Moehring Update

The short version:
Our foster daughter is being placed with her brother next week, Hannah is 15 months old, and I’m 4 months pregnant. . .

The longer version:
We feel a bit relieved to be wrapping up the details on our first foster care placement. We feel that the decision to move her to her brother’s is good and have been working toward that for about 4 months. We are trying to prepare ourselves for some of the emotional times ahead, but hope that our busy life will help us deal. We do think we’ll be able to stay in touch, at least at first and I’m trying to pull together a scrapbook so I can send one copy to her and keep one for us. (Who knows how long that could take?)

Hannah had her 15 month checkup today. 23 lbs, 31 inches. Still has some good thunder thighs but has slimmed up since she’s starting running everywhere. I’ve attached a couple photos of her. She is very independent. Likes to feed herself, plays well by herself for short periods of time, isn’t afraid to protect the things she’s playing with by biting the offending child (we’re working on that), and loves to mimic our foster daughter. I have a feeling Hannah will be a little lonely after she has left, but new baby #2 will come along soon enough. She is a little behind on speech and we blame that on her recurrent ear infections since Jan. She had tubes put in about a month ago and already we have noticed an improvement in her attempting to mimic our words. She doesn’t have much difficulty communicating with us without words and knows quite a few sign language signs for important things like milk. The words she does say include “uh oh”, “hi”, and “ball”. She only says something remotely like ma-ma when she is crying because we have told her no. 🙁 We have started letting her take naps in the twin bed in her room instead of the crib and she seems to be adjusting to that well. We hope to move her out of the crib before baby comes in Nov.

I had my 4 month checkup this week as well and am feeling a little better now that I’m into the second trimester. I was very fatigued at first, but not much morning sickness. I did have a trip to the ER recently due to having a bit of the flu and getting too dehydrated. I hope not to repeat that experience, but am still fearful for the remaining summer months in Phoenix. We have yet to come to an agreement on whether we will find out the sex of the baby in a few weeks. I suppose we’ll let you know the results in our next update. 🙂 We are looking forward to getting out of the heat in July for a family reunion in Minnesota and we haven’t decided yet if we will need to have a little babymoon trip sometime before I am grounded in early Sept.