DBG and the harvest

Well here is DBG with the harvest she helped me to gather. I have a nice garden this year and we have had plenty of rain. DBG is still coming by about twice a month for weekend visits. She is also going to dance class (driven by me) once a week and her little group will dance at the State Fair at the end of August. Much excitement about the dance class, as we had scheduling problems during the school year and she didn't get to dance then. DBG is pretty busy learning to read and write. We are the proud recipients of lots of cards on which she has written important messages about how much she loves us. She will be going to pre-kindergarten in the Fall, her birthday is well beyond the cut-off but I am sure she is well beyond the pre-kindergarten curriculum. What are you going to do?

KD is teaching dance class this Summer, her first solo teaching assignment. She has her permit but not her license. Still the search for the vehicle is on (she will be buying her own), she wants to get an old, old pickup truck and by old we are talking early to mid 1950s. We will see how realistic that is.

DJ had an opportunity earlier this summer to work on an island off the coast of Maine! And now he is working maintenance for the Children's Home that I work for. It seems to be a good fit. I am trying to either get him back in school to finish or work harder at preparing for the GED. He is not terribly motivated.

Son JM graduated from University of California Santa Cruz this June and has a retail job while he is considering his next move. He is very happy and settled out in Cali, I don't think we will see him home except for short visits from now on. :-(

So there's a little update on the kids.
I am working full time and more. DHubby's business is consulting for Foundations, and he hasn't had much work as all the Foundations portfolios suffered a 30% loss or so and their income was similarly effected. As you can imagine no one is beating down the doors to get help with technology upgrades right this minute. So the financial struggle continues for the family.

Catching Up

Of course our pumpkins would be ballet dancers!

Lots of catching up, it has been busy, busy!

First the good stuff, we had a Dancing Baby Girl Weekend and had a good mellow time of it. hoped to meet up with Spidey but he had a strep throat. Couldn't have done the full sibling picture we wanted to anyway as Imiki was home with bacterial pneumonia. Lani can't wait for his heart surgery as she hopes his overall health will improve.

My banner got finished, or at least finished enough to hang in the sanctuary for the baptism on Sunday. I will get a picture of it up here soon. So that is a load of responsibility off my shoulders.

Now for the stressful stuff.

Kendra: She has been feeling very exhausted, looking very pale and complaining of dizziness, so I took her to the peds on Friday and we wound up with an emergency cardiology consult. She is experiencing vasoconstriction to a severe enough degree that they were concerned about seizures!! Anyway they sent her home to bed and started her on some meds to alleviate the vein constriction and collapse. She couldn't dance in her school Dance program's semester dance on Friday night (don't know how she is going to get a grade now) and she couldn't go to the Homecoming Dance on Saturday night.

She spent most of the weekend asleep or lying on the couch but pushed herself to study for a big AP test today and insisted on going to school to take it. The meds do seem to be helping, she no longer looks like a Cullen (vampire for you non-Twilight fans). And she made it through the school day. So I am hopeful. We still have a gazillion specialist appointments to go to. I am glad it wasn't an emergency or anything as the earliest possible appointments with the neurologist and endocrinologist are not until January.

Kendra's biggest fear is that the doctors are going to tell her she can't dance any more. That would be a hard, hard test for her as dancing is her life right now.

Annie: Well the saga continues. the reconsideration letter has been sent to the Medicaid people, a long term waiver has been sought and we are still in limbo. Then tonight Annie calls and she has spoken with her case manager and she is going to go live with this guy that she has talked to a lot on the phone, see he is a really good friend of hers (they have never met face to face), because she has to leave the rehab program because of no funding. Anyway we were pissed that the case manager talked with her about all that and dismayed with the end result that Annie has cooked up. She really didn't follow most of what the case manager was telling her, all she heard is that she has to leave and so she is going to go live with this guy. I swear she is packing her bags as we speak, I know how Annie's mind works.

I am praying that she does not go all impulsive on us and sign herself out of the program. If she can just wait a little bit we think it will all get straightened out and she will be able to move to a post-acute facility here in our city. But Annie is not one for waiting once she has gotten a bee in her bonnet.

DH's work: or lack thereof. The prospects remain dim, he is actively searching for a job, has sent in his resume, etc. but the word is that folks aren't hiring even for previously posted jobs. I saw that happen at my job, one day there were four job postings on the board, the next day they were all gone and an announcement of a hiring freeze was made. It is a scary time. All I want to do is to be able to pay for the house and buy some food. Survival mode is grim but it may not be enough. I try to avoid thinking of the what ifs.

Anyway DH is going out to California this next week and he will have two "interviews" which are not really interviews but at least discussions with those people who might possibly hire him if they are hiring anybody. He has gone back to school and gotten himself certified in two other systems so that he can solicit work on those computer platforms as well. He is trying hard, the economy is just not cooperating.

So now you are caught up. I have to go pick Kendra up from her teaching, ballet of course, I hope she has enough energy left to do her homework or she will get even further behind. On that happy note....

