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.

The Science Toys site is great fun to browse through. Take a look. I'm sure you'll find something that makes you think, "oh! I want to make that!"

Here's a recent photo of Paloma, Lyle and me with my mother.

It was taken at the start of May on the occasion of a significant birthday (my Mom's).

Have you ever tried Google Whacking? It's a great time waster and it really exercises your vocabulary. The trick is to find two words which, when submitted to the Google search engine, return exactly one page. It's harder than it looks. Putting the words in quotes is not allowed. There are a lot of web pages out there that are word lists. If your single, solitary result is a word list then it is disqualified. Here's one of my successful whacks: australopithecine nicety.

How do you measure the progress of a child with developmental delays? We've just been through the exercise of creating an Individualised Education Plan (IEP) for Lyle. Part of the process involves setting goals for his teachers over the next year. Initially his speech and language teacher had set his goal to be that he would learn twenty words over the next year. Sam, a friend of ours who attended the IEP meeting with us, pointed out that language acquisition was very important to us and that the goal seemed a bit... well... lightweight. We talked with his teacher again this morning and pointed out that even though it was generally agreed that Lyle had been slacking in the new word acquisition department this year he still had demonstrated the generally correct use of 16 new words since the start of January. Even assuming a linear curve he should still be on track to gain mastery over 30 words in the next year. She rewrote his goal to be 40 words (!) plus some adjective/noun combinations. We will, of course, accept either spoken words or signs as counting towards the total.

Paloma and I went to look at the Del Mar Preschool this morning. I think its full name is something like "The Del Mar Preschool for the Severely Handicapped". I hate applying that terminology to Lyle. Yes, he has some developmental delays (mostly in language acquisition but in other areas as well). But he's so bright! And happy. The preschool itself seemed like a nice continuation of the program he's in currently. Caring adults nurturing children in a rich and stimulating environment. He would ride the bus to get there.

Lyle got glasses yesterday. His ophthalmologist has been telling us for quite some time now that he is far-sighted. If we don't correct it now he runs the risk of developing crossed-eyes. Paloma got the frames from an organisation called Blind Babies Foundation. I guess I should link to a picture here but I haven't posted yesterday's photos yet. Well I will. Someday. If I decide to continue with this blog.

Dramatis Personae

Bernie - that would be me, the writer, husband of Paloma, father of Lyle
Paloma - my wife, better half, mover and shaker, mother of Lyle
Lyle - our son, two years and nine months old at this time, former preemie, with some developmental delays