I have 5 kids!!!!

Whoever said having 5 kids is no different from having 3 or 4 LIED. It has been busy around here!! For one, we are still on Ukraine time, and about 5pm we are ready to go down for the night. Ava has been a great sport with all the attention she is getting. Talk about over-stimulation! The kids all want to hold her, feed her the bottle, help me dress her, make her smile. They have bragged to the neighbor kids about how "stretchy" she is, and the cool things she can do with her tongue. All day I hear, "Isn't she cute", and "I can't believe she is finally here." One asked, "Can I feed her bologna?" Uh...NO!!!

We have noticed she grinds her teeth all of a sudden. We don't remember her doing it at the orphanage. I think she is communicating: "Who are you and where have you taken me???!!" Other than the teeth grinding, she seems to be adjusting beautifully. We have gotten some big laughs and giggles out of her, mostly when she is well rested and there is not too much going on. We are trying to keep everything as familiar and low-key as possible, but how in the world do you do that in a new family in a foreign country with 5 excited kids in the house speaking an unfamiliar language....very loudly!?

We took her to the doctor for an examination today. Somehow we left all her birth history, medical history, etc in the Embassy in Ukraine I guess? It was nowhere to be found. I managed to fill out most of it based on what I remember from the interview with the orphanage director. I think they should have special forms for adopted children. How sad is it to write to write in big letters over 3/4 of the page "unknown----child is adopted".

The doctor really had difficulty detecting any kind of heart murmur at all. He really thinks that whatever heart defect she had has closed on its own, but we scheduled an echocardiogram just in case.(So much for all those years of understimulation to preven a heart attack!) She was below the bottom of the chart on her height and weight percentile for average kids, but when they charted her on a special chart specific for Down Syndrome, she moved up to the bottom 5 percentile...Hey, thats better than zero! He recommended we see a developtmental specialist, dentist, eye doctor, cardiologist, and physical and speech therapy (feeding specialist). That is a lot to process all at once, so we will just take one thing at a time, making our priority nurturing and family bonding, just as we would a newborn who just joined our family. Thanks to my online friends for their good advice.

We had a very nice day. Our 15 year old washing machine died today. I will not mention names (because I know they would not want me to), but SOMEBODY BOUGHT US A BRAND NEW WASHING MACHINE!!!! Every washing machine we have had up until now has been bought used, and what a treat it was to do my laundry last night in a brand new one.

Then while the washing machine was being installed, we received a phone call from my John's parents, who live in New Mexico. They said their GPS must be malfunctioning because it said they were at our address, could we please check it out to see what the problem is? We walked outside and surprise, there they were, bearing gifts for our kids...all FIVE kids. What a wonderful surprise. Also in their stash of gifts was a DVD made by my brother-in-law, who took photos from our blog and put together the most awesome slideshow set to music for us.(If I can figure out how to get it from disk to computer, I will put it on here). It was such a meaningful gift. And yesterday a man from the Tulsa World came to our house, they said a friend of ours set up an interview to share our adoption story. It will come out in the Saturday paper.

Would you believe I have not taken one photo of all of us together? Or even of just the kids together. I do not know what has come over me. You all know how picture crazy I am...and now not one single photo to go along with this post. So sorry. Check back soon. I need to charge my camera battery, if I can find the charger in the bags we haven't unpacked yet.