Urban Goes Country

Adolescence is coming on strong in the Urban household. Boy do I feel unprepared.
There was a moment today that left two Urbans (one being me) in tears, in a public setting. I know I handled things all wrong, despite being halfway through with this great book:

I pray every day that I am not screwing up too badly. I often try to imagine what kinds of things my kids will say someday about their childhood. Is it too much to hope they will only remember the good things about their mother? :( I miss the days when they were super forgiving of my imperfections as a mother (and when they could be bribed with Tic Tacs and such). I am thankful for the friend who told me long ago that it is our imperfections as parents that should direct our children to their need for their Saviour. (Thank you, Kirsten for that nugget of wisdom)

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Remember all the problems we had last summer with our floors? Well we are still living with no carpet or baseboards. The money we spent trying to seal our concrete, we found out much later, SHOULD have been spent installing a french drain around our house! It turns out that all the issues we were having were related to moisture problems. If we would have invested $35 in a moisture test in the first place, we would have saved ourselves about $10,000 in contractors fees, ruined carpets, cabinets, walls, and baseboards. And yes typing that out just made me want to cry all over again. I guess nobody we hired thought to do it, and we didn't know to ask. Ugh.

Anyway, looks like we are getting back a nice tax refund this year, and guess what we are going to do with it?

NOT fix our concrete and baseboards or replace our carpet! We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take another vacation this summer, and we all agreed that the floors can wait until later. :) My parents have offered to come up and bond with the three newest additions, while we take our big kids somewhere special. And the generous friends who gave us their time share in Virginia have offered it for the rest of the year. We would never turn down an offer like that!! Hmmmm. Where should we go?
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We finally got a return call from the doctor while we were on vacation. He said that although the HIV test did come back positive, he is willing to allow Zoya to take a holiday from her medications. He felt it was worth trying, to see if her appetite will come back. I am happy to say that we have noticed a teeny tiny bit of an appetite increase. Not that she is necessarily eating like other children, but a couple of times she has actually asked for food, which is a first. Also, we have changed the tube feeding schedule around a little bit, mainly increasing her lunch and dinner portion, and discontinuing her morning feeding. I am thrilled to report that she hasn't thrown up in about three weeks or so. This is so huge. And the best part is she weighs just over 26 pounds now!!!

We are now seeing a dietician regularly, and tomorrow will be the second visit with a feeding specialist. We are trying to figure out the source of Zoya's food aversions.

June, my friend who is an NICU nurse, came up with a theory, and actually it makes the most sense out of everything that has been suggested. She said if Zoya was a preemie (which she was by 13 weeks), she would have been fed by naso-gastric tube, probably for several months. She said for this reason babies born prematurely in the US receiving intense feeding therapy in the first several weeks or months of their lives. Most likely this kind of therapy was not available to a little orphan girl, thus the aversion to food. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Regardless we are determined to figure it out, and we pray that the g-tube is just a temporarily solution to get her over the hump.

By the way, her cleft palate surgery is scheduled for April. If the surgeon feels she is healthy enough, we are absolutely going through with it. Boy it will be nice to have that over with!

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I guess that's today's family update. Hope YOU are doing well!