I should probably add that Maddy is also a silly, sweet, funny girl! She tries extra hard to always do what is expected of her and gets frustrated when she fails and we have to correct her. She has a very big heart and immediately felt really bad that she kicked her sister. It was a crime of passion and not something she would have done if she'd taken even 1 extra second to think about it. She didn't have to sit in time-out for very long.
We played hooky from pre-school yesterday morning and headed to our local mall to watch the new Kit Kittridge movie. We've had good experiences with movies lately and I thought the girls were finally ready to try something that wasn't animated. This one came highly recommended (thanks, Catherine!) but even though they tried to sit still and enjoy the popcorn and the movie, they just couldn't really get into it. During a mid-movie potty break, we noticed that Wall-e was playing and (even though we just saw it last week), everyone was more than happy to switch theaters and watch it again. I'll have to Tivo Kit Kittridge to find out how it ends. I liked the movie but it was just a bit too mature for my 47 and 48 month kids.
Wall-e, on the other hand, was even more fun the 2nd time around! It's a brilliant movie with spectacular graphics, an adorable main character, a heart warming story line and laugh-out-loud comedy. It might have just bumped Monster's Inc out of the top spot on my list of kid's favorites.
You can't help but fall in love with Wall-e and his robot gal pal, Eva. I'm a softee and cry during Charmin TP commercials but my girls have never gotten emotionally involved with any of their movies. Until now. Maddy nudged me and said "Mommy, it's sad" and when I looked at Gwen, I saw that she had tears streaming down her cheeks! Never fear, moments later, the sad part turned happy again and all was well.
Before any of this, we saw Kung Fu Panda. I love Jack Black and the animation was excellent but the story line was lame and there was too much fighting. Of course, I knew there would be fighting but I guess I didn't think about how much Gwen and Maddy would act out the scenes at home. Later, I'll post some pics of their crazy karate poses. For now, I'm just working hard to teach them that they can't actually hit or kick when they play Karate.
I wanted to blog about all of this but I didn't have my camera with me at the theater. So how did I create that top photo of the girls at the movies with the popcorn?
 | Here's how I transformed this photo (left). First, I traced around the edge of the girls to extract their image and separate it from the background. I use Paint Shop Pro to do this and it's really easy as tracing. Next, I had to add the popcorn cup. I found one I liked on Google Images. I darkened it slightly and extracted it from the other two cups. Then I extracted Gwen's hands and layered everything to get the effect I wanted. Really, It was easier than it sounds. |
 | Lastly, I needed a background. My favorite source for just about any photo is www.flickr.com so I went searching and found several. But I liked this one best because it's most like the actual seats in our local theater. I played around with different search terms and found some fun alternatives. Here are a few of my favorites. The fun thing about doing this is you can recreate memories of places you've been even if you forgot to bring your camera! |
Gwen has ear wax. Incredible (Super Hero strength) ear wax... Ear wax that rivals the hardness of diamonds and sapphires and is probably under patent by the makers of "mighty putty".
I can look in her ears and see it. And, like most moms who want nothing more than to lick a napkin and clean her kid's face, I really want to cram my finger in there and start digging around to get it out. But then I remember the old admonition that we "shouldn't put anything in our ear other than our elbow" (Hardy Har Har!), so I took Gwen to our Pediatrician who tried the Mineral oil/Ice pick trick before giving up and referring us to Stanford Hospital's Children's ENT Clinic.
Three nurses, one Doctor, one re-purposed dental chair, four scary pointed silver instruments and one pair of lighted binoculars later, we were still waxing unsuccessful. Defeated, we took our crusty old brown sticky ear-goo and just went home.
Her hearing is fine but I can't really imagine how that's possible when you consider what's visible in her ears. If we remove it, I'm sure she'll have bionic hearing and nothing we whisper in this house will ever go unnoticed or unrepeated again.
(Edited to add: Gwen has a follow-up appointment at the ENT clinic in September. She'll have a hearing test and meet with the Dr again and, hopefully, she'll be more cooperative when they poke around in her ears.)
A week after Gwen's Dr appointment, it was Maddy's turn.
Maddy's ears are fine -- perfect, actually -- but her problem is her very minor cleft palate that we hoped and prayed wasn't severe enough to require surgery.
Even though Maddy was fluent and very conversational in Cantonese when we adopted her at age 25 months, she didn't really start speaking in complete sentences in English for more than a year. It's really only been the last 4 or 5 months that she's been consistently speaking enough for us to conclude that she's totally unable to create certain sounds. For example, she can make the "sh" sound but not the "s" sound and D is usually switched for G and other difficult consonants are left off completely. It's common for kids to drop syllables or soften or de-emphasize them so it's only been just the last few months that we really started to worry more and more about Maddy's pronunciation. As is turns out, she'll need surgery to fix the problem and probably should have had it already.
