Waiting for Hari

September 30, 2006 – Update for last week in September

On Saturday, Julia was home for three weeks, and Friday was our one month anniversary of her adoption.

We made another visit to Julia’s school on Friday. We played in the playground when the pre-K kids were out. Julia mostly watched from the swings, but tried talking to some of the kids and ran around before we went in for lunch. At the lunch room, Julia wanted a tray like the other children and we had one. The meal was nothing that great but if it will help her feel more at home, we’ll let her eat the cafeteria food. A little boy who had been on the swings next to Julia came and sat with us for lunch. It was very cute.

When the K kids lined up to leave the lunch room, Julia got up and hugged a number of the kids. I think she is very excited about the possibility of going to school. We will go three times next week and hopefully, the school will arrange some testing and then language classes for her.
We spent time in the botanical garden. Julia enjoyed the shapes of gardens and the plants. She posed for many, many pictures. We had some mini-meltdowns, especially when she wanted something from the gift store and I said no. That kid can scream, and the voice echos!

On Thursday, Julia Bye-Bye started repeating words. On Saturday, she was very interested in repeating the names of animals. She even took out our flash cards and we found the animals to go over. She says "monkey" and "tiger" and "cat" and "dog". Her favorite is "lion" which she repeated over and over together with making the sound of a lion’s roar. She has added "how are you" to "hello." She also identifies triangles, squares, and circles all the time now – there are a lot of round tires on the road. We followed this up on Sunday with another visit to the zoo where a lion came very close to us and Julia greeted her and made roaring sounds as well as saying "lion." She also really enjoyed the monkeys (who are really baboons, but we are not picky).

On Friday, we went to the International Adoption Clinic at Riley Hospital and saw two lovely doctors who poked and prodded at Julia and made her laugh and have a good time. Julia will have additional tests and vaccinations, and the doctors will come up with recommendations for additional care. The docs thought that she was generally on target developmentally and suggested we hold off on any intelligence testing until she has some English. We that figured that would be what we would do – as we watch her in school and at home, we may not even feel the need to test. Also, her dialect makes it hard for her to understand good Mandarin, so testing now would not necessarily prove much.

After the doctor’s visit, we headed up to Chicago to clean out my apartment. We stayed overnight and packed up this morning. Julia was pretty good about the whole process although I imagine she had no idea of what was going on. She demanded to be held during some of the packing up in the van, and we tried to comply. She is so much more comfortable with us than she was just two weeks ago. I feel her relaxing into my body when I pick her up. Too bad she is 40 pounds.

Another thing we worked on this weekend was a kid’s scissor. Julia cut construction paper and drew with colors pencils on the pieces. I glued some of the pieces onto another piece of paper but she was not into doing that but she loved cutting.
I did not think she had ever done this before. She was tentative at first; she watched me very carefully when I showed her how to cut; and gained confidence was she practiced.

posted by Suz @ 10:13 PM