mornin' ramblin'

I feel in a calm place this morning taking some sort of long view of Julia's development. And it is not because she is moving by leaps and bounds. She creeps along but pushing forward in so many arenas must be exhausting and fill her brain with so much as to spill over. For 2.5 years, I have been trying to catch up for the 5.5 years that Julia was not with us. I now have a much healthier understanding, a gut understanding of why "they" say that it takes a child as long as she was in institutional care to catch up. Any less is not at all fair to the child.

I can't imagine what it must be like to have a battery of people -- teams everywhere you look -- working on me. Trying to develope me, trying to calm me, trying to force years of love on me, and trying to teach me everything from table manners to addition. I know that I see a very bright child here and a very delayed one as well. Not only do I want to give Julia the time to "catch" up to her physical age but I want others to do the same. It scares me at time when I see little girls, her peers, treat her with distain or outright reject her. Sometimes I want to say something to these kids. I hold myself back only because I cannot think of anything constructive to say. I am too angry. I need to talk to someone very soon about one particular girl.

When the glimmer of some leap forward come into view, it is startling. Two nights ago at the dinner table, David was asking Julia about her day. We get a behavior chart every day and have been since last spring. When ever Julia get all smiles on her chart, she gets and extra sticker. She is always happy about this but it doesn't seem to give her incentive to get all those smiles.

The day in question had two frowning faces and a note that Julia hit the special ed teacher who was doing math with her. David asked her about the frowning faces and Julia replied that she hit Ginny. David asked why and Julia said that she didn't like math and didn't want to do it. David said that even if she didn't like the lesson, she still should not hit. And Julia replied that she knew but that Ginny was a very bad teacher. David refuted this and added that even if Ginny was a bad teacher, that Julia should not hit.

Now Ginny is a wonderful, patient and very loving teacher, but putting that aside, Julia and David had a real conversation! That was exciting. More and more often, it is more than a single questions and response with Julia. She still calls your name and has nothing to add, she still doesn't look at people when she talks, she still is either over enthusiastic with people or is inappropriately unresponsive, but . . . .

Last night, we didn't do home work. Instead, we cuddled together, told stories -- including hers about swallowing anyone and everyone she didn't like at the moment -- tapped, and sang. She will still fight our cuddling at times, well, most of the time, fight getting started, but once she is in my arms, and sometimes, once she had gotten her angries out, she is very relaxed in my arms. She seems to let more go.

This morning Julia told me she wanted to go to our play group today. Ah, she likes it. Good. It is time to learn something!