Day Five

Emma woke up happy and wanting to play with her brothers. She loves looking out the window. We are on the 22nd floor, so we have a nice view.










The girl loves her some Cheerios and some Cade.







She loves putting on her clothes. Here she is putting her shirt on like pants :-)




She let Mark feed her some this morning. Progress. Today we were supposed to visit the foster care center, but the director wasn't going to be there. We will be doing that tomorrow instead. I do not know how Emma will react.

Today we just took it easy and just did some walking around. It is really difficult to stay at the hotel for a long period of time. The rooms are small and the hotel is not very kid-friendly. We get the feeling that they won't be sad when we leave :-) There are not a lot of options here. This is probably the best choice considering our options. Emma still wants me to be the one carrying her. I really don't mind :-). Chase is kind enough to nab her and take her up any stairs since it is really wearing me out to be carrying her so much. I am really not complaining because carrying her makes me so incredibly happy. When she reaches up for me to pick her up, I am overwhelmed with happiness. How did I get so lucky to have this precious child love me? For some adoptive parents, it takes some time for them to bond with their new child. For both Mark and I, we already feel like she is our daughter. We both already love her as much as we love our other children. We fall more in love with her every day. One thing we love about her is that she already seems to understand that we are her family. She likes it best when we are all together. She is so very precious.

Emma has some very bad habits. We don't know if it is because no one ever bothered to teach her manners or if it is just cultural differences. She most likely had to defend herself and learned some of her behaviors because of this. Today is the first day that she has started to mind us. We are working hard on stopping her from throwing food. She will now sometimes put it on the plate instead. I had her pick up some food she had thrown and then throw it away. She actually did it! We are modeling please and thank you. Hopefully she will pick those up soon. We are doing the signs for them also. An interesting fact we learned from our guide is that her local language does not have a word that means please. We are also working on her not hitting. Don't think that we are disciplining her for these things, she doesn't know she shouldn't be acting that way and discipline is not called for in this situation. We are just using a lot of modeling, repetition, redirection, and helping her do it differently.





Here is Walmart. It is located underneath a park.




She claps for herself often. We have greatly encouraged it.








Chairman Mao statue.

- Jenna