What a day...

Today was one of those days that I started off running and continued chasing until now. Emerson was up at 5am sharp. He was sweet and I enjoyed the nice morning with him, but it was still 5am. I spent my time before Isaac got up running around getting everything together for Isaac's dr. appointments and Emerson's day at school.

Finally I hear Isaac. He now will get out of his bed, but he will not leave his room or call out to us. So I go in there only to find out that he has had explosive diareah and is sitting/trailing it all over the room as it leeks out of his diaper. This was a result of the apple juice I let him have for my romantic b'day dinner of chick-fi-la drive through because John was working. This was not wet-wipe easy fix kind of poo. It needed a good shower. So, nothing like an impromptu shower at 7:15 on a school day while also disinfecting a room.

Then comes breakfast. I am not sure the last time any of you have had the pleasure of sharing a before school breakfast with two three year olds, with food issues and behavior problems, but this is now my definition of HELL. There was spilled milk, changed clothes, yogurt that I just bought that was bad already, "Ew I don't like this." Blah, Yucky, more spilled milk and another outfit and 4 time outs. Oh and no, I never got my coffee or my breakfast before having to run out the door.

So I quickly cram the kids into the only legal place that I can tie them into, the car, and we are off to arrive in the 2 min. window for dropping Emerson off at school. If I show up late I have to park a long way away, haul both of them in, then bring Isaac back out because he is not going to school. Too bad Isaac really wanted to go school and Emerson really wanted to go to the Dr. Have I mentioned that I live in opposite land? Fortunately the teacher came out at 8:04 just to see if we had arrived and grabbed Emerson. Have I mentioned that I LOVE their teacher?

Isaac is now devastated he is not going to school, so he throws a screaming, kicking raging fit for 15min of the 30 min drive through rush hour traffic on the way to downtown. Are we having fun yet? By this point I have gone to my happy place, I am sure Isaac thought I had lost my hearing.

We arrive at Children's and thank goodness I have the Ergo in my car because I need to go on a hike to get to the clinic. We bring a backpack with enough food for 10 (which was all gone by 12:30), crayons, cars, books and loads of paperwork (which no one cared about.) I arrive with 6 min. to spare before Isaac's appointments.

For all of that chaos, the appointments went well. This was the big goal of the day and I must say for having a rough start it went well with minimal tears and meltdowns.

Here is what we learned:
1. First we saw the genetic counselors. They explained that 95% of the time cleft pallets are not caused my genetics but because we did not have any background information on Isaac, we should do a genetic screening to make sure. Yippee I have blood work to look forward to. Not quite the balloon I was hoping he would get or the complimentary wine or Valium dispenser, but oh well.

2. He tested in the lower end of the normal range for hearing. This is very good news because it means that his receptive language can pick up with exposure and time.

3. We met with the surgeon and he said his repair looks good and he explained that what they hope to see is continuous improvement in his speech. If he ever gets to a point where he is stuck with out progress in speech therapy then we might need to look at a different surgery. But for now we are good.

4. A speech therapist came in to take base line information so that they will know how much progress he made in 6 months.

5. We met with an ENT who did say his tubes have both come out and that there is a lot of fluid build up on his ears. We do need to have the tubes replaced and the ears drained soon. Fortunately he said it is about a 5 min. procedure these days.

I will say as hard as it was to keep him in good spirits through out the day it was nice to knock it all out at once. The other big thing is that there is nothing like hanging out at a children's hospital to make you snap out of a pity party fast. I saw some amazing courage today, I saw smiles on kids who had all odds against them, I saw grandmothers being there for their daughters and grandchildren, I saw that I am one lucky Mama to have kids who are doing so well.

Isaac on the other hand didn't get the memo about being thankful and proceeded to throw a fit on the section of the drive he missed this morning. It must have ticked him off royally that I just didn't care because I was too spent at that point to do anything about it. We got home, he got a nap, I took a walk, then it was off to pick up Emerson from school.

Fortunately he had a great day and we had a date to go to the library. I was all excited because I reserved a book for me that was there for pick up. I sent Emerson off to his section only to realize that I requested the cliff notes for the book I wanted to read. OK world I get that I don't have time to really read a book, but I need to, and I am tired of just the cliff notes version of life.

Once home, I reveled in a dinner of chicken soup that was part of my care package from the amazing Kazakh mamas. Every bite helped the woes of the day disappear. We went on a walk as a family and now both boys are in bed. Everyone lived, everyone had good moments, everyone had bad moments, but most importantly we all survived.

The icing on today's crummy cake was that we will not be closing tomorrow on our house, because our mortgage guy didn't bother to read the appraisal until today and wants repairs before he will sign off. Good thing he has had that paper for two weeks. We have lined up a back up lender, and I spoke to the president of the mortgage company which my father and grandfather founded. Let's just say we might get to close on Monday. It is not a good idea to mess with adoptive parents on paperwork issues. We might not have endured the pain of physical labor, but we can sure extract papers from an office monkey.