Waiting for Hari

12 September -- 3rd day home

Julia Bye-Bye and I are sitting on the floor in the living room listening to a Chinese CD of kids music and playing with duplo and playmobil people. Julia is playing very quietly and very seriously. She handles the little people, putting the hot dog cart together and giving the vendor the umbrella and a pitcher to hold. Every so often she joins in with the music for a few words. When something doesn’t fit correctly, she gives it to me to figure out.

She spent a good part of the morning playing with play dough, and now this afternoon with her duplo. We also drew triangles, circles, and squares together. She is interested in doing all of these things although it’s pretty clear that she has not done these things before .

Day 3 and we are not quite over jet lag. Our nights are a bit rocky. I am still exhausted because I haven’t had a full night’s sleep. David is back to work today lacking the same night’s sleep. Julia slept through the night in China but hasn’t managed it here yet. Last night was the worst; she was up from 2 to almost 5.

Marcia stopped over this morning to drop off something and came in for a few minutes. Julia came to greet her but seemed to close up when she saw it was not David, Cheshire, or I. I had been wondering whether it really matter that we were keeping ourselves cloistered, but her reaction to Marcia who Julia met when we came home. We will try next week for some visits but not before then.

Julia is very interested to watch us do household things. She watches me in the kitchen and tries to help at times. Yesterday evening, I brought a bowl of snap beans onto the floor so I could take the ends off while Julia played with legos. However, Julia started taking the beans out of the bowl and snapped off the ends of the beans and broke them in half for me.

Even though it was raining most of the day, Julia and I, and Julia and Cheshire walked from our house to 46th street and back again three times. She was very interested in the houses and cars. It kept her head turning. Yesterday, David put Julia’s car seat in the car and Julia was interested in sitting in it; however, she was not interested in going anywhere.

posted by Suz @ 8:03 AM