First Christmas Together

Many of my dear friends know how difficult Christmases have been in our house for years. How difficult it is to celebrate when you are waiting and waiting and waiting!

Well, this year our child of promise has come! Yes, he came in April but this is our first Christmas together and it is very special! We love having a boy to love on! We have tried to have some restraint on the presents we have bought him, but hey, we are making up for lost years!

Let's look at the boy who we picked up:

A frightened little boy with dark circles under his eyes and almost skin and bones.  

The boy we know today is a bigger, much happier and healthier version of that sweet little boy we brought home last spring.  

Did I mention yet that he never stops moving? The little boy who could barely walk supported is now doing somersaults all by himself!

He has gained a good ten pounds since April and a couple of inches too! He even has a tiny bit of a tummy!

Victor has grown in other areas too - eating only sweet purées is a thing of the past - this boy loves his mac 'n' cheese! He walks about quite well (we are still working on running - he will run a couple of steps but his low vision is a factor here too). We are bonding quite well with him. He loves his daddy! Mama is cool too - after all - mama is the one giving him all that yummy food.

Victor had about four or five words when we picked him up. While this has been the slowest area of development, he still has gained good ground.

Bulgarian Words at pick up:

Mama     Tata    Baba   Diga     Neme

(Translated: Mama, Daddy, Granny (what he called his caregiver), Come get me, I don't want it.)

English Words now:

Mama    Daddy    Tickle     Pick-up     No     Din-din     Eat     Echo     Beep    Up    More  Me

There are other words he says but I can't recall them right now.

We are pretty sure that Victor doesn't understand Christmas yet. He does love the music, the jingle bells, and will probably love his new toys. But he has no clue how wonderful it is yet. I can't wait until next Christmas when he is eagerly anticipating the day!

We are very grateful to God and to our dear friends and family who made this Christmas possible for us and Victor to be together as a family. MANY THANKS!

God Bless You All!

Health Report

Yes, we brought our little Victor home in April.

Victor's chair is just like Daddy's!

But what have we been doing since then? How is the little man doing?

Victor is doing amazingly well! He is blooming before our eyes into a perfectly normal (well, for an Elliott anyway - we can be a bit eccentric sometimes) little boy!

Our first parenting task upon arriving home was to make sure that he was healthy and ready to grow! We started off taking him to his pediatrician. Then to some specialists. Then to some more specialists. We may have even taken him to some more specialists at that point.

The result of all this was some very good news!

General Health
Victor is a generally healthy little boy. He was skinny. Very skinny. Like, you could see every bone skinny. He was dehydrated, but not too bad. Constipated yes... to a ridiculous degree. But that is what a year long treatment of Miralax is for - this will enable his system to recover from being constipated probably for his entire life.

Eyes
We were told Victor was completely blind, but we knew that he had some sight from observing him. He saw the spoon coming and opened his mouth. He knew the general location of an object, but it was obvious that he had problems with depth perception - he would scoot up to a wall and reach for it when it was still two feet away. It was obvious he was seeing! We took him to a ophthalmologist. The student doctor came in and poor Victor was poked and prodded and had his eyelids clipped open. Almost immediately, he shut himself down - it was all too much. He stop responding to the lights being shone in his eyes, to objects being waved in front of his face, to everything. By the time the real doctor came in, it was hopeless. He gave us the same report we had received from Bulgaria - that Victor could not see a thing. We told him of Victor being overwhelmed by the experience and do you know what he said to us? "I waved Oscar the Grouch in front of him - any kid would have grabbed at that if he saw it." Really? Lay aside the issue of Victor getting overwhelmed and shutting down. Victor has never watched TV in his life, much less Sesame Street. He has never played with toys except a couple of plastic rings. He hates touching anything that is not smooth. And that is your primary evidence that our little boy cannot see?


His first American haircut - boy, did he scream!

So we went to another specialist... this time one who was a super specialist and only dealt with retina detachments. He took one look at Victor playing with his toy on the ground (we had learned our lesson this time - no student doctor giving him a pre-examination!) and said, "Yes, of course he can see." Music to a mama's ears! We then put Victor through the torture of a ultrasound of his eyes (poor boy), but it was worth it - real evidence that he had some vision! His right eye's retina was completely detached but the left eye - only partially detached! We were told that Victor was not a candidate for surgery to reattach the retinas as the scar tissue had become hard with age and would tear the eye if they tried to fix it. However, the doctor said that his vision in his left eye was so good that it is at the level they hope to achieve with surgery! Victor should be able to read very large print and live a rather normal life! We were told to get him glasses (he is also very, very far sighted) and teach him to see! Oddly enough, it turns out that Victor's vision is almost identical to Ian's vision!

