firsts

We've had several firsts around here lately.

Today, little A had her first vaccines (well, she had one vaccine in the hospital, but this is the first one with us). She was a trooper! She cried for a minute or so, and then she was fine. She's been her normal self ever since, which has me relieved. I didn't do a lot of research into vaccines. I took a course once on A.BA (app.lie.d b.ehavio.ral ana.lysis), which is an approach to working with kids on the autistic spectrum. The professor, who was amazing, was a strong believer that vaccines (or, rather, the mercury in them) have a lot to do with the increase in autism. I know this is a big controversy. Anyway, we decided to go with the vaccines on the regular schedule. Anyone else out there choose to vaccinate on a delayed schedule? Or skip some altogether?

We had our first post-placement visit with our social worker on Friday. She came to our house. It was a very pleasant visit. We love our social worker, and it was good to see her again. She actually didn't attend our placement ceremony because she was on vacation, so we hadn't seen her since the day we met K, A's first mom. It was a very informal visit - she just asked about how A is doing, how we are doing, and we went over the logistics for taking A out of the country in November (we are going to Chile). She also asked about how long it took for us to feel like her parents. Some adoptive parents in our agency have described the first few weeks as feeling like a babysitter. That was never the case with Mr. P or me. What did feel strange for me - what took some getting used to - was my new public image as a mom. I felt like a mom on the inside and I certainly felt like A's mom, but having other people see me as a mom was for some reason odd to me. I think that with IF we kept everything so secret and internal, that the whole having-a-child-thing in and of itself became somehow secretive and internal, and so it's weird to be "out there". She had also asked us to write a testimonial for their new website, which we happily did.

Little A had her first outing in her "big girl" stroller on Monday. We've been using one of those strollers that is a base with wheels for a car seat, so that we could face her when we're out and about (and because she was so tiny that a "real" stroller felt huge). We really like the big girl stroller. It's a LOT lighter, which means that I can take her on the subway by myself (we don't have a car, so rely solely on public transportation, and we have to carry her in the stroller up and down all those stairs in the subway stations). The other stroller was awkward to carry up and down stairs, and is also heavier.

Tomorrow we are going to see the first potential day care. I'm kind of freaking out about daycare. We don't have a lot of leads, we don't have the budget to pay for what we've found so far, and we only have a few more weeks to look for places. In fact, I'm going to leave off here with the "firsts" for now so I can go do some more research into the daycare situation....