Growing Up

Well, we've finished kindergarten and now summer begins. She's fascinated with "summer cars"...convertibles. We start swimming lessons on Monday. The baseball season continues, as Brendan was selected for the tournament team. But, luckily, Josie is getting good at watching baseball games. We gave her the choice of playing soccer in the fall, or taking Mandarin (Chinese language) lessons. She chose the language lessons. She remains fascinated with all things Chinese. Her dance classes have finished, and we're going to take the summer off from that. She wants to start again in the fall. We think she's gained a pound!! It looks like the scales is at 35 lbs. now! She looks so much different than she did when we met her, we think. She just looks more grown up.

Enjoy the warm weather!!

Six Months!!!

Telling me how big her fish was

Learning how to blow a dandelion

It's really hard to believe that it's been six months already. As is evident by the lack of blog posts, our schedule has picked up it's pace quite a bit. We're doing our best to keep up. Josie has made an amazing amount of progress over the last months. By the end of April, she needed more school. She loved preschool and was begging for more. Couple that with the fact that she was learning things pretty quickly. We decided to send her to Kindergarten. She started Kindergarten the first week of April. God paved the way for a great experience for her. Her teacher is a wonderfully kind woman from our church who herself adopted two older children, so she knows how to handle older children who are adjusting in so many new ways. She's had a fabulous experience and loves going to school. She now knows all of her letters (and almost all her letter sounds) and numbers to 20. She was tested for their ESL (English as a Second Language) program and barely qualified because her English was so good. We are fortunate that she's picking up so quickly. What she'll do once school is over we're not quite sure.


She continues to love her combo gymnastics, tap and ballet class. Fishing is a favorite activity...but eating the fish is required for it to be truly exciting for her! She loves digging in the dirt and helping in the garden. She also loves eye shadow, nail polish and shoes. A neat blend of tom-boy and girly-girl. She loves the cabin, riding scooter and riding the trail-a-bike. We frequently find her playing with junk mail...she goes through the mail with me and takes all of the reply envelopes, pre-printed applications, etc. She loves pretending she's working with them. I find them laying all over the house.


We're in the heart of Brendan's baseball season. The first few practices were a little shaky. She wanted to go along, but was verbally distraught when she realized that she couldn't play and talk with Daddy when he was having team meetings. A little embarrassing. All new public situations can present interesting responses from her. Each time, it gets a bit better. Sometimes we forget that she's still adjusting, because life feels rather normal most of the time.


She's quite the perfectionist and gets very annoyed when she can't figure things out. We are careful to not ask her to do something that will be too frustrating because it really gets her down.


She continues to take a real interest in all things Chinese. Some adopted children want nothing to do with their country of birth, others are extremely interested and want to learn and retain all that they can. We believe Josie is part of the latter group. She's very sad that her ability to speak Chinese is rapidly vanishing. She is frequently asking questions about China, asking us to take her somewhere to help her remember how to speak Chinese, etc. The other day in Target she was asking how something is made. Then she asked where it was made. When I told her it was made in China, she was so excited. I didn't tell her that almost everything in the store was made in China. We had quite a treat the other week. Josie got to speak with her foster mother in Guangzhou on the telephone! We were so excited! She sounds like the most caring, sincere woman and clearly took a great interest in Josie and her well-being. We are going to try to keep the communication open. We are thankful for this little connection to her past.

I will try to update more frequently. Brendan only has 5 more days of school, so once that's done I should have a little more spare time.

Three Months

We can hardly believe that as of Thursday we've been home 3 months! Where has the time gone? We've made so much progress that it's almost hard to remember back to what it was like when we were first home. We looked through our photo album today and watched our China video yesterday. Now that we know Josie better, it's hard to watch the video. It's so obvious that she was absolutely scared to death and so uncomfortable during our first days together. At the time, we had no clue. Now that we are seeing her "secure" personality and know the bodily clues of when she's "insecure", it's clear that our whole time in China was a time of insecurity. It's hard to watch. We had two firsts this weekend...the first time we got to go out to dinner without the kids and Josie's first time in Sunday School. Grandma & Grandpa watched Brendan & Josie Friday night while we enjoyed a quiet dinner out. It was such a treat! We forgot what it's like to have an entire meal of adult conversation. Then today, Josie went to Sunday school by herself. This was the first that she went anywhere without one of the three of us being with her. Her self confidence is growing by the day, and it's neat to see her more confident of her place in our family that she feels safe being out of our presence knowing that we will return. We signed her up for preschool starting this coming week. She seems to be looking forward to what she calls "bye-bye working". It's only two afternoons a week, so we'll see how it goes. No pictures again this week. The scrapbooks were filling up too quickly, so we're not taking quite as many pictures these days! I must do better.

