Six Months

M at 17 months... happy to be at the park!

M has been with us for six months now. It is amazing how quickly those months went by. But the milestone of her being with us for six months makes me happy and also a bit unsettled. I'm happy that our adoption was completed six months ago and that we have our baby home. I am happy that I have had six months to get to know her and watch her grow. I am unsettled because I realized that perhaps she should be a little bit further along in her development than she is. I feel like we have been coasting through the last six months getting adjusted to having a baby again, to having a third child, and to introducing a complete stranger to a life so foreign to anything she has ever known... new caregivers, new playmates, new surroundings, new language, new food, new comfort, and the whole idea of what a family is.

M, her second day home from Russia, 11 months old.

When I think back to how M was when she first came home at 11 months old, she has progressed so much. She was withdrawn and quiet. She wasn't able to process much beyond the 2 feet in front of her. Most of her time was spent picking at the floor or carpet. She would grab a rattle and shake and bang it, but never venture into the toy basket. She had a fear of baths. She had a hard time taking naps. She would only come out of her shell when we picked her up and played with her, and then she would tire and she would retreat to her thumb and close her eyes to shut us out.

Over the past 6 months we have seen her trust in us grow. Just lately she has been happy and welcoming when I return from being away for a short period of time. She still has moments when she withdraws and goes into herself, but she does not do this all the time. She enjoys playing with the twins when they pay attention to her. She watches them so attentively at dinner. Her scope has broadened from a 2 foot radius to the edge of the room now. She is babbling now and has said mama and dada a few times. She dives into her toy basket and gets frustrated when she can't pull out the toy she wants. She loves her baths and could splash all day long in the tub. I have found that with some rocking and good timing on my part, that she will take a nap. And through all of this, she still sleeps through the night about 95% of the time. She has always seemed happy and ready to be loved, grabbing onto my legs when I go about my business in the kitchen. She loves to go out to the park or shopping. She enjoys her rides in the car and one of her favorite things to do is pick up the kids from school. She gets excited when we pull into the school parking lot. She is no longer gorging herself in the high chair. She still has a good appetite, but she is starting to leave food on her tray. She is also starting to become selective about what she eats... she left strawberries on the tray today. Twice.

C and K at 18 months.

M is now 17 months old. I don't remember much about when the twins were this age, but I do remember that they were actively trying to say words like "daiiii" for Christmas lights and "dah" for dog. I recall that the only way I could get them to smile for the Christmas picture I took was to pretend like I was mad at them for banging a piece of pottery on the house. The mischief!

We've all been fairly healthy this season except for a whopper of a head cold that M came down with about 2 weeks ago. We went up to Tahoe again to enjoy the new snow and on the way back down she was showing some ear distress. Over the next week an ear infection developed, and then the head congestion hit. She was miserable, and that's an understatement. And in her misery she did what she had lots of experience doing, withdrawing. Her behavior with her cold reminded us so much of what she was like when she first came home and I felt like we had lost a lot of ground with her. It certainly didn't help that we had to administer antibiotics and pain relievers, inhalers, and the most dreaded saline drops and nasal syringe. How could she still like us and trust us when we had to physically restrain her to do these awful things we knew would ultimately make her feel better? It was a hard two weeks. Finally Friday she was well enough that we could go to the park for a couple of hours after school. That perked her up a bit. And by Sunday she was starting to act like her "new" self again, but not completely.

M... not quite feeling well yet.


But seeing her regression, and finally getting to those chapters in the adoption books about attachment (why are the most helpful chapters always 3/4 of the way into the book??) has made me feel like perhaps I should not have been "coasting" through the past 6 months. I mean, I probably wasn't "coasting", but now I am aware that I should be actively doing so much more to try to stimulate her and bring her out. I am aware that perhaps her love of textures might just be a self-stimulating behavior, just like shaking a rattle incessantly, or slapping every flat surface she encounters. I don't know. Perhaps her wandering through the house independently isn't such a good thing because she doesn't really check back with us. When I sit down with her to play and to try to teach her the cause and effect of her different toys, she is so overwhelmed that she can't make eye contact or even focus her attention on what I am doing. It's too much for her. But she loves being held and bounced and thrown around and she makes wonderful eye contact at these times. I took her to the library once for story-time a few weeks ago and she loved it. I want her to be around other children her own age and to see what it is that they can do. But at the same time it almost seems like she's very much still a baby and is not quite ready for the toddler activities like gymnastics or park play. While other 16 month olds have a shovel in hand and are banging their older sister with it, she's still digging at the sand with her fingers and trying to put it all in her mouth.

I want to hear more words come from her. At the pediatrician's office today I discussed some of my concerns and was reassured that you can't assess the developmental level of any child when they are sick. She told me to wait a week for M to really start feeling better. And then M murmurs a "mama" while I'm holding her in front of the doctor, which was reassuring in a sort of temporal way. Our doctor told us that speech really starts to develop about 3-4 months after the child starts understanding the words. In the past week I have noticed M being a little more responsive to some of my requests. I think she is starting to recognize English. And by seeing this it has encouraged me to really start labeling a lot more things for her. But I still don't feel like I have her full attention. She's not pointing, and she doesn't follow my finger when I point. She will follow the direction of my eyes though. She might also be holding back because she's not comfortably attached yet. I keep trying. And I try not to get discouraged when she tunes me out. At her 18 month checkup (only a month away) the doctor will assess her and let us know if we should pursue some speech therapy.

I've been spending more time holding her and reassuring her. I've taken to putting her to bed every night now because she is starting to bond with me more. I think this is hard for Kevin because when she first came home he was the preferred comfort giver. But I think it needs to be me right now, because I am the one who is home with her most of the day. I am also the one who is taking longer to bond. So we both need this. Lately she has been waking up once during the night or during a nap crying. Once she realizes that we are there she is comforted and goes back to sleep. I wonder if these are dreams of the orphanage.

All these things make me realize that this job of parenting an adopted child from an institution is more difficult than I first believed, because I don't know what's a quirk and what's an indication of unresolved trauma. I don't know what's causing her to shut down at times when I try to reach out to her and teach her. I am realizing that just as I had faith that we would make it through the adoption process and be able to bring M home, which at the time seemed an insurmountable task, again I must trust in God that we can help M through these obstacles that seem so foreign to us. I have a message on my machine from a therapist with whom I left a message. Tomorrow I'll talk to her and perhaps she can help us or refer us to someone who can give us some encouragement, tools, or at least reassurance that we're on track, just the slow track. The books all say that it takes time, but they never say how much or what it will be like along the way.

Finally, I am learning how difficult it is to balance the very different needs of three children. At times I deeply miss spending close time with the twins. I long for the time when it feels natural to be close to all of them together.

And now a few shots of the snow from our last trip to Tahoe...
The resort... snowland.

Swimming in a snow storm!

M and I, not swimming.