Legs
Victor could not stand or walk on his own when we picked him up. His legs were little sticks... adorable but very weak. The orphanage thought that this might be the result of brain damage caused by his traumatic birth. The report in the US? The doctors said that it was completely ridiculous - that his legs were just weak from being confined to a crib and not brain damage - that looked very different indeed, with different symptoms. Victor will run and play someday!

We did get him cute little ankle braces that have made a world of difference! They give him extra stability for his weak little ankles. They are almost hidden inside of his shoes.
Lungs
Victor's oxygen saturation is at 100%, praise God! His lungs are in great condition. They still have some growing to do and he still breathes more rapidly than most, but in a few more years they will be at normal capacity. We give him a steroid inhaler which will help the growth. We still need to be very diligent again lung infections and pneumonia.

Institutional Autism
Victor looks like he has autism - he has some repetitive motion behavior as well as some other similar symptoms. However, the cause of it is very different. Victor did not have much exposure to sensory information other than what he could find in his crib for the longest time. His little mind was starved for sensory information, so he started to create it himself and developed self-simulating habits. This is call institutional autism as he is a frequent condition found in children raised in institutions. Almost all children out of Bulgarian orphanages have it. Now that he has tons of sensory information coming at him, he is using those familiar habits to comfort himself. If he is too overwhelmed by all noise, lights, textures around him, he goes a step forward and withdrawals within himself. As he gets used to his new life that is full of new sensory information, he will learn how to process it and will leave behind his autistic behaviors. We have already seen quite a decrease since picking him up; however, it will probably be a while before he is completely free of them.


Development
Developmentally, Victor has the same skills as an 18-month year old. Some of his skills are even at the 12-month level. For most of these skills, he lacks them because he was never given the chance to learn - he only eats pureed food as he was only ever given pureed food and doesn't know how to chew yet. Some he lacks because no one ever showed him how - he may have had a ball to play with, but there was no one to play catch with. Some he lacks because of his vision - if he cannot see an object, how is he supposed to point to it? Now that he has a family, we will be teaching him these skills. It will probably be a long, hard road, but he has shown himself to be a smart boy and a quick learner. The developmental pediatrician thinks he will be caught up in two years.

So overall, the report on Victor's health was much better than we had been told in Bulgaria. We are excited to watch him grow into a healthy little lad. Yes, he will always have some things like his vision, but there is nothing that cannot be overcome with diligence, patience, and perhaps masses of speech, occupational, and physical therapy. However, we know that the most important factor in his recovery is LOVE. And that is what we are going to give to him!



A snuggle nest of toys and blankets!

There and Back Again

I am starting this blog where the last one left off... we were waiting for our trip to pick up our little boy.

 

I need to fill y'all in with all of Victor's adventures. I am sure you do not want to hear about the months of hideous waiting, so I will skip ahead to the good part - our first days with Victor Boy!

After many delays, our pick-up trip finally happened! We flew away and scooped up our little boy on April 7, 2014!

We arrived in Sofia late Sunday afternoon, and after a night of refreshing sleep, we arose early to travel to a town about an hour and a half south where our little son was born and raised in an orphanage. This orphanage had been his home sweet home for almost all his life - he had been sent there straight from the hospital and had never know anything else.

To tell you the truth, the orphanage wasn't that bad... it was one of the good ones. I say this with a great deal of perspective... it was good for Eastern Europe. If it had been located in the States, it would have been a shameful institution of neglect and abuse. However, circumstances, culture, and differing worldviews can redefine these things. The dear women who looked after our son-to-be were really sweet, good-hearted souls who did what they thought were the right things to do within their means - some of them even loved him. I hold nothing against them, in fact, I have a great deal of gratitude in my heart for all their years of taking care of my boy.


Little Victor Boy is waiting inside!

We drove up to the orphanage gates! Our little boy was waiting inside! We were so nervous and excited! Would he remember us? Did he grow since we saw him last? Did he know that this was the last day as an orphan and the first day as our son?

We were led into an office and spoke to the director of the orphanage at length. I don't know if we heard a word she said, we were so eager to see our son! But we had to listen, it was all about his medications, routine, etc. - information that would be crucial in the days ahead!

But then we were taken to a back room... and then they walked him in! Our forever son was finally in our arms!

This was a beautiful scene... it was. I want to cry with joy each time I think of it.

But he did not remember us... he was led into the room and after a second, he turned away from us and left the room - he thought that his nurse was taking him to eat... or go outside. What were mama and tata to him?

