Our First Rough Night - 2.8.15 (Sun)

Reflections from February 8, 2015:

Unfortunately Saturday night, “B” had a rough night of sleeping and kept waking and crying. It was her first night in a new hotel, so I'm sure with the travel and the new place that only contributed. I'm pretty sure we've gotten spoiled these first 5 days with a very happy and easy to go to sleep child.  Needless to say, due to the limited amount of sleep we received tonight, we decided to just take the day and rest and not have a lot of activity, so we could all get rested and just spend some one on one time with Little Miss.

Today, her personality continued to shine through. Wow. She continued to give us tons of smiles and laughs and giggles. Pretty much anything we do is funny to her.  She loves to try to imitate things we do and she even tried to mimic and sit like someone who had just visited our room. She loves to try to make fish faces, but hasn’t quite mastered that one yet and you can just see the wheels turning in her little head as she tries to figure it out.

She continues to tell us “things” and of course we act like we know and just shake our head and smile and agree (who knows what we might have just agreed to-haha) She does so well with both Nate and I and continues to let either of us feed, dress, or bathe her, which is a blessing.  She likes to pretend she is cleaning things with a Kleenex if you give her a tissue.  It’s really quite fascinating to watch.  It often makes me wonder if she had been shown how to clean things, even at her young age, at her orphanage. I guess we'll never know.

She definitely likes to keep her hands and clothes neat (she’ll pick off crumbs or want her hands wiped after touching something unfamiliar (i.e. a new food, etc.), but she does enjoy exploring and touching new items and textures.  She’s a joy to be around as long as she’s napped.(haha) When it's time to sleep, a whole new side of her comes out. She'll fight sleep so hard sometimes and just arch her back and can be a bit uncontrollable in those moments until she gets comfortable and is ready to let her body sleep. Several times during our travel to appointments, she nearly hit her head on the glass in the bus as she was fighting sleep very hard.

Little one has a number of funny sleeping positions too-- her paperwork we received had said, "She sleeps in many gestures" which translated means many different positions-- I think these photos capture that quite well!

In the last few days, Nate has laughed as we’ve found crackers and other miscellaneous objects in his shoes…ahhhh welcome to parenting, right?  She’s a smart little one and though in some areas she’s still a bit behind with motor skills and walking really solidly, it’s been great to see her progressing even more in the last 2 days.  She’s around a 12 month old developmentally in some areas, rather than an almost 18 month old. She is definitely tiny and even 12 month clothing (depending on the brand) swallows her up a little.  She can wear a 9-12 month onesie no problem and the same with little leggings. We can’t keep pants up for anything, so have learned that slim fit little leggings are our go to right now as they stay on her fairly well. (thank you Old Navy!) She’s a tiny little peanut! Tomorrow she’ll have her US Consulate medical exam so we’ll get to see what she currently weighs.

All in all, though we are a bit sleep deprived today, she’s progressing leaps and bounds, which is a blessing to see.