Beautiful, isn't she? Princess Dai - her serene face, wind swept appearance made me think of conviction and strength in the face of a wind storm. And boy are we in the thick of one.

For those that still check to see if I am posting (sorry about that), so much has been going on in this New Year that I don't even know where to begin. I will start with the adoption, because we really need some prayers.

We have a meeting with our social worker on Monday at 11 am to get an update to our adoption home study which was completed back in November. If you recall, we had quite a delay in receiving our home study from the Centre de Jeunesse because our SW had to "defend" us. Well, it's come to light that he had to defend us for 2 hours. For what, he won't tell us at all (he just responds that "You don't want to know"). Our SW at first refused to do our SN update because he didn't think we would be approved. So Greg and I thought about it for a week, and we finally decided that we were going to go at this full steam ahead. I called the Centre de Jeunesse to ask them what we had to do to be able to proceed. They told me to contact our SW who did our home study. When I explained that he refused to do it, because he doesn't work for them anymore, the lady at the Centre de Jeunesse told me she would contact him and ask him to do it for us. Then our SW called us, all surprised, saying that he would do it for us at it seems that they (Centre de Jeunesse) want him to do. Instead of just doing it over the phone, however, we have to meet in his office for 1 hour and he will charge us for 2 hours, where the second hour will be for writing up the addendum letter. He warned us that its not a given that we will be successful, and that its not going to be easy. So Greg and I are preparing ourselves the best we can for this grilling, but its a little hard to know what to think - should we even be hopeful? - when we have no idea why there is a problem with our dossier.

Our resource person, at Formons, is being very supportive and writing to us almost every night with words of encouragement. Its so frustrating to not know what the problem is, when we know beyond a shadow of doubt that we would be a good family for an SN child. We have so many resources at our disposal - pediatrician, 2 ORLS, speech therapists, preemie clinic, pediatric cardiologist, nephrologist, ergo therapists. I could call any of them up and have an appointment within a day or two! The vast majority of people don't want to go the SN route because they don't feel equiped to deal with health or developmental issues - we've dealt with a great deal of them. SO WHERE IS THE PROBLEM????

The other item on our plate, which appears to be getting better, is the boys and their ability to deal with frustration. We have seen a pediatric psychologist twice so far, once with the boys, and we have made real progress this past week with Tristan. We are now using a Sun/Cloud method of highlighting unacceptable behaviour, with a reward of 10 minutes of computer time if they should finish the day with a Sun. Tristan is trying very hard, and he has so far been successfull 2 out 3 days; Zach on the other hand is not quite able to do it yet.