Home for 4 days

Aside from some major jet lag, our first few days home with Callie have gone better than we could have ever hoped or dreamed. Her seamless transition into our family has surprised us all; we fully expected that once we got home we might begin to see some evidence of the inevitable stress caused by all the changes she has recently experienced. So far, however, she has shown no sign whatsoever of any distress or confusion; on the contrary, she is absolutely thriving. Her English is increasing at an incredible rate every day; she is already putting together a few sentences and she definitely understands a lot of what we say. Today I asked her to please get Lola some food since she was hungry. She said "o.k. mommy" and went directly to the cabinet where we keep the dogfood and proceeded to fill Lola's bowl. Her expressive language is not quite at the same level as her receptive language, but she's getting there. Sometimes her accent is pretty comical, like when Jamie was trying to teach her the words for "fork" and "spoon" at dinner tonight. Her pronunciation of the word "fork" was, um, obscene, and caused us both to crack up, at which point she began giggling and repeating it loudly, causing the other people in the restaurant to turn around and look to see whose child was spouting profanity. Jamie and I couldn't stop laughing, Maili joined in even though she had no idea what was so funny, and the more we laughed the louder she got. We've really gotta work on that pronunciation..

Callie is slowly beginning to warm up to our pug Lola, which is progress since she was absolutely terrified of her in the beginning. She still runs and screams if Lola moves toward her too fast, but as long as Lola is calm or sleeping she is ok with her. I even caught her sneaking a few kisses from Lola yesterday while she was sleeping and I had to take her picture. She put her finger to her lips and said "shhhh, Mommy, Lola shu jou". For the last few days Lola has been "BU hao", but finally this morning she declared her "HUN hao" so I guess we're making progress. She still subjects the rest of us to her rating system, although not quite as often.

Her conversational skills are getting better, too. This morning she picked up her toy phone and pretended to call me, indicating that I should answer my cell phone. Usually a conversation with her is pretty brief and one sided, since she only knows "hello' and "goodbye" and the rest of the time she usually just repeats whatever you say to her. This time, though, we actually had a conversation.

Me: Hello

Callie: Hello Mommy.

Me: How are you?

Callie: How are you?

Me:I'm fine.

Callie: I"m fine. Wo ai ni, Mommy.

Me: I love you too, Callie.

Callie: goodbye Mommy

Me: goodbye, Callie