An Andrew Update!

I thought I would just write a post all about Andrew. He has been doing so wonderful lately, and I am so grateful for his progress.

Health Issues: Andrew has recovered wonderfully from both of his surgeries. I can't believe what strides he has been making to try to talk since the tubes were put in on Oct. 30th. His speech therapist has been seeing him weekly and she also can't believe his progress. After surgery she said to me that she was starting to think she lost her touch because we haven't seen any improvement with Andrew's speech since summer, but now everyday he is saying new sounds. It's like the kid had so many thoughts trapped into his head, and he couldn't wait to get them all out. We don't understand much that he says but he is really trying to repeat things we are saying. In fact today he decided to act like a two year old and he got upset with me that I was taking to long washing his grapes to eat, and he pointed his finger at me and was waving it up and down and yelled at me! Lets just say the kid got a time out (which he responds well to) and he knew right away that he crossed the line. It's hard to not laugh at him when he is bad! We also will be getting another echo done on his heart in the near future. We don't foresee any problems with that, but they like to keep an eye on his VSD and we are also hoping that the whole will be smaller. I'll give an update on that when we know further.

Eating Habits: This has been a big issue with Andrew lately. He is a very picky eater and I'm not use to this because both of my girls would eat whatever I gave them. Lets just say there has been a few nights when the poor little guy has gone to bed hungry because he refused to eat anything healthy for him. I just talked to the psychologist about this yesterday and she said he is just a picky eater and to just keep doing what I am doing, even if that means sending him to bed hungry. I hope this gets better soon, because meal time sometimes turns into battle time.

Sleeping Habits: Andrew also has had some issues with sleep. The kid won't sleep past 6am for anything. Sometimes he starts getting up around 4:30am. Lately this has caught up with me, and I have been dragging. I have tried everything I can with getting him to sleep longer and nothing has worked. I also talked about this to the psychologist but she said that it sounds like Andrew has a built in alarm clock and nothing I do will change that. They did wake the kids up at 6am in the orphanage, so it amazes me that even though we are in a different time zone that is the time he needs to get up. Andrew has also been restless some nights waking up every 30 min. for the first couple of hours of sleeping and then he wakes up doing it again around 4am. I think this has been due to teething, so I'm hoping this will also go away.

Development: Andrew is still on target for all of his development, aside of his speech. This makes me feel good every time we have him evaluated and he is doing exactly what he is suppose to. Sometimes you would never know he was in an orphanage less then a year ago.