"Mommie...Owwie??"

This was a busy week! Blood tests, evalatuions, social worker vists and it's only Thursday! We have another Dr's appointment tomorrow to round out the week of experts.  We had to subject Bela to more blood tests which Ryan took her too. She did very well considering the trauma! First, the blood takers at the lab stuck her twice and managed NOT to get any blood AND they left an incredible bruise on one arm, causing Bela to say..."Mommie, Owwiee?"  She was a great sport when she got back and she showed me both sets of bandages on both arms from the owwies that she got from being stuck!  But after that experience, she and I played with some of my purses and hats and Bela had a great time - she loved my cowboy hat and even discovered how to say Chheeezzzeee for the first time!  She is definintely a girly girl and that's so much for me me! We pick out the clothes she wants to wear most mornings and she especially likes to choose which shoes to wear.

I have had a ton of fun playing pretend with Bela this week. She has really started to latch onto her baby dolls and stuffed animals. So when I was brushing her hair, she wanted me to brush baby's hair. This morning for breakfast, she wanted one of her dolls to also wear a bib and pretend to have yogurt and eggs like she did. Yesterday, we had one of Bela's cousins over, Brianna. Bela and I picked her up from the school next door and she played with Brianna for about 2 hours without fussing very much at all. She even learned Brianna's name and pronounces it, "Bunnuna". Brianna brought over books, an umbrella and jewelry for Bela to play with and she loved the umbrella and jewelry especially.

Finally, today we took Bela to Newport Speech and Language center for an occupational therapy and language evaluation. Good news is that she is doing amazingly well with her motor and fine motor skills. The occupational therapist commented on the fact that Bela's block stacking skills were the best she had seen in over 5 months! She is clearly behind in her language skills because she never learned English prior. So we will likely enroll her into a group program with other children so she can catch up. The speech specialist and case worker for Bela seem to think that she will catch up in no time. We were so impressed with the resources available to Bela. Just makes us so appreciative of the fact that we live in a place where she really has all the necessary support to catch her up, both physically and from a speech/language perspective. We even got some great tips on how to speed up her language skills at home from the specialists.

We had to start correcting Bela this week now that we feel very comfortable that she has connected with us. Last night when a friend came over, Bela spit some chips into Ryan's shoes. So I created a place in our kitchen where I set a stool in a corder and gave her "time-in" (vs. a "time-out"). That was a suggestion from one of the adoption books I have been reading. The time-in requires that I stay with her and explain to her what she did wrong and then give her the option to make a better choice - in this case the choice was not to spit in dad's shoes. It's important that I don't isolate her or make the time-in too lengthy as the attachment process is fragile. She really didn't like the process but she seemed to understand the explanation of what she did wrong - at least we hope she did...time will tell. Bela is not going down for naps much these days either but she is sleeping around 6:30-7pm at night for about 12-13 hours. She is still waking up to see me or Ryan and then she is asleep again - that happens 1-3 times per night and the great news is that we don't have to sleep with her - we can choose when we want to or not. Sometimes Ryan or I just want to sleep with her because we don't want her to be alone - kind of overprotective but we're trying to make sure we don't create a habit of it if we don't have to from an attachment perspective (and so far we haven't had to).

Finally, we had our first social worker visit and he was very impressed with the progress she has made. She was very active when he came by, even talking and playing with her toys while we were talking to him about her progress. He indicated that his experience with our agency is that he rarely ever gets frantic calls from parents who adopt from Holt - so he was glad to hear that we didn't have a need for one of those calls so far either. He will be by 3 more times per California requirements and. Again, it's so nice to know how many resources we have available to us and to Bela. It's something that definitely gives us a sense of relief and ease knowing we're not in this alone and any issues we run into, there is a whole team of people who are truly interested in helping us resolve them!