One Month Home

I just realized that we are just 3 days shy of being home one month. Time is flying! So much has happened and yet so much still needs to be done.

Medical: Alice is healthy. Beyond that there are still more doctor visits ahead to clarify her diagnosis and determine what if anything she might need in terms of therapies to improve her day-to-day functioning. We also still need visits to check her vision and dental health.

School: We are going to homeschool, but it feels like we are getting off to a very slow start. It actually has only been 10 days since we made the decision and the first materials I ordered have arrived. In some ways the past month has been what is often referred to in homeschool circles as a "detox" period. When families bring kids home to learn, the kids often need a period of time to lose the habits and expectations that come from being in an institutional education setting. For Alice the time has been spent learning about life in our home and getting comfortable with a less structured lifestyle. Surprisingly, she has adapted very easily. Hopefully, I won't regret how well she's adapted to all this free time once the rest of the materials arrive and we get started on her lessons!

Entertainment: One of the things other families have experienced with kids coming from the orphanage environment is the strong need for structure and the kids' inability to entertain themselves. What we are seeing with Alice is a rapid adaptation to being an only child. She rarely appears bored. She is able to find ways to entertain herself. Granted much of that is technology dependent, but even there we are seeing improvement. While in China and the first weeks home she was playing games on her PSP and watching lots of the magic fairy show, now she is listening to lots of Chinese music and still watching some Chinese shows (mostly cartoons but also some variety and comedy shows). The music sounds like a variety of children's songs, folk songs and tween/teen music. She loves to sing along with the music. She also writes in her journal every day and writes email and letters to her friends and favorite teacher in Beijing.

Food: Hmm. I am working very hard not to take her reactions to my cooking personal. When I prepare supper I am serving food that is familiar and typical for us. Breakfast and lunch selections cater to her preferences. The hardest thing for me to deal with is when she sniffs the food and then waves it away - indicating she wants it off her plate. Sometimes we'll remove it, but more often now we leave it there. We are also beginning to school her on better manners when encountering new food. I tried reminding her of our time in Beijing when we were staying with Joy and Michael, how we were served lots of food in their home and at restaurants that was new and unfamiliar to us and we always tasted it (never sniffed it!), often discovering that while it looked and smelled different, we often liked the taste. Yeah, that didn't make a difference. She continues to sniff and wrinkle her nose. :) I did get a smile from her last night. She wouldn't eat most of what was on her plate, tasting only the green beans. Using the translator she said "I can't eat." I replied through the translator, "Let's be honest. You can eat. You have decided you don't want to eat." To which, she actually cracked a big grin.

Expectations: We have made some mistakes here. We have learned that allowing something she enjoys once sets a precedent that we may regret. DH allowing her to try steering and shifting in the truck early Saturday morning has created a little driving monster. Now she wants to "drive" all the time. She gets an impish grin as she and I are walking to the car and asks for the key. She sometimes will get in the driver seat, refusing to move because she wants to start the car (which we never allow). She asks all the time for the key. While it has become a time when she is using more English, it is also a behavior that I am getting tired of! DH and I have talked about it and agree that she is expressing immature and impulsive behaviors. Our preadoption training prepared us to see behaviors typical in children much younger than her chronological age. It is normal and actually healthy for the kids with these backgrounds to have the opportunity to express behaviors and be parented through them from stages in their development that were short changed. So like a late toddler who finds a "game" to be entertaining long after Mom and Dad have tired of it, Alice finds the "driving game" entertaining even though we refuse to play along.

Language: Alice is making great strides here. Every few days we are starting to see small bursts of English. She will still go for long periods of time (hours, not days), when she relies heavily on the translators, but there are isolated English words being spoken regularly now as well. As I mentioned previously, her entertainment choices are still Chinese-language based. The main reason we are allowing so much time immersed in her Chinese music is to buffer the reality that her world is all English now and that can be tiresome. Losing herself in her Chinese music keeps her spirits up and possibly is helping reduce feelings of homesickness for China.