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February 2011

It has been 2 years and three months since Maili joined our family, and she continues to embrace life with the same joyful enthusiasm that she has always possessed. The holidays were an especially exciting time for her this year, since she knew what to expect this time around and began eagerly looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas quite early in the year. Of course, her primary request for Santa this year was for her sister to come home from China, the sister whose name she has continued to insist will be Scooby. “Scooby’s” dossier should be in China by the end of next week if all goes well, so we hope to travel this summer to bring her home.

In the meantime, we are not allowed to post identifying information about her until we receive our final approval from China, as much as we would love to share some of the enormous collection of photos we have been fortunate enough to receive. I can say that although she is just 8 months younger than Maili, she will definitely be the little sister, as she is very small for her age and Maili is extremely tall for hers. Maili has been setting aside toys and clothes for her Scooby for well over a year now, long before we ever even considered adding another child to our family.

Maili was very excited to get bunk beds for her room recently so that she can have sleepovers with “my Scooby” as she calls her. We can’t help but wonder how much fun those sleepovers will be when the novelty wears off, but we shall see. We do anticipate a difficult adjustment period for Maili when she realizes that her new sister is here to stay, not unlike the difficulties Holt had when Maili first came home. These days, the difficulties are more in the realm of typical sibling squabbles, and because Maili is a master button pusher, she usually manages to get the best of Holt by annoying him until he explodes, and then giggling sweetly as she retreats.

The giggles are usually accompanied by the following phrase : Just e-NORE me, Holton, just e-NORE me!” I guess after all those times I advised him to ignore her when she was aggravating him, she just decided to tell him herself. Somehow he doesn’t seem to take it as well coming from her..

In January, Maili sang the National Anthem with a group of other Chinese adoptees for the unveiling of the Lunar New Year stamp at the National Archives in Atlanta. They did an awesome job and we were amazed that Maili was able to memorize every word, no small feat when you realize that just two years ago this was a child who couldn’t repeat a three syllable word after the speech therapist who tested her. Literally, she could not repeat more than two syllables. How very, very far she has come since that time. This month we are celebrating the fact that she is finally able to make an “s” blend at the beginning of a word, something that she has been unable to do up to this point.

I realize that as far as skills go it doesn’t sound like it would be that important, but it was very frustrating for her when she would tell us she wanted to play in the “no” and she went to “beach” today and it would take us quite awhile to decipher that she really wanted to play in the SNOW and she went to SPEECH that day. And it didn’t help matters that she was convinced that WE were the ones with the problem! Many times she would yell at us in frustration” No, Mom, that not what I say. You never HEAR me!” The funny thing is, it was starting to affect her spelling, since she would tend to write things the way she pronounced them. In all of the pictures that she has drawn of our family over the past six months or so, she has included a person named GB. We finally figured out that she was referring to Scooby, which she pronounced GOObee. We have actually decided that Gooby’s real name will be Callyn Hope, and there is a really amazing story about how she got her name, which we will share on her very own MyAdoptionWebsite page when we are able to share more about her. Until then, we can only post another sneak peek, sorry.

Sitting pretty

Waiting for Santa

Day at the park

Ready for church

Still waiting for those front teeth	Serious Scooby fans
Christmas morning	Singing the National Anthem
Sneak peek at Scooby	Sneak peek 2

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