playing school last week -

prepping for starting (nursery) school this week.  he was so adorable and asked to play school, after one of our school visits.  he wanted me to be the teacher and then he wanted to be the teacher.  we had his animals all lined up to be the students. he was reading to them and asking them questions.  giving them lots of praise like "thank you, giraffe!"  and "good job, monkey!" complete with smiles and thumbs up signals.  such a cutie!  :)

a big "first" for us tomorrow morning

Eli starts "school" tomorrow.  He'll be going 3 mornings a week to nursery school. He's delighted about it and can't wait to start.  I'm excited too AND nervous.  I'm sure he'll love it and learn so much.  I just hope I don't cry when I say good bye to him.  He does okay with my leaving him for Sunday School time each week.  I'm hoping this goes as smoothly. We'll see.  We did spend a day together at the school last week, to walk through the routines and see what his time there will be like.  He really enjoyed it and came home and promptly asked to play school.  :)

Biting my nails and hoping I can sleep tonight....

(People keep asking me what I'm going to do with my time when he's there.  I plan to grocery shop, clean, and start writing thank you notes that are very very late. The time will fly by, I'm sure.)

Saturday morning

I was reading and he was playing games on the iPad.  

Good times snuggled up in our big chair.  :)

school info event recently...

yes, our neighborhood is this much fun!

I *love* our neighborhood!  Have I mentioned this lately?  

This "funky" rasta banana has been passed around from porch to porch and I think it was given to the first neighborhood family by a local school crossing guard who found it in a dumpster... (I know, ew!, right?!) Stay with me though. It has brought many smiles and so much delight!  What better to brighten these gray wintry days than this funny yellow fellow?  Eli was squealing with joy when he first spotted it on our porch a couple weeks ago. It was the same day we were taking all of our Christmas decorations and tree down. He was so sad about that.  The banana cheered him right up though! :)

Now, we are planning the passing of the banana. I wanted this to happen (last week!) yesterday, but it's frigid right now and I'm NOT putting the thing in my car.  I think we'll need to wheel it to an unsuspecting friend's house in our wagon one day soon.  We've been going over how it's a pass-it-along kind of item.  We'll see how Eli does with the passing it on.  I think he gets it, since he saw it at other houses before ours.  I'll let you know...

If you live in our neck of the woods, keep your eye out for the next home to have this happy fellow chilling on their porch!

reading, home visit, and next eye appt.

We've been having so so much fun READING lately.  Eli is just devouring books and will sit to read and chat about books for nearly an hour!!!  He *loves* books.  This thrills us both! He will read on his own or in one of our laps.  He enjoys fiction, non-fiction and books on many topics.  I'm so excited about this! He told me recently that his foster mom and dad didn't read books with him.  I could tell that he didn't have book handling experience when he came home with us in October.  He has developed a sincere love for books in these past few months and it's beautiful!!! :)


Our second post-placement home visit this afternoon went very well.  I kinda like having a social worker interested and talking with us about Eli and his development and adjustment.  :)
When we have our next home visit, someone please remind me *not* to clean every room on all three floors of our house! We sat and chatted and played in one room only.


Also, tomorrow we have another eye doctor appt.  We're getting a second opinion and more info to work with before proceeding.  I'm looking forward to this visit and hope it's as helpful as I'm anticipating it will be. This doctor comes very highly recommended.  I'll let you know what we find out and how we'll proceed from here.

mid- January hodge podge of an update

I have soup to make, and floors to sweep and bathrooms to clean and laundry to fold and (my) hair to wash.  But really all I want to do is sift through photos of fun times w sweet little Eli and share some of them here.  Nap time minutes go by so quickly, and I've been too tired to do much more than post photos here lately. Sorry for the lack of words.  I'm hoping you can see how we're doing through the photos lately.

Life is good.  We're having such fun.  Eli is learning new words constantly and trying out all sorts of new phrases.  Can't even imagine when he starts nursery school...

He has happily added kiwi fruit, oranges, green peas, deli turkey, strawberries, blueberries, raisins and couscous to his diet.  He's not a huge fan of most veggies, but he's enjoying more fruits lately. :)



We have our second (3 month) post-placement home visit on Monday afternoon (oh, that's today and in < 2 hrs now - behind on my posting....)  
Our one month visit went well and I'm sure this one will be fine, but it's tough to not get a little nervous about it.  I'm sure our social worker will be shocked with his progress.  I'm just hoping he doesn't pull any stunts while she's here.  I'm sure she has seen all sorts of things, but I don't want to have to deal with a melt down during her visit, of all times.  You know?!



We've had a couple of days lately where this will happen:

Eli:  "I want A.  No, I want B.  No, A, maybe.  No, B.  No, I very want A.  I really want A."  Singing - "A, A, A!" :)

Mommy:  "Okay, here's A, little man."

Eli:  Wailing - "I wanted B!!!!"

This is exhausting.  And I'm not sure what it's about.  Is he just figuring things out?  Testing limits?  Not sure.  Hoping it's a phase that passes quickly.  We'll see.