A very meaningful day (for 2/3 of us...)

Today is our third Family Day. I can't believe it's been three years, and yet it seems like we've always been together. We let Quinn take the lead, so we went out for a bagel breakfast, and after preschool we went to the zoo and out for "Chinese noodles."

It was a lovely day, marred only by the grownups' repeated attempts to get a nice family photo. Quinn thought this was a terrible, boring idea that was sucking important fun time out of his day. He did a bit of whining and trotted out the fake cry he has just about retired, but all in all he put up with us  pretty well. We didn't get the perfect Christmas card photo we had envisioned, but we did get some photos that made us laugh (especially the one at the bottom of this post, which is the most perfect image ever of his goofy personality). And that's probably better in the long run anyway.

To Quinn's BCWI cousins Malia and Anna, Happy Family Day and lots and lots of love. To everyone waiting for a Family Day of their own, I hope your wait is short and sweet. And to Quinn Jianrong, we love you more than all the love in the world, times 27 million.

Trunk or treat!

I zipped home from work early today and we carved a couple of pumpkins. Quinn drew on the faces, I did the carving. He tried to convince me to trade jobs, but I didn't fall for that one...

We all went trick-or-treating as the royal family. Tom made us crowns (Quinn chose one from his massive collection, and Nana found one that fit her, too) but Quinn also wore a cape. He is always very serious when he puts on a cape...

Here we go!

Our little dog Baxter is having some severe fainting spells due to a leaky heart value, so we're not supposed to get him too excited. A constantly ringing doorbell seemed like a bad idea, so we handed out candy from the back of one of our cars. It turned out to be a really fun thing to do and we got to talk to the neighbors a lot more than we do just opening the door and tossing out some candy while the dogs go nutty. This (and Quinn, of course) made for a really fun Halloween!

Who is scarier?

I love this photo of Tom and Quinn at Panda Club today. We combined Autumn Moon Festival and Halloween, and the girls of the Asian sorority at the University of Arizona helped the kids make paper lanterns, decorate foam pumpkins and masks, and decorate some seriously delicious sugar cookies from a local bakery. Once everyone was hyped up on sugar we went outside for a rousing game of "red-light, green-light" and "duck, duck, goose." Ah, the classics. And the kids LOVED it!

A new best day ever: Day Out With Thomas

Last week we went to a preschool spectacle called "Day Out With Thomas." The kids get to ride in a train pulled by Thomas and also have access to a boatload of related activities: Thomas face painting, coloring pages, jumping castles, train tables, temporary tattoos - and, of course, an entire airplane hangar packed with Thomas merchandise for sale.

Quinn loved every little thing about this event. Tom snapped this photo after we boarded the open-air train and just before it took off. His expression shows the joy and wonder that was on his sweet face the whole day long.

Well, at least someone is enjoying this heat...

"Gotta go poo-poo on the potty, get Lightning McQueen!"

Yes, friends, we have resorted to full-scale bribery to get Quinn to poop on the potty. Why? Because he's 4 years old and fully capable of using the potty. Because his sensory-seeking tendencies make him unusually nonplussed about sitting around in a stinky diaper. And mostly because, well, it works.

Yes, indeed. On Wednesday I told him that if he went poo-poo on  the potty he could go to Target and pick out a toy. "Blue Star?" he negotiated. That's what he calls Toys R Us, whose logo is, yup, a blue star. In other words, the kid won't poop for a trip to Target, but if we up the ante to Toys R Us, he's in. And he was. On Friday, bingo. He was VERY proud of himself and we got off fairly easy with a $16.99 Lightning McQueen car. Of course, now each time he heads to the bathroom, we hear a very excited boy tell himself, "Gotta go poo-poo on the potty, get Lightning McQueen!"

A (fleeting) wish for a sis

We have pretty much decided that Quinn will be an only child. So of course, when I told him this morning that his friend Nate was going to have a baby sister soon, he said, "We gotta go get a baby sister! Quinn want a baby sister." Just how deep is his desire? This afternoon, I was looking at a blog by the mom of a boy from Quinn's orphanage - they're in China now and welcomed a beautiful, smiling baby girl just yesterday. "Look!" I showed Quinn when he came to see what I was doing. "Matthew got a baby sister!" He leaned in close, squinted at the screen and proclaimed, "All done baby sister!" Then he went to play with his toy garbage truck. And that - at least for today... - was that.

The boy and the arm

This month has been so busy - and so blisteringly hot - that I totally neglected to post a report from the doctor who operated on Quinn's brachial plexus injury last year.

