Aside from speech, her little temper is starting to become the wonderful terrible two's temper. Everything I suggest is met with NOOOOOO! with a full-body tense up and tipping her head to the side to shout it over her shoulder. Sigh. She's starting to understand options and conditions we are putting on things; you can have more cereal if you eat this piece of pear. She is blowing my mind with letter recognition. Now that she can see she is pointing out letters on signs all over the place and accurately stating which letter it is. She got very excited at the F in the word "fresh" at the store today. She picks her alphabet cereal out of the bowl and knows the letters perfectly too.
Her seasonal obsession right now is pumpkins. SO excited when she sees them on people's steps during our Leia walks. What is with the sudden barrage of white pumpkins this year? They are out in equal numbers to the orange... weird. She pats and kisses every pumpkin close enough to touch - the outside displays at the grocery store take about 20 minutes to walk past hahaha. It's cute. I've started to just tell her they are too heavy for us and she leaves them. That's a new word for her, 'heavy.' Except she uses it for anything that is difficult. If she can't get up the stairs alone, they are heavy. If she cannot put the box of cereal in the cupboard because she is trying to do it sideways, it is heavy. Puzzle piece not fitting? Heavy. I'm trying not to say 'hard' when I correct her because hard is a texture we are working on too! I always laugh when she says heavy because it makes me think of in Back to the Future when Marty McFly keeps saying things are heavy, in keeping with his 80's slang, and Doc Brown thinks there is something different with the gravitational pull in the future because of these comments.
Swimming lessons are getting better! I think the water was just too cold and the place was too chaotic for her on that first lesson. She is enjoying them now and kicking and falling off the wall to us in the water. She had a pool party on the weekend for a friend's birthday and she had a ball there. Our local pool is a wave pool so you can sit up in the shallow end and let the waves knock you around. Water in her face? Yes, please! Weirdo hahaha. Man, I love her.
She doesn't always need the waves to knock her over as she loves to fall down all on her own hahaha.
The only other thing going on now is that because our adoption agency is defunct (just disappeared after a year of no work) we have this contract with Russia saying we would provide post-placement reports for the next 2 years, but now have no one to send them too. Asking around online, some people are doing them up themselves and then sending them to their orphanage's regional Ministry of Education but on the other hand, we had given the agency a bunch of money in trust to complete this for us and ensure proper translation, legalization, and delivery of the document. I'm of one mind that if Russia doesn't want us to adopt their kids anymore than they can't be that concerned about how she is doing presently. I feel a bit bad because we said in court that we would do this and our judge was so nice, and the money we gave the agency would have been spent on this anyway so it would have been gone (just being spent over a longer period of time instead of disappearing all at once) so we don't have that amount to 'double spend', and our social worker has retired now. The other mind I have is that maybe providing successful post-placement reports will help to lift the ban of adoption as they see how great all their kids are doing. I also do want the orphanage to know how she is doing as we donated a bunch of money on her behalf to help others with clefts and other physical ailments. Big sigh. It's like the government 'threat' will hang over me for a long time now!
