Trying to stay strong and patient!

It has been a kind of a difficult week. It is hard to complain about it though when I see what other adoptive parents are going through with their sick kiddos and all the other events that have happened across this country. It does help put things in perspective, still, this is what we deal with on a daily basis. I have been trying to keep my posts fairly upbeat as our life is pretty darn fantastic. It can still be tiresome and require a lot of patience. I remember though, when I first started blogging, that one of the reasons I was going to blog was to educate and help anyone who read it. I wanted to be honest.

Sofie has made remarkable strides with her speech therapy. She has learned how to move her lips and tongue to make sounds and she does an amazing job with all her vowels. The consonants she has a much harder time with. If you plug her nose and get her to say a word, some consonants, like B and P she can say. Unplug her nose and they come out like vowels. Because of her cleft, she has air escaping into her nasal cavity and she cannot trap enough air in her mouth to force the consonant sound out. We are pretty sure that it is going to require another surgery to correct. Her tonsils are also very large and we may end up having to get those removed before they can do the speech surgery. We will meet with the ENT soon to see how and when to proceed. It is much different this time going into a surgery knowing full well what you are in for. It is not a minor procedure and it will be another painful surgery with only a liquid diet at the end. I try not to dwell on it, but I can't help it. It makes me very sad knowing what she could be in for.

Her speech therapy also involves a lot of thinking outside the box. She can't be treated as simply a cleft kiddo with a speech impairment or as a hard of hearing kiddo with a speech impairment. Factor in that she was adopted at the age of 2 1/2 and never learned her mother tongue, and you have to do a lot of adapting in Sofie's treatment and therapy. One of her speech pathologists is great at that, the other one is still on a learning curve. That frustrates me sometimes :)

Sofie is also starting to get very frustrated at times. It is hard to know what to attribute each behavior too. She is 3, hard of hearing and has a difficult time making people understand her when she talks. Bad combination!!! Most of the time I can understand what she is getting at. The odd time when I have no idea what she is talking about, she gets very angry. Lots of temper tantrums, but she is also 3....lots of temper tantrums. The more words she learns, the harder it is to understand her. People think it would be easier to understand because her language base is expanding. Not so. Keep in mind that she knows what the word means, she just can't say it well enough to have someone else understand it. It is like you have had a stroke and you know what you are trying to say and NO ONE gets it!!! Very frustrating....and you are 3 :) I have more patience than I ever knew I had....and less some days too! It is so stressful to be driving down the highway and have your child say something to you over and over again and you have no idea what they are trying to say or what point they are trying to get across. She gets madder and madder and I am trying to drive a car. It ended up with the both of us bawling our eyes out in the driveway :) We then went in the house and had some chocolate and all was right with the world again :)

It is such a difficult thing to explain to someone, so hard to put into words. She is such an amazing little girl who just attacks life head on and smiles through it all.  I think that is what makes the times that she gets angry and frustrated so difficult. It is really not like her and it breaks my heart when I don't understand her. I guess I feel a little guilty. I am supposed to figure this stuff out. She has to learn how to hear, how to listen, how to move her lips and tongue to make sounds, what sounds to make when and what they all mean......wow! She has come a long way, but, she has such a long way to go yet. I am worried that the surgery won't help with her speech. I know that there is nothing I can do about it so there is no point in worrying about it. That is what I tell myself anyway. Sofie has been through so much already. She just needs to catch a break. She really needs this surgery, if it happens, to be extremely successful.

I try to focus on all that is wonderful in our lives, which is a lot. Ainsley is so good with her sister. They play school together, dress up in funny clothes and just love each other immensely. They dance sing and play together, all that sisters are supposed to do. Sofie is still just a riot and constantly has us laughing. She is so goofy and just loves people. I love my kids dearly and I wouldn't change a thing about our lives at all, ever. Sometimes I just need to let it out :)