The good news is that Dr. Waters is very happy with Quinn's progress. He has almost complete "passive" use of his right arm - if someone moves it around for him - which is a good indication he'll have good "active" use as he gets stronger and stronger. We have to have him checked every year (a good excuse for an annual trip to Boston!) and there is always a chance he'll have problems when he has a growth spurt. The biggest challenge is that he continues to favor the right arm quite strongly, so we need to work on that. We worked with Dr. Waters' physical therapist to tweak his twice-daily exercises, and we learned that he'll probably never be able to reach behind his back with his right arm because the tendon that does that is one of the tendons they transferred to give him the ability to lift and rotate his arm. A good trade-off, I think.

So the news was good. But the visit itself? Not so much. We had a longish wait, during which Quinn was quite angelic, playing games happily in the waiting room. But the minute we went into the examination room - the same one he was in that horribly traumatic day last year that his cast was sawed off - he pretty much freaked out. The physical therapist came in right away, and he cried every time she looked at him. He wouldn't let her touch him, he wouldn't do anything she asked and he kept either hiding behind the curtain separating the room into half or hurling himself on the floor. Then he started spinning uncontrollably. Not a good scene. Eventually, the PT gave up and left the room. It wasn't until then that it hit me: Pull out the puzzles. Thankfully, that worked as well as it always does and Quinn sat on the floor happily doing his puzzles, even after Dr. Waters came in. In fact, when he wanted Quinn to lift his arm or reach in a particular direction, he just held up a puzzle piece. Worked like a charm.


In short, the visit got better, we learned what we wanted to learn, and we left and had a good rest of the day. But the next morning as were eating breakfast, I noticed that Quinn - who is NEVER cold - was shivering. And he was not eating, which is equally odd for him. I thought maybe he was sick, and then it hit me what was wrong. I bent down, looked right in his eyes and told him he didn't have any doctor's visits that day. Boom. New kid. He started chattering away, ate his breakfast, put on his shoes and announced he was ready to get on with the day. I just felt horrible. I knew that we were finished, but it didn't even dawn on me that he didn't know that. Poor little guy was just plain terrified. Definitely not one of my best moments in parenting...

Quinn is 4!

Today is Quinn's "Happy Birthday," as he calls it. We're still in Boston, so we had a fun and relaxing day with no medical appointments and lots of stuff Quinn likes to do.

We brought him a couple little presents and Nana sent a recordable story book that he loved (but he kept looking at it when he heard her voice and asking, "Nana? NANA?") We also took him to a local toy store we've been to on previous visits and let him pick out a toy. He picked a small dump truck - no shock for the Things That Go kid - but the surprise is that this kid who has never liked stuff animals and is not what you would call the nurturing type took to this new friend like it was a doll.

First came the greeting - "Hi, Rocky!" - and then came the hugs. Then he started showing Rocky the ropes - when the waitress delivered our food and removed the number from our table, Quinn shared his concern with his new charge. "Oh no, Rocky, she took our sign!"

Best of all came after dinner, when he held up Rocky and asked me, "Go change diaper?" I took him into the bathroom, where he pulled down the changing table, put Rocky on it and asked for a paper towel. We wiped the truck down good, and then Quinn directed me to lay the truck on its back and put on a new diaper (made from paper towels). Quinn gave Rocky a once-over and proclaimed, "Okay, he's all clean!"

Tonight Quinn let Rocky watch us do a puzzle and brush our teeth, and now the two are now sleeping side by side. Many a therapist has tried to get this child to engage in pretend play with dolls and action figures. Turns out that all he needed was a yellow dump truck!

Catching up with Cousin Anna

While in Boston to see Quinn's surgeon, our wonderful friends and China travel companions Susan and Russ drove in with their three kids, including Quinn's Cousin Anna, who joined her family approximately five seconds before Quinn joined ours. (Cousin Malia was the other child adopted in our trio, and we were lucky enough to catch up with her and her sister Cousin Ari at a reunion of kids from the Beijing CWI last year.)

It was so incredibly wonderful to see the kids together again. Anna, nine months older than Quinn, tried her darndest to get him to interact with her. Quinn, being nine months younger and a boy and generally unwilling to make eye contact unless forced, was less interactive but enjoyed himself in his own way. He also dug the "big boys," Cousin Spencer (during a visit to the aquarium he kept hollering, "Cousin Speeeeeeeeen-sur!") and Cousin Kent.

