Monday, July 17, 2006
10:47 PM
Everything is going well. So much has changed, but it's not nearly as earth-shatteringly stressful as I imagined. of course, a gummy, drooly smile and giggle helps offset the stress a whole lot.
When you are a parent, suddenly you stop dealing in weeks or days ahead, and you just function from hour to hour, minute to minute.
The jetlag is still an issue- I'm trying very hard to keep up with Tom and Cupcake's sleeping habits but it's proving difficult. Both of them sleep whenever they feel tired, so it's all sort of sporadic. I try and sleep when they do, but it's like this: 1pm-3pm sleep, up from 3pm-10pm, nap from 10pm-2am, up from 2am-6am, sleep from 6am-4pm, etc. Without some sort of drug, I can't pull that off. So I spend most of the time when they are asleep getting things ready- making bottles, cleaning, ripping out pages from magazine for Cupcake to crumble.
We started Cupcake on food-food, and she's fond of bananas and Cheerios. She still doesn't get the Cheerio thing- she likes to move them around the various trays she is attached to, and throw them at the cats, but other than that, she pretty much thinks of them as small toys. When we put one in her mouth, she acts very surprised and pleased.
We took Cupcake in the pool yesterday, and after being initially irritated by the very bright sunlight and the fact she couldn't just swim off on her own, she was pleased. Bringing her to the pool was probably a mistake, though, because we found out today she still has a little bit of an ear infection left over from Vietnam, and needs ten more days of antibiotics. Oh well. She won't start her Olympic simming training just yet.
While we were at the doctor's office, he talked to us about immunizations, and whether or not we wanted to re-do some of the shots. Some of them we have to do (MMR, etc.) and some of them she still hasn't received. It's a tough call. He's an adoptive father himself, so we appreciated his perspective.
One thing that shocks me is that children are REQUIRED to have the chicken pox vaccine before starting school. What the heck? What ever happened to kids just getting chicken pox and that's that? Has chicken pox become a dangerous national epidemic since I was a kid? I didn't even HAVE chicken pox (not for lack of my mom trying), and I still don't think kids should have the vaccine. I mean, if you don't get them by the time you are 20, then by all means, get the vaccine. I did when I turned 21 because someone I worked with was very very ill from shingles, and my doctor was concerned I might get exposed through a chain reaction at the museum where I worked. But a kid? What ever happened to just getting stuff and letting that be the natural immunization?
Are they going to have vaccinations for foot fungus next?
Another thing is the TB vaccine that Cupcake received in Vietnam. It's pretty useless, and she'll ALWAYS test positive for TB now. TB is a pretty serious thing in my family cause my mom had it when she was a teenager, so we don't take it lightly. I hate the fact that Cupcake will have to have a chest x-ray done to rule it out in the future.
Anyway... besides the trip to the doctor, we took Cupcake to visit the cat shelter Tom and I volunteer at. She was very interested. I have no intention of putting her to work quite yet, but I'd like to start taking her during our shifts so that she gets used to the environment and the animals. I'm hoping she'll love animals as much as we do, and want to help out when she'd old enough. We'll see.
I'm off to spend some time with MY kitties, and then to bed.
