In Which We Are A Family On The Inside

Today is Ellen's fifteenth birthday!

I have no doubt that it's going to be quite a landmark year for the girl.  She'll have lots and lots of new experiences-- hopefully more good ones than bad.  Technically she could get her driving learner's permit now, but we're going to hold off on that for, um, a while.  She's still learning basic written English right now; we're not going to throw traffic laws in on top of that.

Anyway, the week has been relatively eventful.  A couple of days ago we drove over to the hospital to x-ray Ellen's legs, hips and torso.  She's got an appointment with the orthopedic clinic next week to see what things look like in there.  We were standing next to each other when the x-ray tech came out and called her name.  He looked right at me and then said to her, "Is there anyone here with you?"  Ha!

To my mind, it's so obvious that we're a family unit that I haven't really thought about how the rest of the world sees us.  I'm really used to being stared at because of the little guy, so I haven't really noticed a difference there.  Ellen seems pretty immune to the staring too-- I would imagine she got quite a bit of it in Thailand.  The only time people really up the ante is when they see us with Jer.  Here I think people pretty quickly figure out that Ellen is adopted, but in Thailand where adoption is very uncommon we definitely got some very confused looks and questions.  Oh well!  Luckily Ellen thinks it's pretty funny right now, though she may find it annoying later once the novelty wears off.

Connor has now decided that Ellen is his favorite person in the whole world besides Daddy.  It's pretty cute to see how excited he gets to give her a love butt (actually about ten love butts, as he never seems to think one is enough for his big sister) in the morning and evening.  I'm lucky if I get even one!  Mommy is always the boring one, right?  That's okay-- I can just steal kisses.

He's had a few more of those weird seizures in the past few days; we're waiting until Connor's med increase kicks in fully before we change anything else.  It takes about two weeks for the level adjustment to happen.  So in the meantime we're just keeping a close eye on him.

Otherwise things are going well!

~Jess