I recognize the importance of fixing this but I'm so uncomfortable with having her undergo potentially life threatening surgery to correct something that clearly isn't life threatening. Even so, we're going to do it because it will affect her quality of life if we don't do it and other kids will almost certainly tease her. I wish I didn't have to weigh the risks/benefits of teasing vs surgery but we can't avoid it because this is the world Maddy lives in and this is the world that will judge her (fairly or unfairly) so we have to give her the most level playing field possible.
Surgery is scheduled for the end of the first week in September. I was so numb that I didn't even write down the date (Andrew says it's the 10th). I'm dreading this but also looking forward to getting it over with and hearing my sweet baby sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with perfect enunciation for the first time in her precious young life.
We didn't really think Maddy's speech problems were very significant or even directly related to her minor cleft palate because Gwen seems to have many of the very same speech issues and she doesn't have a cleft palate. But it turns out that Maddy's problems are completely related to her cleft and even though Gwen is growing out of her speech problems, Maddy never will.
We're very protective of our children and wouldn't normally post such a personal thing on our blog but I wish we'd known more about minor cleft palate issues. I guess we always (incorrectly) believed that a level 1 cleft palate probably wouldn't need surgical correction. There's really not much information out there about Level 1 Clefts (not even on the big Yahoo AdoptCleft site). Our experienced Pediatrician wasn't even concerned that Maddy might need surgery ever -- much less soon. But she does.
I hope our story helps send the message that even minor clefts should be seriously evaluated. I've already heard from a few families about the surgery experience and I hope that we'll continue to hear from more -- especially if their child was over age 3 or 4 when the surgery was performed. We want to help Maddy cope with the post-surgical recovery as best as possible.
Like last year, we're celebrating the girls birthdays together. Maddy is just too young (and sensitive) to accept that her sister can have something as spectacular as a birthday party while she sits there and gets nothing. They're 36 days apart in age but 36 days is much too long to wait for your own birthday cake and presents. So, for the foreseeable future, we'll be celebrating birthdays together. No complaints since it's actually much easier for Mom and Dad this way!
This year, the big present was bicycles! Beautiful pink and purple girly bikes with streamers on the grips!
Both girls mastered the trike long ago and it seemed like age 4 was the perfect time to bring in the 2 wheeler. Okay, it's technically a 4 wheeler - since there are training wheels - but we're working our way down two two wheels. Gradually. We also picked up a Razor Scooter for their birthday but, so far, Mommy has been riding around on it and she probably needs to work on sharing. When the kids get a turn, it's teaching them some good stuff about balance and they're already making some impressibe progress with it. We have a friend who has a child who learned to ride a bike without training wheels just one week after his 4th birthday. He did it because he was already able balance on the Razor Scooter. Even though we're not rushing the girls to master the art of balancing on two wheels, it makes sense that a child could learn from something like this scooter. Maybe Mommy will let them play on it more often.
Here are some sweet pics of our big bicycle surprise yesterday (that went slightly awry). There are many other really great pictures from our fun Birthday Weekend but I'm struggling to find time to turn them into pretty collages and post them. Geesh, it seems like there's really no time to do this bloggy stuff as the girls get older and require more and more of my attention. When they were two, all I really needed to do was make sure they didn't kill themselves while they toddled around the house. Then, at three, they were a bit more challenging but they didn't seem to want my attention every-single-minute-of-the-day but now I have to spend hours and hours sitting with them and singing or playing games or reading books or coloring pictures or pushing them on the swing or playing catch or collecting flowers or bugs or leaves outside.... AHHHH! It never ends! And they absolutely HATE to see me sit at this computer!
Here are some Birthday Bike photos from Saturday. Gwen was actually 4 on June 25 and Maddy won't be four until July 31st but this is the weekend we picked to have their little party. Last year, we had more than 50 people at our house to celebrate birthday #3 so this year we decided to keep it small and simple. Well, at least it was small. So much for simple....
(click the images for a larger view)
We had such a wonderful Birthday Weekend! We had cake and presents and even Michael came over to help us celebrate (Maddy LOVED that!). The girls insisted on wearing their Princess party hats everywhere we went and they drew plenty of attention and smiles from everyong. They played with their helium filled balloons every moment we were home - which wasn't very often since we were BUSY and always on the go - and this morning the balloons were suffering from the attention and laying listless on the floor. But the girls didn't seem to care. As long as there was air in them, there seemed to be fun in them! Maddy's big balloon, Minnie Mouse, was the last mylar survivor but she's now floating somewhere over Santa Cruz (and Maddy hasn't noticed that she's missing). All the rest are flat and "taking a nap" in the trash in the garage.
For the past two nights, we've sang the Happy Birthday song at bedtime and I've had to sing it at least three times before being allowed to leave the bedroom. Tonight, Gwen told us she wanted to have "more birthday!" so there's going to be some unpopular discussions about calendars and months in her future.
More birthday pictures will be posted soon but it's after midnight so I better go to bed. Tomorrow is an important day for us as we're finally meeting with a surgeon at Stanford Hospital to talk about how necessary it might be to correct Maddy's cleft palate (it's just a level 1 cleft). I'm really hoping that he'll tell us that it's too minor to require surgery but I'm bracing myself for a different opinion. More about that later.
