"Slippery"

We took Abigail to the beach today. This may sound a little silly, since it was 15 degrees and the wind made any exposed skin hurt instantly. But we wanted to show her the ice on Lake Michigan.

First of all, she's never seen a big lake yet. I think she had a little trouble envisioning such a large body of water. We did show her on the globe where it was.

She still hasn't seen such a big lake yet. The ice is so far out that any open water cannot be seen. We told her that there is water under all that ice and that we'd take her there in July when she could actually see the water.

We walked over the ice to the end of the pier. Abigail's new word is now "slippery". She said it the whole way there and the whole way back to the car. And slippery it was. Most of the time we weren't sure we were actually on the pier until we reached the light beacon at the end. And then we were standing at what was normally head height on the ice.

She picks up more and more of the language every day. We're to the point where we don't see it as much any more because she is able to communicate rather well, but others who are not so close will notice right away. She puts words together and speaks in phrases a lot.

One of her favorite phrases right now is "Will you please?" She uses this for nearly everything that she wants. We're working on getting her to specify what she is requesting and now she will usually add a word to this along with her hand gestures. "Will you please...up" means she wants me to pick her up. If I don't act right away, she will still occasionally add, "Green Eggs and Ham" in a sing-song voice, something the boys taught her in China.

As her English is increasing, her Chinese is decreasing. It is more and more difficult to coax her to say anything in Chinese, and she will usually just interject some babble when she is trying to piece her English into complete sentences. We can usually understand what she is trying to communicate, but someone who doesn't know her as well will have a harder time. She was on the phone with Grandma several days ago and rattled on for a good ten minutes in part English, part babble.

We have periodically had Chinese-speaking people over to our house, averaging about once a week. When the first person was here she talked his ear off for an hour and a half. By the fourth time, she talked far less and even talked to the Chinese people using what English she knew. She was still able to talk in Chinese, but her preference is shifting as she gains more English.

She is adjusting well, though. We had a person over last week who is a specialist on post-adoption attachment. He sat and talked to us for a couple hours, asking lots of questions and observing. He was actually glad to hear that we had such a horrible time on Gotcha Day, as he said this meant that she was able to form attachments with her caregivers and should be able to form attachments with us.

We have another social worker coming over this week for our required three month check-up, hopefully she will come to the same conclusion.