Yin & Yang

Today, we have the light stuff and the heavy stuff. I'll start light.

Yesterday was Julia's half year birthday. I smile as I remember that one year I let my birthday pass without mention and some of my friends celebrated my half birthday -- so very sweet. Julia just started understanding birthday - as in, the day you are born -- about two months ago after the last class birthday party of the school year. We have been talking about her half birthday and even though I doubt whether she understood the concept of half, we decided to go for it.

After OT yesterday, we went to Whole Foods and picked out a much too expensive carrot cake (kid has good taste). When we got home, I worked on her alphabet work with her and she earned her last two of ten stickers to get her newest two LPS pets -- two little kittens. Then she took an aveno bath (still with the rash, though better, and lots of bites), as I put finishing touches on her favorite supper food -- bok choi with Udon noodles. We had supper and settled down to a movie, stopped part of the way through and had our cake, complete with candles and singing, and we gave her a present -- the LPS fun house.

She was beside herself with joy. She thanked us many times, including the last thing before she went to sleep and first thing on waking up. Gifts are still an incredible unexpected surprise to her and they make her very happy. "I girl happy!" she tells us.

Julia had a hard time getting to sleep last night and did not really bed down unitl almost 10:30. By that time I had been dozing and waking, and was not ready for bed myself. I stayed up and watched a great tv program about searching for Atlantis and looking for it in Bolivia at a site called Tewanaku, which is the ruins of an ancient Andean civilization. There are over 3000 ancient civilization sites in S. America most of which have not been explored and no one knows much at all about the civilizations. By the time the Europeans came over, these civilizations were long dead and the explorers/invaders had no interest in what the people remembered of them. And so, even the stories about the civilizations disappeared. I can't help but think of our European-American modern civilization without the stories of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. What if . . . what if.

Well, good transition into the heavier stuff.

I have been feeling the tug to do attachment work with Julia. Why? Well, probably because I read too much. No, more likely, I read online and books just enough. I know that Julia's behavior still baffles people who should know kids on the spectrum, and although everyone says tht all kids with autism are different, the bafflement of Julia's teachers and therapists have nudged me on. Coupled with that, I think I have an internal timetable that is dictating something about our two year anniversary as a family of 4. I joined the yahoo group for attachment/china adoptions and have almost finished reading the Connected Child. I was further drawn in by the warning, from an expert, that the intensive autism therapy which is behaviorally based (and for which we are on a long que to be offered) is not good for kids with attachment disorders, so it is important that in the next 18 months or so, I tease out the threads of attachment issues or at least investigate them before we get into the 20-30 hour/week commitment of autism therapy.

So, now I read about attachment and trauma, and can see how Julia's behavior could be described as the result of those experiences. I hope that our new therapist -- family shrink -- is sufficiently expert enough to help me on this journey.

What a puzzle, this child.