The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

First I'll start with the good - we had a fun family afternoon last week. It was March Break and one of the things we did was go swimming. Hosanna hadn't been swimming yet and she has the cutest swimsuit she just HAS to wear before she grows out of it! We had a great time! Will got to show off his swimming skills to Dad and Zanna had fun in the water. She clung to my hip in the beginning and then I slowly moved her away from me to bounce her up and down and splash. She got quite a kick out of this. We also met a family there with two daughters from China - one from the same province as Zanna. Ironically, the older daughter had attended a class at the library with Will the day before and they had hit it off. So the two of them had a great time in the pool.
This last week Zanna has found "her groove". She started dancing and it's a hoot. She has this little Fischer Price piano and she plays it like Tori Amos - squatting and shaking around! Too funny. Then she shakes her head back and forth and claps. The girls got rhythm! Will just learned "Twinkle, twinkle little star" on the violin and she likes to dance to that.
Another good - since the time change she's been sleeping a little longer in the mornings. Gotta love that.
Ok, now the bad. Part of the newfound walking is more falling. Followed by screams. This is bad but part of the learning process I suppose. Another bad - Will has suddenly developed uncontrolable fits of laughter during church - apparently from observing Zanna. This is quite a problem especially during the Wed night Lenten services when we are focused on Jesus suffering and death. After much thought I decided his discipline would be that he will sit by himself during church until further notice - and not with friends. This slightly backfired on me. Not having explained this to my fellow church-goers, it looked like Mom had made no room for her son in the pew and he was cast off to sit by himself. So his best buddy and buddy's Dad took pitty on him and sat with him. Thus not producing the desired effects Mom had wanted and making Mom look like a heartless women too busy with her new baby to notice - what's his name? Oh, Will. Haha!
And then there's today. We had an appointment at the Adoption Clinic at the local children's hospital. It's a specialized look at internationally adopted kids so they know more specific things to look for and test. Therefore blood needed to be taken - quite a bit of it. Wayne held her and I tried to distract her from the needle that was plunged into her arm and pumped blood slowly from it for the next five minutes (that's what it felt like). She didn't struggle but sobbed and looked at me with eyes that seemed to say "Mama, how could you? I trusted you and now you're just standing there singing the Alphabet song. You have stabbed me in the back (arm)." It was awful. But now for the ugly.
The nurse requested a urine sample and stool sample. I didn't know how exactly they would go about doing this. I briefly imagined they would extract the urine by sucking it out of the absorbent diaper. This would not be the case. She put a bag that stuck to the area around her vagina to "catch" the urine. Yes, you read that right. The bag hung out of her diaper so we would know when she did her thing and then put it in a cup. She assured us that most babies did it while they were still there so she would take it off and do it. Great. As far as the stool sample, we would take three containers home to collect three different times and keep in our refrigerator until we brought them in. Included was a convenient scoop. Wonderful. Poop in my fridge. As it turned out the stinker wouldn't pee. Instead she pooped contaminating the pee bag, forcing me to take it off (ouch) and have the nurse put on another one. We went upstairs for the previously mentioned needle and surely by then she will have peed, we'd bring her back down and the nurse would take it away. Not a drop. So we take her home and yeah! - she's peed. And pooped. Contaminated. Take off, put pee bag on. Finally, I now have a small container of pee in my fridge. Not exactly appetizing and I may have to insist on eating out until the diaper contents are not in there.
I know I promised pictures but I'm on the wrong computer so I 'll have to do it after the post. Don't worry - no pictures about the ugly. Just the good.

She's walking!

It's official - she's walking! She definately is walking more than she is crawling at this point. She's the drunken sailor type - wobbly and bangs into things. She is also doing very well on the stairs. On a daily basis one of us follows her up and down the stairs for practise and excercise. This also helps the stairs to be less "forbidden" (aka appealing).
We made lots of progress this past week. On Monday I had a hair appointment in the afternoon and I couldn't very well take her to this. I couldn't very well not get my hair cut. So this forced me to leave - without her. I put her down for her nap and when she woke up I was not there. Daddy came in and she was not amused by this. She cried and threw a fit. She stood at the bottom of the stairs shaking the gate back and forth thinking I might be up there. Wayne took her all over the house, in closets, the showers, etc to show her I wasn't there. After she came to accept this she became distracted by playing a game with Daddy. So when I got home it was quiet and they were on the couch playing Megablocks together. Her face lit up when I came around the corner and it felt fantastic!
This outing made me feel a bit bold so I decided to try it again. Will has gymnastics on Wed and Ruth has been picking him up for that since our trip to China. So with Wayne on board with my idea, I took Will to gym and once again put her down and left. Will had a particularly great time at gym (not sure why) and I chatted with the girls (adults) while pretending to make up a grocery list. Zanna ended up sleeping 2 1/2 hours for Wayne which allowed him to get a lot of work done. She wasn't mad when he got her up this time and he had her in the highchair for a snack when i got home. So we're 4 for 4 - we all had a great afternoon! Yeah! We will try and do this regularly so I can start having a bit of free time and she can feel more comfortable with Daddy and know that Mommy comes home.
Easter for Kids was on Saturday at church. Will said he had a great time and Zanna cruised around and especially got a kick out of the singing. We had an outreach event going on upstairs at the same time. Seminary guys were up from the States for this and we had the opportunity to house one of them originally from Taiwan. We got Chinese food last night and Wayne set out chopsticks for all of us. He and I ended up using them while our guest used his fork. Ha! Wayne has been gone a lot over the past 5 days or so because of the Sem guys and took them out to canvess handing out brochures and talking with people. It's been exhausting sometimes not having him around and has started to really bother Will. Hopefully we can get in some family time this week as we're taking school off for March Break. It'll still be busy - he has to write a new sermon for Wed.- but hopefully not quite as crazy.
I'll have to wait until later to post pictures. We had some professional ones taken and there are some great ones! Wayne will have to download those later this week.