Int. Adopt. Med. Clinic Visit

Well, we went for our first of several visits with the people at the International Adoption Medical Clinic here in B'ham. For those of you who are not familiar with this, it is a clinic run by UAB, set up at Children's Hosp. South on Acton Road who sees only Internationally Adopted children as patients.

At yesterday's visit, which was about 3 and a half hours long (!), we saw an attachment specialist, a developement specialist, a pediatrician, and of course the ladies in the lab. Overall, they felt that things are going rather well in all areas.

She is bonding somewhat with both Todd and I so that is great, there were some clues that they look for and questions they asked that helped them give us some direction in areas to try to strengthen the attatchment process. For those of you who've asked if you could hold her, please know that I hate to say "no", but it just really isn't best for her right now. The time will come when that will change, but right now, here are some of the guidelines we've been given to help her to develop an appropriate attachment with us: (thanks in advance for your understanding of this process and encouraging us as we do what we need to do for her during this transition period)
1) Don't let your child be passed around or go to others until they are appropriately attatched to you. The length of time varies from child to child. Others, besides parents should also not engage eye contact for over two or three seconds at a time with the child. (I know that one sounds the most strange to me, but the point here, I think, is that they are trying to keep her from engaging other people in an intimate way through eye contact.)
2) Only mother and father should hold, feed and nurture - not extended family and friends until the child is attached. Parents should provide basic needs - physical and emotional. Meet child's needs to establish that you are reliable providers and that they don't have to rely upon themselves. (Which is what they largely have had to do in the orphanages.)
3) This child must be "reparented" as if they are a younger child, remain on a bottle longer than normal, not be encouraged to walk right away, etc...

Those are probably the most primary things that our close friends and family would need to know. As far as the "contact" with others is concerned, we are hopeful that this will be a short period of maybe just a couple of months. It's hard to believe we've been home for 2 and a half weeks already.

Developmentally speaking, she is of course behind in her language skills, but is very on target with most of her physical skills, language should catch up rather quickly, assuming we are able to get her ear infections under control. The medical exam did reveal another ear infection, this time in the opposite ear. Otherwise, medically she looks fine. They took a lot of blood (2 viles) to check for some genetic markers, look at her antibodies from the vaccinations she's already received, etc...

Basically, she is doing really well. We've not had any really major breakdowns yet, and they've warned us that this may still be to come, or she may transition completely fine without any real problems. It's just too soon to tell and we'll have to wait and see.

Thanks for checking in on us. Please continue to pray for all of us as we navigate this changing season of our lives.
Lori