6 Month Anniversary

Well, I can hardly believe it but today marks the 6 month anniversary from when our family received our beautiful baby girl. Paige is 21 ½ months old and doing great. Bonding seems to have gone well from the beginning in China. It helps that we are able to stay with her instead of having her in day care. I stay with her 4 days a week and Mike has her 1 day. We started out with me working 2 days per week but soon got that down to 1 day. Mike still takes his 2nd day off so she gets to have both Mom and Dad home with her on Fridays!

6 months seem to have flown by and yet it seems like we have always been a family of 5. Of course, mom and dad are still adjusting to remembering how much stuff you have to take along when you have a baby. More than once we have found ourselves out and say did you bring the diaper bag? No, did you? No, oh shoot (or something to that effect). But we manage to survive.

It has been an eventful 6 months for us as we took our regular trips to Branson throughout the summer and had our convention for Servpro in Hawaii this year. We all had a blast in Hawaii for 2 weeks. But we were definitely ready to be home in our own beds with our regular routine. Paige did fantastic on the plane trip to Hawaii. After the long hard trip from China we were worried about it but she did really well and it helped that on the way back the stewardess rearranged the lady sitting with Mike and I to a new seat so we could have an empty seat for Paige to sit/sleep in. In between our travels we had a great summer at home. The boys had a good time teaching Paige to like the pool as much as they do. They took her swimming practically every day and she loved it. So much so that we could not turn our back on her or she jumped in the pool by herself! She definitely is not afraid of the water.

Now that school is back in session she misses her big brothers and is very excited to see them when they get home. She will practically squeal and run to them when they come in the door. They are good baby sitters so mom and dad can have a little time to themselves now and then.

Potty training is on the horizon as she will bring us diapers when she wants changed. Not always, but enough we know it is time to be thinking about it. I was hoping for more communication before I tried. She says a lot of words if we say them and she repeats them back but she is not using a lot of words in regular conversation. We still get a lot of ehh ehh and pointing when she wants something. She does use some words in everyday conversation like mom, dad, no (this one a lot), bye, Dustin, Derrick, yuck (when we change her diaper or go to the bathroom ourselves), hot (that is for my coffee in the morning), again (sounds like gin), eyes, nose, hair, ear, ball and few others but only occasionally like wow, uh oh, aww man, up, hi, etc. She is definitely doing well for only hearing English for the last 6 months.

She is growing like a weed. I had to get rid of several cute dresses in the last couple of weeks that fit her fine at the beginning of summer. She has grown 2 ½ inches and gained 4lbs since our medical exam in Guangzhou in March. But never fear after shopping for boys for 16 years I enjoyed myself immensely when I got to go buy new fall clothes for my baby girl. Her favorite food is still pasta, bread and gummy snacks. She also loves chocolate but we try not to give her too much of that. And she still will not eat rice of any kind. I even went to a local Chinese Restaurant in our small town and asked them for a recipe for congee and they told me how to make it and then gave me a bowl of what they had in the back for their own meals (they do not sell it at the restaurant). She wouldn’t take more than a bite no matter how much salt, sugar, etc I added to it and she loved congee in China. Oh well, surely in time she will expand her palate much like the boys did (although one boy could still be happy with nothing but pizza, burgers, and chicken nuggets).

If you read this thanks for sticking around and sorry for the slow updates. Mostly I update facebook these days and that is about all I have time for and if you are facebook friends with me you will know I don’t do that very often. Typing is a chore when you have a 21 month old on your lap trying to help!

Here are some recent pics from our trip to Hawaii.