This Time Last Week...

This time last week we had just gotten on the final flight home to Manchester after nearly missing it! Ana was already a U.S. citizen and was soon to meet our closest family members. It feels like forever since then actually! Just thought I'd give an update of where we are a week later.

First, her personality. We have found her to be a rather serious baby actually. She really studies people for a long time (and I mean multiple meetings) before she starts to warm up. She gives a lot of the furrowed brow look. It's so neat though to see her personality unfolding to us. When we were in Guatemala, over the span of each day, it felt like she revealed something new to us every day. The first day (after that first night that we got her) she woke up smiling, and would give an occasional smile throughout that day. Then the next few days, she would start to smile at us, then started to babble a little bit when she was in her crib. When we came home, it feels like everything was sort of reset back to square one. She really needed to do her studying of the new surroundings and smells and just sort of regressed back to our first couple days together. Now, just about a week later we are still seeing new things every day. I am personally feeling closer and closer to her each day. I don't know if it's me, or her or a little bit of both but I like it. She has started to lay her head on my shoulder, and relax onto me where before she would feel kind of stiff, and just wouldn't let down her guard. I can't tell you how good it feels to feel her little body melt into mine. And I've noticed when I walk into the room where she is she smiles or giggles and seems to get excited to see me, so cool! Greg is doing well by her too. There have been a couple times these rough getting to sleep nights where he is the one who can get her to finally give in and fall asleep. He is so cute with her, I'm loving seeing him with a baby again!

As far as Ian's adjustment, he is doing well. Today at school he got to tell the class a little bit about Guatemala. I asked him what he talked about and he said, "I don't know, just about the swimming and the sand carpet." I'll have to ask his teacher what he actually talked about. He's really starting to warm back up to Ana again. He was very into her at the middle to end of our trip, but when we came home, I think the attention she was getting from not only us, but everyone around us wore on him. But he is really starting to pay her attention again, and seems to truly care for her. It does my heart so good to see him playing with her, or helping out with diaper changes (placing the clean diaper only of course, he won't even TOUCH a wet diaper even if it's been all folded up into a little bundle if we payed him!) or getting things for her. The only thing he can't tolerate is meal time. He has to have the weakest stomach of any child I know, and he cannot look at Ana's messy face while she is eating. All the pureed food that gets on her, and of course the massive amount of drool she is currently producing is just about enough to make him gag. In fact, he didn't say anything, but I saw him take a bit of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich today, watch me swipe food off her chin with her spoon and ran to the trash to spit the bite out. It's kind of comical actually. So I do my best to keep her as clean as I can for the time being, just wait until she starts feeding herself!! Tonight I left the room to get some lotion while I was getting Ana ready for bed, and I asked Ian to watch her and make sure she didn't roll anywhere (which she doesn't do much of anyways, but of course when I'm not watching is when she'll get into trouble right?) I left her pajamas open because I was going to put some lotion on her. Well I came back into the room and Ian was zipping up her pajamas for her ever so carefully, it was so sweet.

As far as Ana's development goes, we haven't called Early Intervention yet, we just want to wait until she is home a couple weeks before bringing complete strangers into the house but we will be setting things up soon. I am noticing though that she is sitting up a lot better now. She can sit for longer periods and even when she is leaning far forward can hoist herself up to a straight up position. It's amazing the difference in just this week! She has rolled over a couple times for us, and really seems to enjoy the jumper and exersaucer (we're really trying to get her to realize that her legs can do wonderful things for her!), she had a pretty good pincer grasp (oh yeah, she is a pincher, ouch!), but didn't really know what to do with it as far as feeding is concerned. We give her puffs or cheerios and she'll pick them up, but will generally just drop them. Well just yesterday, she picked up a puff and after first smacking herself in the forehead with it, she got it into her mouth, success! We were so excited, she gave us her furrowed brow and looked at us like we were crazy.

Sleep is getting better. Ian is going to sleep in his own bed again, and seems ready to actually go to sleep at the appropriate time. We dug out his old aquarium crib toy that plays music and lights up to try with Ana last night. When I layed her down and turned it on, she looked at it, then looked at me and giggled, then she looked back at it and back at me and giggled again. It was so stinkin' cute! The only drawback is that it only plays for 10 minutes, but she seemed to really enjoy it and after resetting it 3 or 4 times she actually fell asleep on her own. She still seems to wake 30-45 min after she initially goes down, but just starting that back up seems to be doing the trick for now. We're still trying to work out the whole nap timing thing, but I know it will all come.

Okay, I'm going to leave you with a little Ian giggle. I think I mentioned that Ana's primary babble at the moment is "ra ra ra ra". Well tonight we were on our way home from a trip to Wal-Mart and Ian says to us "When do you think Ana will learn how to say "sish coom bah?". Gave us a good giggle, hope it does the same for you.