The Challenges of English

Too cute...Yesterday, Josie walked up to me and said "I love you, Mommy". I replied "I love you, too". She got a big smile and proudly said "I love you, three". Why does English have to be so difficult??

Needing Social Graces to Accompany her English

Well...we managed to finally get an oil change in my car this week. Brendan and Josie were standing by the window watching the garage in the waiting room that was filled with people. I am sitting on another bench across the room. Right beside the kids on a bench was a rather overweight old man. One of those where the belly rests on the knees when he was sitting down. Josie, in all her cuteness, walks right in front of the man, points to his stomach and says "Big belly". I could hear it the whole way across the room, so I know the man heard what she said. He just looked at her, didn't crack a smile or acknowledge her presence. Brendan frantically motioned for her to come back to the window and watch the cars. About a minute later, she returned to her place right in front of him and repeated "Big belly" again, pointing along with it. By now, I was thinking whether it's worse to just ignore it, or go over, pick her up and apologize to the man. Quicker than I could decide, Brendan yanked her over to me and said "Mom...I'm so embarrassed. You'll never believe what she just said". The man still never said a word. I guess we need to work less on English, and more on social graces.

She had her first piano lesson this week. It went well and so far practice hasn't been too difficult, if we do about 5 minutes at a time. School has proven a little harder these days. Yesterday was the first that I made her do a worksheet that I wanted her to do, not just whatever she chose. It's time to learn that school is following directions, not just a free-for-all with pencil and paper. She pitched quite the tantrum, but eventually realized the uselessness of her fit and happily did her paper. Today went a little better...no tantrum, but still needing a little convincing to finish the paper that Mommy wanted done. She can do very nice work...when she wants to.

Proudly completing her bar work

Loves the balance beam...but wouldn't think of doing it by herself yet

A little ballet...

A little tap...


Her gymnastics/dance class had a little performance this week, so the camera went along with us. She had a great time and even enjoyed getting her first medal. She walked up on the "stage" and smiled proudly. How far we've come in just a few weeks! The remainder of the week was uneventful. Another doctor's appointment brought with it two needles, which was a bit traumatic...but she survived. She liked the doctor, but the nurses who brought the needles are in the dog house right now. School has been a bit of a struggle, as she's finding that playing can be more fun. Once we have more communication, I really think school will go well. It's frustrating for her when I can't explain everything just right. She enjoyed watching the Super Bowl and declared that "I like football...fun watching". We think the large bag of King's potato chips may have helped her decide that she likes it. This next week we're going to buckle down with her ABC writing. She's got her name down now, so that's a start. We've really enjoyed visiting with friends lately. We're finally at the point where we can have company and feel relatively assured that all will go well. It's a blessing to see her making friends and enjoying the company of other kids. Have a great week!

Happy New Year!!

Celebrating Chinese New Year with Friends

Making Dumplings for our Chinese New Year celebration

Our translator friend helped us make dumplings from scratch (OK, we bought the wrappers though)...what fun!!

We've had a week busy with Chinese New Year preparations. We celebrated a day early with friends for dinner last night. Josie was quite familiar with the festivities and told us that she should get a red envelope with money in it. We enjoyed making dumplings, chicken with cashews and a whole fish for Josie...she was quite excited to go to market with Daddy and pick out her whole fish. It was actually quite yummy. We had a very nice evening. Whenever we cook Asian food, Josie calls it "Guangzhou food". She loved it...along with the leftovers today. The kids enjoyed the few inches of snow that we got this week. It was an unexpected surprise and they had a great time shoveling and playing. I spent all but the first five minutes of her ballet/gymnastics class outside of the room, watching through the glass this week. We've made tremendous progress and she loves it. We're starting piano lessons next week, if all goes according to plan. We've had success this week with saying "Hi" to strangers. Instead of saying "No" when meeting someone, she has begun to smile and say a somewhat shy "Hi". This makes going away much more pleasant. She even spent all of her time at church this week with Brendan in children's church. We were very pleased...and she loved it, wanting more "church" and being disappointed that we were leaving. Each week we learn more about her personality, and it is so much fun seeing it develop as she feels more comfortable around us. Her newest (and most overly used) phrase right now is "I like..." followed by whatever it is she wants to tell us she likes. This can be food, a neck rub, her sunglasses, the cat....the list goes on and on. She's also picked up on "that's nice" which she repeats over and over whenever we give her a back/neck rub. She asks for these mini-massages quite frequently and her little expression, which sounds more like "thatsa nice" is just too cute. We are so blessed.