She Laughs!

Today, Bela really started to open up! While she is still completely attached to Ryan and won't even let me hold her unless I am bathing her, she actually started to open up quite a bit. She started throwing her toys and blocks off our hotel room bed and onto the floor while she was playing. While most parents would normally discipline their children for that, Ryan and I encouraged her to do it! We were so thrilled that our hotel room floor was covered in toys and blocks. Best of all, Bela helped to clean it all up after she was done - even pointing out blocks that had made their way under the desk that we hadn't noticed. We noticed that she likes things to be clean, in order and organized once she is done playing. It's kind of interesting seeing how many new personality traits we notice each day - there is an analyst in her for sure!

Now that we have Bela's paperwork done with the US Embassy. The plan was to do some shopping, sight-seeing and then make our way to the airport to get home. But we found out this morning that our flight tonight has been "rescheduled" from 4am to 1pm the following day! Delhi has had tons of "fog" the last few weeks resulting in major flight delays. What's funny is that it's actually smog that has been socked in by very cold weather and has caused near 0 visibility in the mornings. It's also much colder than I remember it ever being here - apparently they have been breaking many records like other parts of the world with severe cold temperatures.

So with the extra time, we visited yet another temple today. My mom wanted to visit Laxmi Temple; in Pune we visited the Ganpati Temple (“Please don’t feed my God peanuts to all of you Simpson’s fans”). My mom wanted to bless Bela again and our nephew Ayden. My brother's family and my Dad joined us in Delhi yesterday so Bela got to meet her uncle, aunt, grandpa and cousin for the first time. She doesn't react well to new people yet and pretty much clung to Ryan when they met her – she wouldn't let him go for anything. But today, was truly an awesome day for Bela and her getting more comfortable with us. During our car ride from the temple to the shopping district, Bela started to play in the car, waving at people and started to laugh. Ryan found a tickle spot on her neck and she started to laugh hysterically when he tickled her! We never heard her laugh like that before - we barely saw her crack a smile before today! What was totally cute was that she would lift up her shirt so Ryan could tickle her belly and she would laugh some more. I think Ryan was totally relieved that she showed some humor and started to laugh; I think he thought that she would have a stoic expression forever! :)

It's late here in India - Ryan and Bela are both sleeping heavily while I update this blog. Tomorrow we're going to make our second attempt to leave India. None of our travel delays have stressed out though as everything seems to work out just the way it needs to (i.e. or as my Mom would say - fate and Karma takes over). So with the flight delay, we spend another night in Dubai tomorrow, getting home a day later than expected. But with that, we can pick up Bela's bag that was stuck there before we arrived in India (saving us a ton of money to have it shipped). And who knows, maybe we wouldn't have seen Bela open up so much today if we were traveling on a plane like we had planned. My mom probably credits the temple visit for her opening up today but we're just thankful and so, so, so grateful for little Bela and how she has already added so much joy to our lives. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings in terms of us learning more about her personality!