Survival

I haven't posted much about our financial problems, there is too much of that depressing news in the papers and on the telly. But we are in big financial doodoo.

I know a lot of people are also here. For us it was not extravagant spending, we don't have fancy cars or expensive nick-knacks, but a series of job losses over a number of years that depleted all our reserves. So now that my DH is facing further job erosion we have nothing left to fall back on.

Survival mode is in full swing, but I am scared it will not be enough. The whole world economy is scary. Just in time for Halloween, only I am afraid it will not go away come Nov. 1!!

Blogging sequence

I need to learn to write my blog each morning before I read every one else's. I love catching up and seeing how everyone is doing but by the time I am done reading I am overwhelmed, over stimulated and over thought filled about the life, times and tribulations of being a foster/adoptive family. So I really need to write first, read second.

That said, Annie's surgery went better than expected, they were able to do it lapascropically (sp?) so she will not have stitches to pull out! Although painful she seems to come out of it fine and was able to transition back to her residence. DH came home exhausted as he had to drive through intermittent torrential downpours for 5 hours, but Annie had apparently been very receptive to his being there and even seemed grateful that he was there to offer comfort and care.

I need to spend the day arguing with the adoption subsidy people over Douglas and Annie's medical cards. They are arguing that since they are not in high school any more they should not get the card. What they are refusing to recognize is that I am homeschooling them still, neither has a diploma or their GED and both are still working hard to achieve one or the other. But apparently homeschooling is not considered "real" school for the purposes of the medical card documentation. So I am off with my donkey and lance to fight the towering windmills, wish me luck.

Gallbladder Surgery

My DH left at 4:30 this AM to drive down to Illinois to see Annie before she has gallbladder surgery. This came up rather unexpectedly and he was able to clear his calendar more easily than I was. So he got the short straw.

Annie seems to be okay with it all, telling me about what the nurse described as her surgical procedure, etc. But we know Annie, she will fight the doctors and the nurses, inflicting self harm if the pain is at all intense. So DH went down to do what little he can to help. See Annie is 19 and considered an adult, we have been trying to get guardianship of her because with the FASD and the Acquired Brain Injury, and all the other alphabet soup after her name, she does not make safe choices for herself. But we have been hampered by the fact that the disability courts look at her IQ which somehow tests out at 89. That seems to mean that she is not disabled enough so we are having to gather all sorts of documentation from all sorts of professionals to make our case. In the meantime she is considered a functional adult. (yikes)

Just to give you an example of our concern. Annie is highly allergic to fish, we have known this since she was allergy tested at age 3. Well at 16 Annie decided that she was not allergic to fish, that the doctors were wrong and she knew better. So she had some fish at her friends' house. She started feeling ill almost immediately and came home where she promptly started to vomit multiple times. She was so agitated though that she was walking all over the house and must have projectile vomited in about 6 different rooms, all the time screaming at me, "my head hurts, I don't feel well" I of course did not know that she had eaten fish, so didn't know what was wrong. Then her face started to swell and her eyes started to swell shut, so I knew it was an allergic reaction and got her Epipen into her and called 911. She then started screaming at me, cursing me out the whole time, "I ate some fish, you stupid b***, I hate you".

She was wildly out of control, and despite our best efforts to calm her and put cooling cloths on her swollen eyes, she was rampaging. She gouged at her eyes, trying to make them stop hurting/itching, leaving huge open wounds on her face and eyelids. She began banging her head on the wall and door frame, hard. We called off the ambulance run as the Epipen had done its job, but I almost considered an ambulance run to the psych hospital.

Eventually the benadryl and the exertion slowed her down and she was able to settle for the night. But the wounds on her face and eyes were horrible, luckily they didn't get infected.

Now can you see my concerns for surgery. In a worst case scenario I envision her trying to rip out her stitches, IV, etc as she comes out of the anesthesia. I certainly hope that she won't but we don't have such a good track record to go on. So I will be thinking about my DH and Annie all day hoping for the best.

Sick in the Summer, Bleah!!

Well I got the strep throat too. I have been down and out since Sunday afternoon. I am finally feeling better but DH just went to bed feeling horrible. Luckily the DR gave me a prescription for his antibiotics just in case.

We have had the most gorgeous beautiful weather for the past three days, brilliant sunshine, blue sky with light puffy white clouds skidding by, and a Spring like temperature with no humidity. And guess what, I haven't felt like even sitting outside. What a waste. I hate being sick during the summer, February is a good time to get ill as all I want to do is cuddle in a blanket on the couch anyway, but June, no I should be gardening or swimming or hiking or camping or something, not laying on the couch moaning.

So today I am feeling a little better and I went outside to pull some weeds and stake up my tomato plants some more. I was only out there for maybe 30 minutes and I feel so drained I am going to have to take another nap.

But by tomorrow I am planning on being totally well, of course then I have to be at work all day, but I will swim when I get home.