currently scheduling adoption court sessions for April. While I don't think our processing will move that quickly for us (it hasn't yet, why start hoping now!!), I'm hopeful that we will be able to finalize the adoption in May or June of this year. I'd love to show you guys our little guy's face and truly introduce him to you!
On that note, here's a glimpse that I caught back at the beginning of January. This little guy is so loved!
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