Definitely showing us more her personality....

She's spunky. She's sassy. She may be the smallest in our childcare class for the testing the older classes are doing (she was in the class of 0-4 and the youngest we had was 2). She was the smallest of 11, but she had them following HER orders.

Ummm...yeah. I'm trying my best to nip that one in the bud real quick. I doubt it will be so cute to other adults when she's bigger.

BTW, she IS growing...finally. She's roughly 33.5 inches tall, wearing a size 5 or 5.5 shoe, and weighs in around 23.5 pounds! I believe that puts her around the 5th percentile for height! She's still below on the weight, but not as far. In fact, she's almost to the 3rd percentile. ;)

It still haunts me

It's been 14 months, no 15 months since we held Katie for the first time. We are quickly approaching the time when she has lived in America for longer than she lived in China (and yes that makes me a little sad to think about).

But, honestly, there is something that still haunts me. I can hear it, very plainly in my mind 15 months later. It was something Katie would say over and over and over. Especially when we tried introducing her to me as "Momma" and perhaps the way we said it...I don't know.

She cried for so much of our trip to China, so much of it involved me. It involved ME being called "Momma" to her. It involved her just crying when I looked at her. If that was all that happened, I would understand and probably NOT be so haunted now. But she would say something, a phrase, over and over and over. It sounded a lot like "My Mom" to me.

Tonight, I was reading a blog about a little girl who is recovering from heart surgery, and her parents mentioned she said, "Ma" to things she didn't want. In Cantonese it means no.

That lightbulb went off. Katie lived in Southern China, and quite possibly did not speak Mandarin. I KNEW this before we went, but I didn't think about it until TONIGHT. Ya'll...that's 15 months with us that I didn't make the connection that while I knew she probably only spoke Cantonese, that the baby words she spoke that our friends who spoke MANDARIN couldn't understand...well, duh, she was speaking Cantonese. Or most likely, she probably spoke a dialect of Cantonese, or at least understood it. Most likely though, at 16 months she was speaking some (and given the rate of language acquisition I would suspect she was talking quite a bit). Ya'll...I NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK IT UP. I knew, instinctively, it had to do with her Foster Mom. It sounded too much like Momma. I just thought, "Hey that must be what she called her."


Jyutpin------------------------------pinyin-----------meaning
maa1*4 maa1------------------------ma1 ma5----------mother, mom
maa1 mai1 mi4 / mai1 mi1------------------------------mummy, mommy

maa1*4 maa1*2 dei6*2------------------------- not bad, not so good, so so, okay, etc


I have NO idea what those would sound like with those tones

In Cantonese, the "not" seems to be the letter m in front of the "word" which serves to negate it. What does that m sound like?

She could have been calling for her Mom or Mommy...or she could have been saying "Not Mom". Whichever it was, I knew it was not me she wanted. The grief she displayed was overwhelming to me. She babbled here and there, especially with Dh...and I wish I had been able to get that on video (she would stop as soon as she saw the video camera). But, my mind has perfectly recorded that wail with "My Mom" and it haunts me still.

I can hear her crying, sobbing, "My mom" over and over in my mind. I can picture the hotel room in Kunming, with Dh holding her while she cried. I tried to hold her and it caused her to scream in this terror filled voice that needed no translation. When I close my eyes while remembering this...I can smell that scent...that precious scent that was hers while we were in China.

And then my heart breaks again for all that she has lost. All that her Foster Mom lost. All that her Mom in China has lost.

It still haunts me. I think it always will.

It's finally happened...

It took her about 13 months, but she has finally done something that I've been waiting on. Waiting for months and months and months for her to do. Why? Because I knew that until she did this one thing, I would wonder if she was anxiously attached. I would wonder how much she still carried with her from her time in China. I would wonder how much the first 16 months of minimal stimulating toys affected her.

Did I mention that she's just about 2.5 years old? I've been waiting on this for months.

MONTHS.









Do you see what I see? If you've adopted internationally, I'm sure you do. If you have not, I'm sure you only see the messy messy room. She is playing with toys. She is playing with toys ALONE in her room.

Do you see - the doctor's kit next to the open doors of the doll crib? She was doctoring the babies...and changing their clothes and diapers (hint to those out there, buy stock in baby doll diapers at the rate she's going through them). The Little People town was played with. The kitchen food was spread all around the room. The First dollhouse was pulled out of the closet and put in the middle of the room (she evidently could not find the pieces to it, so it was abandoned there). The tea cart? Oh she wheels that around the upstairs for multiple tea parties with babies that are sporadically placed around the house.

Imaginative play. Play with toys appropriately. INDEPENDENT play.

The evidence of this brought tears to my eyes...the first 5 times. I'm quickly developing the reaction most parents have when greeted with a bedroom that looks like this after just 15 minutes from when it was spotlessly clean. ;)

Follow up on a comment....

I feel the need for discussion on this, as I know someone going through the "older stage" of separation anxiety. At Katie's age, and honestly, a little older, we can tell them "We'll be back after we go XYZ." They believe us, they like that. However, as we experienced some with Samuel, around the age of 4-5 a new awareness settles in. Children learn, not only that Mommy exists apart from them, but BAD THINGS can happen to Mommy while she is away. I don't want to lie to Katie when that happens, because we all know that we can't promise that NOTHING will happen to us. We don't know that. Just like we don't know for certain that we will all live to see our children with their grandchildren. We hope to. But we don't know for certain. KWIM?

I am trying to figure out WHAT to say to Katie when it's time for this. It's sort of like trying to figure out what to say about the birth parent issue. We don't know for certain that her birth parents loved her, we believe they did. But we can't know for certain. Just like we can't know for certain that all the information in her referral paperwork was correct (i.e. her finding story). All I can tell her is that this is what we know from her paperwork, and from that we BELIEVE this. We can tell her that she was well cared for by the orphanage, and we believe they loved her. We know that she was attached to her foster Mom.

With Samuel, when he was crying every time I left the house, or his needing to see me at the store at all times (no going to find a seat at the pizza place), we ended up telling him that I loved him very much and I would always do my best to come home to him. He understood something could happen to me, and that was what he was afraid of. We ended up having to explain to him what would happen if I did not come back to him, and that Daddy would take care of him and the grandparents would take care of him and the Aunts and Uncles would take care of him and love on him. Which worked except for times when Daddy and the others were not around (like I had to leave him with a friend while I went to a doctor's appointment). That friend and I explained to Samuel that she would love on him and take care of him until she could get him to Daddy, or grandparents, or aunts, or uncles! But somehow, I do not see this working as well with Katie. I am concerned that her past, and what she has gone through already, will make this harder to explain and to ease her fears. I could also be wrong about that as well.

However, JM never went through that stage that we know of. Of course, he was never anxiously attached at any point either.