Friday, October 20, 2006
WHO’S THAT GIRL?

This is not the same little girl we met three months ago. Gracie has blossomed and shown us more every day of her funny little sparkling personality. Sometimes there is a bit more spark to her than sparkle, but we are loving getting to know our little daughter. She has become more loving, affectionate, silly, talkative, entertaining, teachable and open than I ever imagined she would be in this short time. There are still times when she starts feeling all of her two-ness and will have a screaming fit, or smack one of her siblings (or parents!) when she doesn’t get her way, but she has become more quick to apologize and the fits are much fewer and far between than when she first came home.

We have settled into a fairly predictable routine around here…a routine best described as the “tyranny of the urgent” (or rather emer-gent as in EMERGENCY….Emergency Diaper Changes, Emergency Grocery Store Runs, Emergency Spill Cleanups, Emergency Room visits…you get the picture) I’m not getting much done, thank you notes are piling up, laundry is piling up, dust covers all, daily showers are a thing of the past, telephone calls go unreturned, but everyone is fed and homework is done most days. Grace is sleeping through the night consistently (Thank you, Jesus!), in a little toddler bed in the room she shares with her two sisters, and is napping most days contentedly…although the naps can last anywhere from half an hour to three hours, so it’s a mad dash to get things done on the days she power naps. Most days, Grace is the first one awake in the house and she tries to convince everyone that 6am is a perfectly reasonable hour to get going on the day. Mama and Jack are still the slowest to convert to this way of thinking. It is PAINFUL for me to rise that early, but sweet big sister Lily is always up to the challenge of early morning snuggling and breakfast with Gracie. After seeing her siblings off to school, we have had a busy schedule of laundry, housekeeping, and recently many trips to the doctor. Grace has had a constant runny nose since coming home and in the last few weeks had the unfortunate experience of sharing a yucky virus with her mama. It doesn’t seem to slow her down a bit though, and it’s been fun to watch her roam around the house, playing with the dogs (she’s apparently decided they are a-okay for now and loves to hug their heads and kiss them, sometimes a little too enthusiastically for their taste), imitating whatever I do, and chattering away. She is still speaking what sounds like Chinese gibberish, but has picked up more signs and a few words too. Now she is saying, “More”, “Again”, “Go”, “No”, “Down”, “Open”, “Night-night”, “bye-bye”, “oh yeah”, “all-done”, and “me”. Oh! And “bad”. Usually, she saves “bad” for when she is admonishing the dogs for their bad behavior. J She and I will have “conversations” where I say something in English, she replies in what I can only assume is her local dialect, then I say something, she replies again….it goes on like this all day. I often wonder not only what she is saying, but what she thinks I am saying, since she is always so animated in her response. She calls all of us by name except for Lily who is “JieJie” (Big Sister) and is often heard throughout the house yelling, “MOM! MOM!” Two guesses where she picked up that habit. J At night, when John comes home, she squeals, “Baba!” and is usually one of the first to greet him with a big hug. Since he has so little time to spend with the kids during the week, John has relished giving Grace her nightly bath and cozying up with her on the sofa as she settles down for the night before tucking her into her bed. This is her happiest time of the day and usually when all of her silly antics come out which make everyone giggle. The kids are always commenting on how funny Grace is…and since we are a family who loves silly, you can imagine how much we have enjoyed that side of her little personality. She really is a loving and sweet little girl and her desire to learn and her curiosity and powers of observation are delightful for us to witness. We had forgotten what the world looked like through the eyes of a two year old.

We made our first big road-trip with Gracie this month when we packed up the Yukon for a cross country trip to Nebraska….Ohio to Omaha was a twelve hour drive and I have to say she was surprisingly a great little traveler. As long as the Barney or Bible song videos were going and she had some munchies to enjoy, she was a happy camper, much to everyone’s relief.