We celebrated our two year "Gotcha Day" anniversary with Sawyer a few weeks ago, so I thought I'd share a little bit about how he is doing. So many of you followed our story throughout the adoption process. If you want to know how it all got started, read this post. I wrote about the day we met him here.
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I'm starting a tradition of having a little photo shoot with him every April in our backyard. This is from a few weeks ago...
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These were taken the week we brought him home from China...
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And these were taken one year ago...
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He is now four years old and is by my side pretty much all the time!
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He's still very small for his age (he wears 18-24 month shoes), but you'd never know it by the amount of food he eats. He's always had a fixation on food and making sure to get enough and sometimes not knowing when to stop. Eating times have been fairly stressful for him in the past, but he is definitely improving in that area, and we are very thankful.
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We have had lots of challenges with him, but overall he's done well considering his situation. Sometimes it's hard to be public about the challenges of adoption, because I'm very aware that he could read my words in the future, and I don't want to cause him hurt or pain when he reads them.
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One of our biggest current challenges is that he is home with hubs and me while the older three kids are at school, and he can become very clingy and difficult when he doesn't have playmates. He is extremely social and loves to have people to interact with. We do our best to spend one-on-one time with him, but it can feel like it's never enough which leads to frustration and exhaustion.
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Right now we have him being tutored once a week with a sweet former school teacher who is a neighbor, and he loves that. He is very bright and picks up on things quickly. It's been a lot of fun watching him learn and grow so much. I also take him to speech therapy once a week. Because of his cleft lip and palate, speech has been very difficult for him. But we are making steady progress with that.
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Our oldest three (all are our biological kids) have adapted so well to him. Of course, there are always the natural arguments that can happen when he wrecks their things on a daily basis, but they get along with him well.
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He is been an amazingly healthy kid. Aside from a couple of very mild colds, he hasn't been sick at all in the two years that we've had him. He had a surgery to repair his cleft lip a few months after we came home, then he has a surgery to repair his cleft palate six months later. His surgeon has been extremely pleased with the results of the two surgeries. We go for regular check-ups with the surgeon every six months. When he is around seven years old, he will need another major surgery to repair his mouth further. A few months ago he had a dental surgery where he had two teeth pulled, a root canal, four cavities filled and three crowns put in. He has recovered from each surgery incredibly well. He has a very high pain tolerance and doesn't let anything get in the way of moving right along with life.
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One of his favorite things to do is help his mommy or daddy. He loves to feel like he's part of the team and actually does a great job being a helper when needed. Potty training is something we have been working on since the beginning of the year. It's been a very slow process for him. He is physically and behaviorally delayed a bit, and this is part of it.
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Most of the challenges we are having right now with him are mostly things that I'm pretty confident that he will outgrow, although I do know that there will always be hard things we will face because of his past. As you can probably tell from the pictures, he is a really funny kid and loves to make people laugh! We love our Sawyer!

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April 24, 2017 — Aimee Weaver