258.

Zoe spent 257 days without us.

three months old, before we knew her

Today, she has been with us for 258 days.

People say she is blessed.

But really?

the hospital lobby in Taitung, just after our sick girl was discharged into our care {The Archibald Project}

She is the blessing.

We are the blessed.

in our backyard a month and a half ago

My cup? It overflows.

in which I try not to die

For those of you following me on Facebook, the title doesn't refer to my tuberculosis exposure. Nope. 

Sure, my positive TB skin test paired with the three days we spent last summer with our sick baby girl in a hospital in Taitung, Taiwan, means I was exposed to the bacteria... but thankfully my chest x-ray was all clear, so I'm waiting for my appointment with the health department, which will launch several months of preventative antibiotics and public health monitoring.

Hi, my name is Shannon, and I'm a walking petri dish.

See the joy on our faces as we sprung Zoe from the hospital? Who knew that I was also busting out a few TB germs? {photo credit: The Archibald Project}

So why the concern that I might die?

Today, my friends, marks Day 1 back in the gym.

We tried having an elliptical in our bedroom. It's still there. Lee loves it, as it works the entire body through voodoo clever design. Me? It messes with my knees.

Plus? When I work out at the house, it feels like a chore. As I juggle the kids, the laundry, and whatever else I'm setting aside for the elliptical or a exercise video, the workout ends up feeling anything but refreshing. Knowing the benefit for my physical and mental well-being, though, it's not an option to opt out of exercise, though.

So I rejoined the gym.

It's the same one we used to go to, with the perk of being down the road from Jocelyn's elementary school. We cancelled because we didn't have time to go in the midst of the move, and then we knew Zoe wouldn't be ready for childcare yet for a while after we brought her home. (Plus our new house payment is higher than the old one, so I needed to have the time to devote to my freelance writing gigs which fund my membership, as well as our adoption fund.)

I'm praying that the childcare staff is the same, because they were fantastic.

Though Zoe will be peeved about being left, no matter how wonderful the staff is. 

Even if my lungs try to give up on me today, though, the good news is it's just from being in poor shape and not from tuberculosis, right?

The other good news? We'll be returning home from the gym in time for therapy for Zoe... which means someone will realize soon if I don't make it home because I'm passed out on the floor of the locker room.

Where, ironically, I might pick up some bacterial infection. 

{Probably not TB, though.}

You’re open to HIV+ adoption? Say what?!?

We’ve shared on Facebook a few times about our openness to adopt a child with HIV when we're ready to add to our family again. We’ve talked about it with friends off-line. And, in doing so, we’ve realized a lot of folks just don’t know much about HIV in 2013. Which brought me to write this…

I get it.

I thought the same thing when we first started looking at waiting child listings before we adopted Zoe.

“Oh, that poor thing. He has HIV. It’s so sad he doesn’t have a family.”

And then I moved on to the next listing, because really? Why would anyone put themselves and their families at risk by adopting a child with HIV?

Then, as we read more and learned more, we realized that our understanding of HIV was stuck in the 80s.

You know, with big hair, leg warmers, the Cold War, shoulder pads, and an MTV that actually played music videos.

Now?

HIV is a manageable chronic illness. Meds called ARVs can make the virus undetectable in blood samples. With ARVs, children with HIV can live normal lifespans.

HIV no longer means AIDS is inevitable.

And contracting it? No, if we adopt a child with HIV, we won’t be putting the rest of our family at risk. Why? Well, because we won’t be sharing needles with each other, our next kiddo won’t be breastfeeding us, and none of us will have any sexual activity with our new arrival. Those are the primary ways that the virus is spread.

In fact, in 2009, the CDC removed HIV from their List of Communicable Diseases of Public Health Significance. While adopting a child with HIV or otherwise immigrating with the virus used to require additional paperwork, it doesn’t anymore. Furthermore, HIV has never been transmitted in typical household interactions.

So what will we do if we adopt a child who is HIV+?

