Day 5 - The Hardest Day



Momma brought me "salty sticks" (what Americani call pretzels)!



I didn't get to visit with A.J. very long on Friday morning, only about an hour and a half. It was not nearly long enough. He seemed much more subdued that during our other visits, but I don't know if that was because he was picking up on my mood or if he really understood when they told him that this would be the last time that I came to visit for a while. :-(

We got to play and snuggle a little and enjoy each other's company for one last time before I had to meet with the Director to give her our answer to the question "Do you want to adopt this child?" Our answer was 'Yes. We can't wait until he is part of our family, laughing and playing with his brothers and sisters."

I found out that he weights 12 kilograms (26 1/2 pounds) and is 33 inches tall. His size would be about 50th percentile for a 2 year old, and isn't even on the growth charts for a 4 year old. I guess his small size didn't completely hit me until I got home and realized how much bigger his sister (who is 6 months older than him) and his brother (who is 6 months younger than him) are. Eve is 11 inches taller than him and weighs 12 pounds more and Zac is 7 inches taller than him and weighs 10 pounds more. I almost fell over the first time I tried to pick Zac up after I got home! :-) I forgot how heavy he is. It made me so sad to think about our tiny little man...

I also found out a little more about his medical history. He weighed only 4 lbs 6 oz when he was born, his heritage is Romani (we suspected this, but his records confirmed it), he has no chromosomal abnormalities, they tested him for cystic fibrosis but could not get a result "because of technical problems with the laboratory", and he has been hospitalized for pneumonia or bronchiolitis a total of 12 times in 4 years. Because of his reversed organs and lung problems, we strongly suspect that he has Karatgener's Syndrome rather than CF but testing for this disorder is not available in Bulgaria and the physicians may not even be aware of a diagnosis as rare as Kartagener's. We are blessed to be just a few miles from an amazing children's hospital in Austin (Dell Children's Center) that "just happens" to have an International Adoption Clinic. Once A.J. is home he will have a 3-4 hour appointment at that clinic where they will do complete developmental testing, assess him for sensory processing / integration issues, a nutritional consultation, any immunizations that he needs, a thorough physical exam, any diagnostic tests such as lab work or x-rays that they feel he needs immediately, and give us referrals to any of the specialists that he needs to see. It could take us months to accomplish all of this if we had to schedule everything with individual offices! We are anticipating that we will get referrals (at the very least) to the CF clinic at Dell (because Kartagener's is treated in much the same way as CF), occupational and physical therapy, GI clinic, and the surgical clinic. I am anxious to get this done as soon as we can after he gets home because I really think he will thrive best after his physical needs are taken care of. But I am not looking forward to walking into a hospital with him for the first time. I know he will not be a happy camper, but I am hoping that having Momma there with him will ease his anxiety.

It just occurred to me that some of you might not know that the Romani people are commonly called "gypsy" or "gipsy". We choose not to use that term because in Europe is is very derogatory (similar to a white person using the "n word" to describe a person of African-American descent here). We have been doing a little research on this group of people so we will be ready to share his heritage with him when he is ready to understand, and I will share some of that with y'all in another post. I am also going to share a little more about the culture in Bulgaria, an opportunity to help A.J.'s orphanage, and a few other things.

I am sorry it took me so long to get this post up. After blogging twice a day all week, I know some of you thought something was wrong when I didn't blog for three days! School starts tomorrow for us, although I arrange our school weeks from Thursday to Thursday to correspond with our Classical Conversations campus teaching so we won't really get into things until Thursday. I will keep you all updated on how things are progressing with our final paperwork. The I800, local police checks, and medical exams are the only things we have left to do!