9 Weeks Home

You gotta love little girls. I came in the room to find this:



Time flies - I have so much to update. Cute little things happen almost everyday and I think to myself, "I should write about that on the blog", but then I don't get to it, so hopefully as I look through pictures for this post I can remember some of the funny things that have happened with the kids in the last 4 weeks.

It is amazing how quickly Valencia has picked up English. She can basically say what she wants to get by now. It's not perfect sentences and sometimes she is grasping for the right word and she still has a thick accent which makes it hard to tell what she's saying, but for the most part she is doing great. She picks up little phrases from Tallie and the latest one is "mom, can I tell you something?" She says that to me every time she has something to say and I think it is so cute.

She has a new hairstyle since my last post - here is the before (with the beads):
(we're at the zoo and she was TERRIFIED of the animals - I made her pose for this picture and that was as close as she was getting to the bears)



Here is the LONG and PAINFUL process of taking out the braids:
braids are out - her hair is only about 2-3 inches long so here she before we got her hair done again:
(Jared reads books to the girls every night before bed)

and here is the after:


It wasn't at all what I had asked the lady to do to her hair, and to be honest I was horrified by the new hairstyle -- it's cornrowed on the sides and meets at the middle and looks like a mohawk if left alone. But I discovered that if I pull her hair up it looks really cute.

One thing that has been fun to watch is to see how the girls influence each other. I check on the kids every night before I go to bed and a few weeks ago I just had to laugh because Valencia was asleep in bed with at least 10-15 toys. That is Tallie's influence -- that is just what she does every night, but when Valencia first came home she didn't want to sleep with ANY toys -- even if we tried to give her one at night she REFUSED to sleep with it, so it just made me laugh. Also because of Tallie some of the first English words she learned were "princess" "beautiful" "unicorn". On the other side, Valencia has influenced Tallie as well. One of the first things she did was teach Tallie how to fake burp. They used to stay up at night burping and giggling (which was pretty funny but did start to get out of hand so we made a no fake burping rule - one of those funny things you have to do as a parent). She's also really helped Tallie become more outgoing. Valencia isn't shy at all and she's really helped Tallie open up and talk to people. She's also helped Tallie be more brave physically -- trying to climb on things, jump off of things, etc - Tallie was SO timid to try things like that, but now she wants to keep up with Valencia.

(I made rolls with the girls and left the room for one minute and this is what I found when I came back in).


This video is soooooo cute - at Valencia's school they say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and then sing "God Bless America" so she usually has it in her head during the day and sings it around the house. I recorded her singing it and it is so cute -- I'll try to post the video - I sometimes have problems getting it to work so hopefully it will.




Tonight we watched some video Jared took when he visited the Creche (the orphanage) almost 2 years ago. Valencia LOVED watching it and seeing herself and all of her friends. Just within the last week she's started to talk to me about her life -- I think because she now knows enough words to be able to tell us things. It's been so great to reach this stage because it's really helping us get to know her. We drove past the airport last Friday and she started talking about how she flew in the helicopter. After the earthquake when they were getting the kids out the roads were in such bad shape they actually flew the kids in helicopters from the creche to the airport. It was fun to have her tell us about it. Anyway, tonight when we turned off the video of the creche she started to bawl. I think it was hard for her to see it and realize how much has changed. We're not sure if we should watch more with her at this point.

Here are some pictures from Easter - we made a garden tomb out of food -- the girls were quite proud of their work:

Tallie LOVES artichokes. In fact, I can't take her to the grocery store because if she sees them we HAVE to buy them for dinner. She wanted them for Easter dinner. She decided she couldn't wait and went straight for the heart:

A cute shot of my little guy:
Beckett is getting SO close to walking - I had to grab the camera for this - we thought it was SO CUTE!



And finally, my 2 dancing princesses (whew, I think this catches me up on blog posting)