Family Day

Well, we're fast approaching the big day that Santa comes to town, and the girls are wound tight as tops. In fact, La Nina is shrieking with laughter at this very moment...45 minutes past her usual bedtime. It could be ugly tomorrow.

We celebrated our fifth family day with La Nina on Sunday. It's so hard to believe it's been five years. I reread all my previous family day posts, and geez...I waxed poetic in the past. You know it's funny, this year the day held more fond memories than intense emotions. Here's this year's little update.

Dual Immersion Kindergarten is going well. She's reading in Spanish and doing pretty well at reading in English too. (English is far more difficult language to learn to read.) She can read some headlines in the newspaper, a few street signs--especially the ones that are Spanish words-- and other phonetic words, but anything unusual throws her. She likes math too, and she really loves the social aspect of Kindergarten. Outside of school, she loves dance and gymnastics.

She still sleeps more than any five year old I know. She usually needs a solid twelve hours of sleep every night or I pay the next day. And she still is just a dream eater. She prefers fruits and veggies to junk. In fact, it's common for her to hand me a half eaten cookie and say, "Mom, this is just too much for me." Trust me, that NEVER happens with her sister.

As far as the adoption goes, she asks some pretty tough questions these days, but the topic runs hot and cold. Some days or weeks, it's all she wants to talk about. Others it's not. With her, she'll usually ask the question she wants answered, then once she hears what she needs to hear, she leaves the whole topic alone for awhile. The hard part for me is she never asks a question I expect. I'm always winging it on my answers. Frankly, I'm usually way behind in what I think she understands. She understands it all and has for sometime.

We're beginning to think about taking both girls back to China. Not necessarily to see their hometowns, more just to be tourists. We've never really been tourists in China, despite visiting the country three times for a total of almost eight weeks. I really do love traveling in China. The food can be tough, but the country fascinates me. So, I'm excited to think we'll go back in the next couple of years.

That's it for year five. I know everyone tells parents it goes so fast, and when you're in the trenches with a wild twenty-month old, time feels like it is standing still. But in hindsight, it does seem like those hard times flew by and now when she waves at me as she walks into her kindergarten class, I wonder what happened to my baby.