« A born entertainer | Main | Spongebob Toiletpants »
August 30, 2005
A general status report
I thought I'd take a moment and pull together a variety of notes and observations from the last few days, and give everyone a general status update:
- With a few months' distance from our illness and general travel fatigue, Lara and I are starting to look more favorably on our time in China, and even to enjoy the prospect of taking Emma back some years from now. Sometimes, it's hard to see the forest for the trees, isn't it?
- Emma is now crawling rapidly, meaning that the first thing to happen when we get home in the evening is the deployment of the baby gates.
- She is also, with Momma and Daddy's help, able to walk (with great assistance. For about two weeks, she's been doing the "someone hold my arms while I goose-step around like a military version of Frankenstein's monster" routine. But that's not bad for someone who didn't realize what her knees were for just two months ago, now is it?
- She attended church for the first time yesterday, where she spent an enjoyable hour in the nursery, and was then fawned over by several parties in Freeman Hall. Chris Paradise and Amy Brooks, now in-progress with their own adoption via CAWLI, were especially interested in our reports.
- We have a ton of pictures going up shortly, so look for updates and revisions to the photo site structure. It's getting a little unwieldy to navigate at present, so I'll probably combine a lot of pages and remove some older stuff in the name of simplicity.
- The exotropia situation seems to oscillate between "not so bad" and "really obvious." We'll know more in October when she goes back to the doc.
- Where she used to consume any food pretty much indiscriminately, we're starting now to see some preference in particular foods. She'll also distinguish between 3-4 foods on a plate, and pick the one she wants.
- Bottle-feedings are down to one a day, at night before bed. This keeps her tanked up overnight, and helps get her nutritional levels corrected. At meals, she's getting pretty adept with the sippy cup, although cups with fast flow still make her choke, and she has to be reminded to tip the cups up far enough to get the contents.
- She will now kiss her Momma and Daddy without being asked -- not bad for a kid who shied away from any kind of affection back in June. Credit Momma with that big step forward.
- I've been meaning to mention this, but we improved her room with a Gordon ODL tubular skylight. The light from this fixture is simply gorgeous, and even late in the evening, it continues to gather noticeable light and pipe it into Emma's room (which is in the center of the house with a window onto a 12-foot deep porch).
More as I think of it, but things are going well. Emma's making lots of progress, and is probably the happiest baby I've ever seen. We were truly fortunate to be matched to her.
Posted by brlittle at August 30, 2005 02:40 AM