Quiet Week with Pneumonia

Daniel's recovery is going well. We're monitoring his activity, but he feels great, and it is wonderful not to have that aneurysm hanging over our heads any more.

Ruby, meanwhile, decided to develop pneumonia in her left lung, so her ear tube surgery has been postponed and she is on a hefty regime of medications. She doesn't act sick and is just as feisty and bouncy as usual, just with a rumbling cough.

We took a family walk to identify trees on Tuesday despite the recovery and the pneumonia. We had a relaxing time searching for the perfect picnic spot along Trout School Road. Pearl is collecting tree information for a book she's making following our unit on trees.

Later in the day Sapphire asked if we could make chocolate chip cookies "like we used to do." I'm not sure why she was feeling so nostalgic about them, but we made a batch and somehow I was left spooning them onto the cookie sheet.  They have such entertaining ideas that take a lot of prep from me, then they rush off to asking for something else while I am still cleaning up. No wonder I seem like a killjoy sometimes. I can only manage so many messes on my own.

If you have watched the girls you know that there exists a healthy sibling rivalry between Ruby and Sapphire. This has meant two kiddie picnic tables on our porch because the greater the space between them, the less arguing we hear. They also often have to go to separate floors of the house to give us a break from the fighting, though they are always drawn back together like two fractious magnets.  This morning I learned just how deep it goes. Sapphire had climbed into bed with us in the night and fell back to sleep. I awoke to hear her arguing with her sister in her sleep: "No, you can't Ruby!"

Daniel's trip to Israel is filling up, and he will be giving a talk about it this Friday at the Forks of the Brandywine in Glenmoore. See HolyLands2014.blogspot.com for the details of the trip.

Cleft Palate Clinic Experience

As we tried to corral Ruby into the pew at St. Joseph's church during Mommom's full funeral mass, I realized that being at these big family milestones was something that would tie her into our family. I think that is coming along, but it is a process for the extended family too. 

The social workers like to hear about family rituals as signs of a stable family, and we completed another fall ritual this week by going to a nearby orchard that hosts a fall fun day for kids.  Here are all three little gems riding the tractor-pulled train, wearing their matching hoodies.  Ruby really liked the goats and chickens. I think she is getting used to animals at last.

In the realm of homeschooling, I found some inspiring blogs that reminded me of what is possible.  So the big girls and I headed into the woods for a nature walk, motivated by a scavenger hunt list we found. We tracked down everything but an animal's footprint.

Here Pearl shows the variation in leaf colors we found out there, plus one mammoth oak leaf. The girls seemed to enjoy it, though after a guy working on the road warned us he'd seen tons of snakes, they stuck to the middle of the road and did a lot of fearful squawking.

Yesterday the big girls went to the cop-op with their daddy, and Ruby and I made our way to Lancaster to the Cleft Palate Clinic. On clinic days specialist in cleft issues meet with families. So instead of the family driving from speech therapist to dentist to orthodontist, to hearing specialist, to plastic surgeon, the child just hops into a dentist chair and the specialists come to her. I like the convenience, though we had a very long wait--1h 45 m--to be seen. We're fortunate that we live so close. Some families traveled for hours to be there.

We learned some of what the future holds for her medically. She'll start the first round of braces at 8-10, then a second round a little later, around 12ish. She'll have an outpatient bone graft from her hip to her palate sometime when she's around 10, and she might need tubes in her ears (though I'd like to avoid that). She could choose to have other plastic surgery, though they like to wait until the child is about 17 and the face is done growing to do that.  Just knowing that schedule really helps. We'll go back every six months, so they'll tell us when things need to happen. The specialists were all very impressed with the repairs she had had done in Beijing. It's the type of place where everyone gushes with encouragement, and I wonder if they ever have to share bad news.

Ruby bopped around the waiting room and bumped into kids at all stages of cleft-repair. There was a three week old baby, a nine month old who had just had his lip repair, a nine year old from China, and several other kids. Everyone was very gracious and kind, and they certainly loved Ruby's personality! She nearly emptied the hearing specialist's hand sanitizer bottle as we distracted her from getting earphones put in her ears for a test. The plastic surgeon's two observing interns didn't want to leave without getting high fives from her too.