We’ll cuddle with all of our kids, and they will take baths together, and we’ll wrestle, and we’ll wipe snotty noses, and we’ll change diapers, and we’ll share the occasional cup or utensil or plate, and we’ll hug, and we’ll share sweat and tears, and we’ll probably cough and sneeze on each other. (Hey, it happens.) If we do adopt a child with HIV, we’ll add him to our health insurance like any other new arrival, because adoption is treated like birth (in other words, pre-existing conditions aren’t a factor).

In other words, we’ll be a family.

{for more on HIV+ adoption, visit Project Hopeful. watch the video below to learn more.}

oh, that's right... i promised a post about the curtains!

I procrastinated on making curtains for years, intimidated by the size of the project.

{at the old house}

Granted, I took sewing lessons as a child and won ribbons at the Florida Strawberry Festival and Hillsborough County Fair for quilts and stockings and stuffed animals and clothing I made.

But, y'all. That was a few decades ago.

{at the old house}

Since then, I've hemmed a couple of things and repaired a few others. That's it.

Let's be honest: I've put most items to be hemmed or fixed into a drawer and forgotten about them until they've been outgrown.

{at the old house}

The scariest part to me was the size of the fabric. I can't draw or cut in a straight line - could I sew a long one? If I messed up, would I ruin something and be out the cost of a whole lotta fabric?

And picking fabric? What if I made the wrong choice? I'm too cheap thrifty to discard it, so then I would be stuck with drapery I hated.

{at the old house}

If I had taken a fraction of the effort I spent worrying about making a mistake and devoted it to doing the work, I could have made enough curtains for all of us.

A line of Premier Prints fabrics (including this one and several others that aren't made anymore) had caught my eye early in the search, but none of my local stores carried the exact print and color. Finally, I checked out similar designs of the fabric in stores and then hoped for the best with the color. (Yes, I could have ordered a swatch first, but I'm impulsive.)

I like fabric.com, though I stalk fabrics until they're on sale or until the site offers a coupon. Remember, I'm cheap thrifty. This print is $12.98/yard right now, but a sale plus a coupon made it $7.98/yard when I ordered. (Granted that was three or four years ago, and I haven't shopped fabric in the past year, so that sort of deal might be elusive nowadays. My total was right around $90 for seven panels worth of fabric, including shipping and a good bit of extra fabric because I was scared of under-ordering.)

{see the matching chevron print on the wall? it's a matching fabric that I stapled to a canvas. easy art!}

If my rust and taupe designs (called Arizona and Denton in PP land) aren't your fancy, Premier Prints has a lot of other options. For curtains and other home decor fabrics, I look for this in the description: "textured 81% cotton/19% rayon (similar to barkcloth) fabric." All of these have it. That's the stuff I prefer in their line, but it seems like they are moving away from it.

A lot of other cute prints are available in a cotton duck fabric, which would work too, but it won't have the same burlap-ish look with the texture that my curtains have. (That said, I'm a fan of the kids' line of screenprinted duck fabrics - prints that are all over the place in stores and etsy lately - so I might use them in a future project. Plus I think the duck would work better in our master bedroom than barkcloth, so I'll probably go with that there too.) Some are also available in a 100% cotton textured fabric that's supposed to be like barkcloth, but I haven't seem it and I'm not sure how it compares.

Then I bought curtain hooks from ebay and curtain rods from Lowes (a splurge for me, but I really like the color and birds... and I use half of a long rod, links above, and half of a short rod to create an in-between length that fits our wider windows at this house while saving $5 per rod).

As you'll see in this post, we had a cute yet destructive reason for replacing the original support brackets. I'll be painting the wood ones but I haven't gotten around to it yet. (I can't offer a link for the wood supports, given that my father-in-law made them to my specifications, but he does contract woodworking, so let me know if you want some, and I'll connect you with him!)

I measured how high I wanted the rod to go, and then cut a third of that length (plus two inches) in my contrast fabric and two-thirds of that length (once again, plus two inches) for the main print. I just made each panel the width of the fabric, so no cutting or measuring was necessary there.

Then I pinned the two pieces of fabric together for each curtain and sewed them with a seam of about an inch. And I hemmed each end, once again using about an inch of fabric.

I bought lining and planned to finish the sides and cover the seams, but them I decided I liked them a little raw. I might have made the seams a little prettier if I had known I wasn't covering them, but perfection is the enemy of good... and good is good enough for me, so I'm glad I didn't know.