It's amazing how far these kids have come. They went through so much we'll never know about before they came to us, and they've been through so much since. But here they are, growing, smiling, thriving. Anna charmingly sang us a Justin Beiber song during dinner Saturday with the sweetest smile on her beautiful face, and Quinn ran joyfully around every square inch of the New England Aquarium, exhausting him and all of us.

It was a beautiful reunion, and a fabulous weekend. And it made me realize how incredibly blessed we were to be thrown together with two really wonderful families in China who we immediately liked and quickly grew to love. Sometimes you end up with your family, sometimes you get to choose. We chose to bring Quinn into our family, and now - for his sake but also because we just plain want to - we choose the families we traveled with to be part of our own patchworked, embroidered, crazy quilt of a forever family.

We are peeing on the potty! (but not pooping...)

It was no small feat for a kid who is quite content to spend the day in a dirty or wet diaper, but we are doing it! Quinn is peeing on the potty! No poop yet, and honestly, no real reason to hope that's going to change any time soon.

Me: "Quinn, where do we go poo-poo?"
Quinn: "On. The. Potty!" (You wouldn't believe the enthusiasm!)
Me: "That's right! And where did you just go poo-poo?"
Quinn: "In. The. Underpants!" (Equal enthusiasm.)

No remorse from this kid. I guess this is the downside to taking the potty training thing nice and easy...

Still, we'll take our successes where we can find them. After all, QUINN IS PEEING ON THE POTTY! After an appalling lack of success with regular reminders, and after discovering the impracticalities of letting him run around naked (it worked, but ONLY when he was naked) we jumped on the prize bandwagon. Oh, my. We had a little basket with some cheap stickers and freebie toys, plus a few toy cars. Within hours the kid had the system licked, and was fishing about for the toy cars. That eventually morphed into demands for toy cars upon peeing, and eventually into determined but not very convincing fake tears when one was not produced. Oops.

So we have moved on to the "prize chart," which was greeted with wailing and desperate cries of "Basket? Toy car?" But finally, a week in, he is on board. He gets a sticker for each time he goes, and works toward prizes - a trip to the "car washer" or the little train ride at the zoo or "Old McDonald's" playland - that was his first choice.

So we're progressing, and we're wearing big boy underpants right out in public. Which is darned inconvenient. It means having to pull over when he says he has to go, spending way too much time in dirty public restrooms and trying to remember to take him to the potty at regular intervals. He's shockingly good about it, and sometimes funny to boot. Yesterday he was trying to pull down his underpants at lunch and was stymied by the drawstring. "Mama," he finally said, quite exasperated. "These pants are locked!"

One year (!) post surgery

Incredibly, it's been an entire year since Quinn's tendon transfer surgery to repair his brachial plexus injury - the "SN" that brought us together. He has almost complete use of his right arm - before the surgery he had almost no use of it - but he still has to be reminded, constantly, to use it.

His one remaining challenge is reaching behind his back, which makes dressing himself quite a challenge. In fact, one reason we decided to go ahead with surgery was meeting an 8-year-old girl with brachial plexus injury who was begging her parents for surgery because she couldn't dress herself, put on her backpack or hang on the monkey bars at school. Anyway, his PT suggested some exercises that didn't really work and I've tried some other things that didn't really work. So not much progress, until about a month ago when I ran into his former feeding therapist, who is the easily most brilliant person I've ever met when it comes to children. "Hmmm," she said, "What could we do?" And on the spot she plopped down on the floor and came up about three exercises THAT ARE WORKING. Incredible. Quinn had no strength to sustain them when we started, but I already see that changing. Score (another) one for the feeding therapist!

We head back to Boston in a couple of weeks for his one-year check up with Dr. Waters. I'll be eager to hear his report, and eager for our strange little family vacation that has become our medical trips to Boston!

The best day ever

If we search the world over for the rest of our lives we probably will never find anything Quinn loves more than the "Keep On Truckin'" show held each year at a local synagogue. All kinds of working vehicles gather in the huge parking lot and kids get to climb aboard.

Operating the lever to lift a garbage can was a BIG hit - and this guy was so nice.

This tour bus driver about had a heart attack when Quinn grabbed his expensive microphone and started talking into it.

Start this baby up!

Guess who came out of here with a black bottom?

Fire truck!

 Oh. My. Lord. Quinn was in true nirvana from the moment we arrived until the moment we left. While he loved it all, we quickly established a pattern: garbage truck, skid steer, fire truck, skid steer, police car, skid steer, front-end loader, skid steer. Luckily, he and the skid steer guy bonded so he patiently lifted him into the cab and lowered the safety bar around him time after time and after after time after...

