Our New Normal

First I would like to say that I have tried to blog twice and I've had technical difficulties both times, but to my credit I have tried twice. Okay, things are different around our home. Different even from the first few days at home. We've had our warm fuzzy days of euphoria and now we are settling into the dailiness of parenting. It is good, don't get me wrong, but it is also tough. Xavier is still pretty easy going. He now says up, (pl)ease, bye bye, allo (hello, but only when he is pretending to talk on the phone), upa (open), ball, and oh yeah! He can sign more, please, thank you, finished, and he did chicken once. He is still eating fairly well, but I really think he eats less now that in the first few weeks. He will now tell us when he is finished eating. He will also tell us when he is finished in the car seat or when he is finished in the shopping cart which unfortunately usually doesn't correspond to when we are actually finished. He does throw some fits now, which is perfectly normal for his age and shows a level of comfort with us as his caregivers. Doesn't make them any more fun though. He can make the sound for cats, dogs, and I really think he did a sheep today. He laughs really hard when J.J. tosses him up, when you play games like "cover his head with a hat" or "make mock surprised faces". He also thinks sprinklers are hilarious. We had his first check-up and it went really well, except he is anemic. We now have iron supplements but I'm not entirely sure how we are suppose to get this medicine in his body because it is suppose to be mixed with 8 oz. of water and we are already stretching it to get him to drink one sippy full of Pediasure a day and one sippy full of pedialight a day. We had to drop juice because he was having diarrhea. I might have to call that doctor again on that one. The biggest challenge is sleep. He has fought sleep from the second day. It makes sense; we are still one step above strangers, he is still in a strange place, he doesn't really know that we will be here when he wakes up, we don't really know how sleeping was at his first home or in the baby home. I try really hard to keep those things in mind, but I just don't do well without sleep. I never knew how much I valued my sleep until this little person came along and pushed me beyond my limits. We try to keep a routine going, but our summer schedule is pretty lax. We now give him a snack, read a story, play this little song/video from a Russian children's program "Spakoina Nochie" (which I would highly recommend other adoptive parents watching on You Tube even if it is just for the experience because it is interesting at least and seems to be soothing to him), rock him while singing and then rock him while praying. Some nights it works, some nights is doesn't. That is the troublesome part. I wish I could make one whole week as uniform as possible so we could eliminate some of the variables and maybe have a better idea why things keep going downhill, but that seems to be impossible. For now, we just do our best. We have taken some pictures, but I better sleep while I can. Da Zaphtra!