The sides don't unravel, even when I've washed them. They kind of have a burlap-ish look to them, though burlap wasn't really a thing in home design when I made them.

Initially, I had the spotted curtains in our family room and the bird ones in the dining room, but the new house has a different number/arrangement of windows, so our front room has mismatched curtains.

{any tips on where to find a not ugly lampshade? i've been putting that off too...}

And I like it.

For me, the hardest part was picking the fabric, hooks, and rods. Then it's one seam, one top hem, and one bottom hem for each panel. Clip on the hooks, put them on the rod, hang the supports, and put 'em up.

That's it.

please, be nice

Special ed has many forms. While most of us in the public school system start with our kiddos in kindergarten, Zoe is already receiving services under education law.

That’s because special ed law guarantees services from birth to age 21 for children who qualify.

North Carolina’s early intervention program – CDSA – is administered by Department of Health and Human Services, not the school system. Once a child hits age 3, services transition from early intervention to the local school system’s preschool program for children with disabilities.

Zoe’s services aren’t covered 100% by CDSA, though.

First, our insurance plan covers the first 30 therapy visits a year, which is the typical cap. Since Zoe has physical therapy and occupational therapy each week, that means we hit that cap at the end of March. After that, a percentage of her therapy costs are paid by early intervention, and a percentage is paid by us. Honestly, I don’t quite remember what portion is ours and what portion is theirs. It’s a sliding scale based on our income, determining how much of Zoe’s therapy costs are subsidized. I think we’ll pay about $150-200 a month, but I’m not sure about that.

(Can you tell that Lee is the bill-paying member of our marriage? Yep. Not me.) 

Why share this? First, I think it’s an important piece of knowledge to have for folks considering special needs adoption.

Second, though, I’m sharing this because we’ve had friends – even close friends – lambast anyone who receives income-based government services in Facebook posts, blogs, tweets, and so on.

Technically, early intervention is one of those programs.

Please, hold your tongue or think before you post your rant (or re-post someone else’s).

 When you state unequivocally that anyone receiving government services is not pulling their weight, it hurts.

When you think you’re talking about some nameless, faceless stranger, you’re not.

When you complain about having to pay for someone else’s services, it feels like you’re complaining about my daughter. It’s hard for me to be your friend when I feel like you’re saying that it would have been better for Zoe to remain in her country, where she - as an orphan - would have been transferred to an institution for her care. I know that sounds harsh, but we wouldn’t be able to be her parents and afford for her therapy needs without the portion subsidized by the government. Our budget is stretched enough with the additional $150-200 we’re now paying each month.

It’s popular in some of my circles of friends to judge the woman with food stamps who has her nails done and her iPhone out… without knowing if her iPhone was a gift, if her nails were done for free by a friend, or if she’s spent hours that day searching for a job and is beaten down by all the rejections, much less the condescending stares from the person behind her in line who will post about her on Facebook like he knows her full story. I’ve known pastors who were given a fancy car as a present and then embarrassed to drive it, lest people think the church is paying him way too much if he can afford that. And blogs and opinion pieces occasionally tackle the topic of how much of a financial drain people with disabilities are on the rest of us.

Enough already.

Please. 

Let’s go ahead and debate policies and discuss budget proposals and consider cost-cutting measures. Seriously. I don’t mind one bit if you disagree with me about education funding or any other topic, as long as we can talk without insulting anyone in the process.

Let’s stop pretending we know someone else’s story. Let’s stop attacking people. Let’s stop applying broad labels to diverse groups. Let’s stop shouting at each other online, as if it’s okay to forget manners when we’re communicating through the computer.

Please. Use your brain and your mouth to discuss issues… but use your heart too, so that you can express your views without being a jerk about it. 


P.S. – All the pictures in this post are of today’s therapy session with Zoe, in which she did some pretty spectacular commando crawling with only a little bit of help. Thanks for the tiny fraction of a penny from your taxes that helped make that happen. (Truly, I’m not being sarcastic; we are grateful. We love living in a country that offers services so that people with disabilities, people like Zoe, aren’t just hidden away in an institution like she might have been in her birth country.)