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.