The biggest smiles were reserved for the skid steer.

More skid steer smiles.

All done wif no?

Quinn has developed a clever little pair of techniques for getting out of trouble as soon as he gets into it: distraction and charm.

When he first started speaking sentences, any time he was corrected - and I mean the tiniest little redirection, like, "Here, Sweetheart, try it this way" or "Let's do that after we put our shoes on" - he would immediately ask, "Go outside?" We kept remarking on how much he loves being outdoors, until - slow parents that we are - we finally noticed that he was trying to distract us so we'd forget the correction. Crafty little kid, this one. In the last week or so, with his language skills expanding, he added an even more effective technique. When corrected, he gets a very sad look on his face, lowers his high-pitched voice and asks very sweetly, "All done wif no?" As predicted, the answer is pretty much always yes.

Are you the little king?

Quinn has become quite obsessed with Old King Cole, which he discovered on TWO different Barney videos. First, he started using my company-issued blue fleece blanket as a cape. Then, one Friday - boy's day - he and Tom (actually, just Tom) spent most of the day making crowns out of manilla envelopes and aluminum foil.

Quinn still mixes up his pronouns, calling himself "you" and everyone else "me," which kinda makes sense since that's how he hears everyone referred to. Anyway, most mornings I get up to find him in his cape and crown in the living room, and when he sees me he looks up and asks, "Are you the little king?" I tell him he's the king of my heart, and he nods, very seriously. Mind you, the picture at the top of this post is an anomaly. When he is in his regal regalia he is VERY serious.

Life, narrated

Now that Quinn is attempting full sentences, we're having a blast hearing what's going on in that head of his. Mostly what we hear is narration. The moment he wakes up in the morning, he starts talking to himself, narrating each and every move he, the dogs or either of us make. "Go see Rosie? Eat? Go for walk? Look! Mama getting out of bed. Mama is putting coat on. Baba is walking up the hill."

Just this week, after MUCH work, he is starting to answer our questions about things that have already happened. What did you do in school today? What game did you and Nana play? What did you do while you were outside?

And just today, he started expanding on those answers, turning them into actual conversations. At dinner tonight he told me that he and Baba watched the sun go down. Now it is dark, he said, but he wanted the sun to go back up in the sky. I told him that the sun would go up, but not until he woke up in the morning. "Sun go up now," he said. Not yet, I told him. Just like you need sleep, the sun is sleeping. We went round and round about that and you could really see him trying to wrap his head around the concept. After dinner, while he was playing with my cell phone, he hit some feature that activated the voice control and the phone invited him to "Say a command." "Tell it to do something," I told him. He looked at the phone and commanded, "Wake up the sun!"

Pee pee on the potty!

 

Every day since last July when I bought this "Cars" potty seat, I have dutifully sat Quinn on top of it. And every time he has dutifully sat there, looked at toy catalogs or played with an envelope of potpourri, and then smiled sweetly at me and announced, "All done potty." Never has he deposited anything in there, mind you. Until now! One night I noticed a drip or two and made a BIG deal out of it. A couple nights later we got a tiny little squirt - bigger deal - and the third night an actual, bonafide pee pee. "Look!" he announced, pointing. "Pee pee come out the penis!" BIG PARTY. All the excitement prompted him to put the potty on his head and christen it a "potty hat." This kid is immature in many ways, but his sense of humor is crazy sophisticated.

Since then he has been doing his thing almost daily -- If I get him to the potty at the right time, he'll go; if not, he'll just use his Pullup (now known as "underpants."). One day he even added a bonus feature: "Poo poo come out the bootie!"

So we're getting there. Finally.

Oh, Thomas, I love you so...

My little "helper"

Christmas with Quinn was a true joy. He loved lights and Santa and Frosty and "Ru-fall" (Rudolph). And after watching "Barney's Christmas Star" he came to believe that every tree should have a star on top.

We had a really nice visit with Tom's parents, and while there we took Quinn to see the lights at his beloved Candy Cane Lane TWO times. Tom set up a string of lights in our room and hung the star that was too heavy for the tree but looked very nice on top of the curtain rod. (Every day when Quinn would see his grandparents' tree he'd suggest to them, "Star on top tree? Angel down?")

This picture has nothing to do with Christmas, but it's my fave of the season. A few days after Christmas we went shopping to spend our Macy's gift cards from Obaachan (Japanese for grandmother). I was shopping for a coat and Tom was corralling Quinn. Suddenly he called me to come quick, and I happened to have my camera in hand. Here is what I saw: