-- la reverdere
Friday, February 8, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
The Ooo La La Girl
Alina is a teacup-sized girl. She's 4 years old & weighs 18 pounds. She probably won't grow too much larger than she is. She has fetal alcohol syndrome & dwarfism. She's a sprite, a scamp, an elf. She's been here her whole life & kind of runs the place, in that her cognitive & language abilities enable her to talk & sing, not fluently, but selectively, bi-lingually. She a mimic & has acute observational powers. She speaks Romanian from the staff & English from the volunteers. She speaks snatches of sentences & songs in a tiny, Thumbelina voice. She likes to say "Ooo la la!"
She can be charming when she wants...winsome & funny & affectionate. She can also be a brat. For a long time, she bit everyone. She's now graduated to pinching. She knows perfectly well it's wrong, but she can't seem to resist. She loves to dress up & has an uninhibited flair for fashion.
The things she does do & the things she could do are quite disparate. She does not feed herself. She still drinks from a bottle. She still wears diapers & is not toilet trained at all. The reason she is still infantile in her habits is due to institutional living. Dan, the Romanian leader of the volunteers, says that, if she were adopted into a family, she would be a completely different child within 2 weeks. She would do most things a normal 4 year old does. She will always have delays of speech & cognition, but not to a non-functional degree.
It's amazing that a change of circumstance & 2 little weeks are what stand between Alina remaining a baby into adulthood & Alina becoming a contributing member of society...albeit a very, very small one.
-- la reverdere
Sunday, February 3, 2013
A Fellow Can Get Bored With Nothing To Do
This is Marius, Master of Destruction. Origin unknown. He is four years old & has been institutionalized since birth. Officially, his diagnosis is a bad heart. However, he has many behavioral & developmental problems. He used to make eye contact, but not any more. He exhibits autistic behaviors -- visually fixing on an object for long periods, rocking, no speech, not much purposeful activity. He still drinks bottles like a baby. He has non-stop frenetic energy; nothing is safe in his path. He will step on other children, grab things from them, & throw anything & everything he can. Objects in his hands are heat-seeking missiles, flying across the room, often hitting others. Because of this, he has many time-outs in his crib, during which he shrieks & cries & kicks & gives a full operatic performance of a temper tantrum. If there's anything in his crib during these tantrums, that object is flung out, including the shoes & socks he's wearing.There's a lot of ducking going on because of the Master of Destruction & his pitching arm.
His most notable talent, however, has to do with food. He will grab any food he finds anywhere & cram it in his mouth, whether it is an ancient bit of cracker in a corner or another child's bowl of food or bottle. He will snatch food right out of the mouths of babies. All leftovers go to Marius, & then there are no leftovers. It's unclear whether he behaves this way because he's underfed, or because of some compulsion.
It's unclear whether his behaviors are due to undiagnosed retardation or the culmination of lifetime institutionalization. He does show indications of possible socialization...sometimes he grabs a spoon & tries to feed himself...sometimes he will sit on an adult's lap & permit being read to briefly...& he thinks a lot of things are funny. Marius, Stealer of Food, Master of Destruction, has a wonderful laugh that drifts all the way down the hall & into the rooms of other sick children.
-- la reverdere
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