I was also shocked at his appearance... he had been very sick and in the hospital that winter and looked it. He was skinnier than when we last saw him with dark circles under his eyes. There are some things about his time at the orphanage that I will not share online... but you could tell that little Victor Boy had had a hard time recently.

But we were overjoyed to see him! We took him up in our arms and kissed his face, he was ours at last!!!!

The rest of the hour at the orphange was spent thanking the staff and giving them gifts - it was a very happy time for all with songs and flowers and smiles all around.


Our forever son.

We then carried our little boy to freedom - out of the orphanage and into our family! We put him into the car seat and away we went! We had to rush back to Sofia in time for an appointment with the police department for his passport.

We made the appointment in time and, after many screams and tears, finally were able to get a decent photo for the passport. We then visited the pharmacy to get his medications and went home to the hotel.

We now had a week and a half of waiting, with an appointment every couple days as we worked our way through the visa process.

Father and Son

This was a very difficult week for Victor - so many new things and new people. I am sure he missed his nurses and his crib. Victor took to us well enough - especially to his daddy. We feed him good food and played with him and held him as much as he would allow. We were getting to know each other.

Nights were extra hard - falling asleep is impossible when you have never slept anywhere else and are not sure whether you are safe with these new people or not. Essentially, Victor fell asleep only when he was exhausted and could not help it.


Victor Boy looking at his phone.

As the week wore on, Victor got more comfortable with us and even began to enjoy all the attention we were giving him. And his new toys! His favorite toy that we brought was a toy iPhone, with songs and flashing lights. Now we had been told that Victor was completely blind. When we met him in September, we know this was not the case - that he had some sight - but no one believed us. Does this look like a boy who cannot see?

He would also spend hours by the window in the hotel room - the orphanage had windows but Victor was kept in his crib for the majority of the time and this was a rare treat! Fresh air and sunshine!

Fresh air and sunshine!

We would go on walks about the city - anywhere just to get out of the hotel. Sofia is a beautiful city, and the Bulgarians are a wonderful people - we loved each moment of experiencing Victor's land. We found a wonderful park by the National Theatre with fountains, playgrounds, and live accordian music courtesty of a Roma street musician.



A smiling Victor Boy playing at the park with daddy!

Ian worked hard and quickly picked up enough Bulgarian to communicate about most of the things we needed - I am so glad I married a language wiz! The people were friendly and loved it when we would try their language - even though a lot of them did speak English as well.


Old Palace

Russian Church

We did some sightseeing about the city but did not venture very far as Victor could only handle so much - he was easily overwhelmed so we took it easy. And after the first museum, we decided against further visits to large, echo-y buildings. We had to leave when Victor Boy discovered that his voice echoed throughout the entire Archeology Museum - there was no stopping him and his shouts were getting quite loud!

 

We ate delectably yummy food - Bulgarian food is delicious! We even tried some rather odd dishes - like pickle pizza. It wasn't too bad at all, though I am not sure I am going to be ordering it from Dominos any time soon.



Pickle, corn, and ham pizza

And the coffee! We were in coffee heaven! Even the vending machines served excellent, better-than-Starbucks coffee. And the cafes! It was truly amazing!

Mmmmmmmmm!

Victor had a medical appointment for the visa - they were mostly concerned with TB. He was tested and it came back negative. Hurrah! We then had an interview at the US embassy. The security took forever to get through, then we waited forever, and then had a three-minute interview! A couple of questions and it was over! We were surprised at how easy it was - but then again, we had done all the paperwork ahead of time. Victor would become a US citizen the moment we landed back home!

It was not all fun times - after the interview, we discovered what happened when Victor was pushed beyond his limits - a six-hour temper tantrum! The only thing that helped was to have him in his toddler carrier - such a sad, overwhelmed, little boy! And everytime I sat down, he would cry again! Such a tired mommy!

A "please stop crying" selfie

When we finally got him to sleep, it was like we had finished a marathon! I am sure he felt that way too!

Sleep at last!

After that, we had a few more days of waiting for the visa to be available. I highly recommend the Sofia Free Walking Tour - it was very good and in English too! That and other sight-seeing passed the time and soon we had the visa and were ready to go!

The flight home was ok for the first leg. The second leg involved an extra long tantrum again... that resulted in me standing with him in his carrier in the aisle for the majority of the flight to keep him from screaming. It did not help that there were four other screaming children on the flight and each time one went off, they all did. Fun, fun.

But we landed, went through customs, Victor became a US citizen and we were met by loving friends at the exit! It was amazing. We went home and plopped Victor down in his little bed that had been waiting for him for over a year!

The next day, we introduced Victor Boy to his new world... and he was happy to be home!

Welcome home Victor Boy!