This is a picture of Tang Jiayun. She is two and a half years old and currently lives in the Guangdong province of China. She's going to be our daughter. A sister to Lyle. We are adopting her. The plan is to go over to China at the end of July and handle all the paperwork necessary for the transfer. We are both excited and overwhelmed. The commitment is staggering.

The previous two photos were taken by Gail one day when Paloma and Lyle stopped by the office to say hello. I really like them 'cos Lyle doesn't look like a zombie (as he does in many of his photos). The sight of a camera usually causes his eyes to glaze over and his mouth to hang slackly open. I'll post more of them in the next couple days.

Oh my!

Kisses for Daddy

I just re-read my post from last year concerning Lyle's IEP. We had an IEP for him a couple weeks ago and the progress has been immense. His speech and language teachers have documented over a 100 new words. Most of them used appropriately. Clearly he has met his goals from last year. His language is still not fluent and he tends to overuse words (if I hear him ask for a "cracker", only to have him reject every type of cracker offered, one more time I will scream and tear off my ears) but he is trying very, very hard. He's a total little parrot. One day Paloma said to me, "listen to this". "Lyle, say dammit". Sure enough out of his angelic mouth comes "dammit". In general if you tell him to "say [fill in the blank]" he will do his best. Some of his brain circuitry for prossessing language is faulty. Words often come back garbled. But, hell, as I get older my brain doesn't work so well either. I often spend many frustrating minutes trying to dredge up common words only to have to go with something that's not quite right.