International Adoption Clinic Visit

Today was a big day for Miss Lainey. After another long night with her on the bare nursery floor (sleep is an issue we're still working on), we made our way to Cincinnati Children's Hospital. We are so fortunate that we have one of the best International Adoption Clinics in the country so close to us. The IACs are so great in how they holistically approach the treatment of adopted children, understanding that the expectations for a child adopted internationally have to be shifted to take into consideration the fact that they might be malnourished and/or not given a chance to fully thrive before being adopted.

We had a long, productive day meeting with a wide range of doctors and therapists. Thankfully, the general assessment is that Lainey is quite healthy and developmentally on target! Pretty remarkable considering she's spent her life in an orphanage until just a few weeks ago. She even said another new word there, "baby", as she fed the toy baby doll for the occupational therapist.

We also knew that she was tall, and found out that she is in the 89th percentile in height, and that's not even on the Asian girls growth chart (I'm sure she's off that chart). 

The visit also included one immunization, a TB test, and, because they can't necessarily trust that all of her vaccinations were done in China, they had to draw blood to assess her immunizations. They had to draw blood for a few other things too... and in the end they needed 13 viles of blood from our poor sweet girl. The sweet nurses who were there to draw her blood are THE best at what they do... but our baby girl is just little, and so are her veins. It took three different attempts before they were finally able to find a vein that would give the amount of blood that they needed. It was pretty horrible. :( But we survived, and in the end I'm happy we just got the whole thing over with in one long day.

6 1/2 hours later, we were out of there! Whew!

Lots of orders for blood. At this point the nurse had run out to get more viles.

Happy to be home after a LONG day!