In Which We Get The Ball Rolling

So our initial adoption application has been accepted, we've been assigned a social worker, and we're on our way!  And, of course, the first thing we have to do is fill out this fourteen page packet where we answer approximately eight billion questions which are meant to get us really thinking about issues we may run into while parenting an adoptive child.  None of them, I am sad to say, are multiple choice.  This is our opening teaser to the sheer mountain of paperwork we will have accumulated by the time we are finished with this process.  We'll slog through all of it, I'm sure, though I may be a bit tired of writing by the end of things.  Expect short blog posts when we're in the thick of the process.  Or long whiny ones-- one of the two.

Anyway, thanks for all of the well wishes as we start our adoption journey, folks!  I'll do my best to answer the questions you've asked so far about Sylvie while respecting the fact that she's not "ours" yet. 

We don't know whether or not Sylvie has been fitted with hearing aids yet, but my guess, since it's not mentioned in any of her files and she is also totally non-verbal, would be "no."  We're not sure of the extent of her hearing loss, either, but based once again on the fact that she's totally non-verbal I would guess that it's relatively profound.  What technology we might consider for her, be it hearing aids, bone conduction aids, cochlear implants, etc would be contingent on what kind of hearing loss she has (we don't know), how severe it is (ditto) and how she is developing.  We're huge proponents of total communication around here (feeling with our current non-verbal child that ANY communication is good communication), and though we don't know anything for sure yet my guess is that a kid who's not talking at all and is being fitted for a hearing device at five or six years old is probably not going to be a great candidate for an oral program.  So we'll just have to see how she's doing.  I'm now pretty close to fluent in Signed Exact English and Jeremy is in advanced classes, so we'll continue learning.  Hopefully sometime in the next year I'll start ASL classes so I can eventually be fluent in that too.  I believe right now Sylvie is totally dependent on sign language, and that will probably remain her main form of communication.

What sign language it is she's learning we're not exactly sure of either.  This is because the orphanage social worker, when asked about it, claimed that sign language was "universal."  Right.  I'm taking an educated guess and betting that she's learning Thai Sign Language, which is the national sign language over there and is used by the majority of the Deaf community.  It's has its origins in ASL, so hopefully the transition between the two languages will actually be smoother than it probably would be if she was speaking Thai and transitioning to speaking English.  This is pure speculation, though-- she could be learning Pig Latin for all I know. 

That's one of the things about adoption-- you end up with a whole lot of questions you won't have the answers to until you meet the child.  Some of the questions-- things about birth family history, medical history, and background of the child-- these are questions you may never have the answers to.  We're going to have to take a lot of things on faith; though we will get the chance to send our questions over to the orphanage, there's no guarantee we'll get any answers.

Oh well.  It'll give us something to talk about on our breaks from filling out paperwork.

~Jess