Waiting for Hari

Day 10

September 18, 2006

Day 10. Julia is learning to take comfort from us. She will go to David or I (or Cheshire when she is home) when she is scared or hurt. She complains loudly (whining to be more specific) when she has minor boo-boos, but we make a big fuss and kiss the hurt place.

Julia is not learning lots of new words yet. She works on counting, and also on three shapes – triangle, circle, and square. She still tries communicating in Chinese and chatters at us all the time. She sings in Chinese. She is picking up a few of the words of Oh Susannah which I have been singing to her since we’ve met, as well as the words to a few of the Chinese songs from our Chinese kids CDs.

Her imagination is incredible and much of it concerns music. Long legos are the keys of a piano, a lego stack becomes a flute or something blown into straight on. We have a game of putting her stacking cups in a tower and making a piano on each side and playing them together and singing nya-nya-nya. She is also very interested in plucking the guitar and David’s bass. The sound of the bass was astounding to her. Music at its most basic is organized sound. It makes perfect sense to me that a child without language or other means of communication would gravitate to music. And of course, we will encourage this interest.

On another hand, we went to the JCC the other day, and into one of the basketball courts. Julia carefully stood on the foul line and tried to make a basket. Where she saw any of these things, we will never know, but she may have converted from Jiangxian to Hoosier with that move.

On Saturday, we went to the Indy Zoo with Marcia and Matthew. We went again today, Monday, in the rain. She loved the dolphin show each time – I guess jumping fish are cool no matter where you come from. She loved the polar bear today and didn’t want to leave. She says the English word for bear but I am pretty sure she doesn’t know the Chinese, so it is not a translation but a new animal to her. Horse is still Ma; and Monkey is something I cannot write or pronounce.

Cheshire was in Florida for the weekend and this morning Julia was very happy to see her. Julia called her Jei Jei and a funny pronunciation of Cheshire and hugged her many times.

Last night, Julia looked at some of her books with more patience and interest than she has shown before. The books were all pop up books and the three dimensional pictures thrilled her. Still, she was looking at books.

posted by Suz @ 9:44 PM