7 months together

Today marks 7 months since Liana joined our family so I'm going to brag.  I am quite impressed with our little Chinese princess these days.  She is getting better at all of her gross motor skills, which have been the toughest for her to catch up on.  She is able to jump (teeny tiny jumps) and run (slowly) and she is a pretty excellent climber.  Yesterday at the park, she and Ethan had the most fun together and  he challenged her to climb a ladder over and over and over.  Her little legs are so weak still but she managed to do it with no help at all!  I stayed behind her just in case but she did it all on her own!  She's not a natural at these skills but she really wants to do things and so she does!  She adores dancing and singing and her favorite thing to do is play outside or run around with Ethan or Ella, doing whatever they are doing.  The latest accomplishment for our dear girl: she is potty trained!!!  That's right, it's real big girl panties all day now!  She went pretty quickly from pull-ups to big girl panties!  I don't think we even went through 2 packs of pull-ups before she moved on, and that's counting our big trip to visit our families where I pretty much didn't worry about potty training for a week and a half.  For a child who had never seen an English style toilet before we adopted her, if any kind of toilet at all, this is a huge accomplishment!  Her language has improved so much and both her doctor and our social worker were extremely impressed with how much she can say now.  Everyone has been impressed with how quickly she has adjusted to being in a family and all of the enormous changes that she has gone through since September.  Sometimes I can tell that people are trying to compare her to their own children and it, quite honestly, ticks me off.  No one knows what she's been through and to compare her to a child who has grown up in a family with every opportunity to meet the milestones on time is absolutely ridiculous.  This is a child who was raised in an orphanage from the time she was a newborn baby until the age of 2.  She was stuck in a crib or a walker all day rather than learning to use those legs like she's supposed to, she was given little food and very little nutrition and she had no mommy or daddy to care for her.  She was in an orphanage of about 1,000 children and was not able to have these opportunities.  She was taken from everything she has ever known and put in such a different environment that I'm shocked that she didn't just curl up in a ball and cry for a week.  We have Ethan, who is only 3 months older than Liana so it is hard not to compare, at times, but their circumstances have been so extremely different that it is just silly to compare.  We compare Liana to Liana and she is amazing us every day.  She is beautiful and funny and smart and learning so much so quickly.  We are so proud of everything she has learned and we see new things all the time!  She is amazing!

 She's getting so big!