Progress and challenges

Silin is developmentally young and we were certainly told to expect this.  She is probably much more like an average 18 mth. old than a 2.5 yr. old.  We were told to expect that for every three months spent in the orphanage, she would loose 1 month of development, so she spent about 30 months in her orphanage and we could expect her to be a developmental 20 mth. old.  Amazingly I can see her making progress by the moment.  We bought her a little toy abacus yesterday-- the beads slide up and over a little wire upside down u-shaped metal piece-- at first she didn't understand how it worked but we showed her and in a matter of minutes she was sliding the little pieces and experimenting with how to get more than one piece at a time to the other side of the metal wire-- I just don't think she has ever been played with 1 on 1 before --

 

Silin is starting to use the signs that I show her.  She clearly is starting to understand words like more, no, and all done but her speech is not quite understandalbe yet-- that said, she is signing for the words and so that makes it very easy to get what she wants and needs.

 

Last night we went out again to a restaurant and like usual Silin was willing to try everything.  She ate lots of pesto pasta, some tuna pizza, and drank much of her hot milk.  The only problem is that I left hungry.  I wasn't intersted in having bread, I'm not suppose to eat the salad and raw food here, and the amount of tuna that came on the pizza and tuna sandwhich I ordered was miniscule.  I am very glad that I brought almonds with me-- lots of them-- and also the breakfasts in the hotels here are very good and plentiful-- I'm finding that breakfast here has been the main meal for us--

 

Other moments that I want to remember for her from yesterday-- she walked inbetween Yami and I holding one finger of each of ours and toddled happily along-- that was very sweet-- she waved at her brothers on Skype and was vey happy to see them-- it seems like she wanted to jump through the computer screen--  (seeing them is wonderful but definitely makes me miss them so much -- I am loving being here but I really look forward to hugging and kissing the boys)

 

One thing that was very difficult last night was getting her to sleep-- it took two full hours and involved much crying and many failed attempts at soothing her-- she is a thumb sucker only when she is sound asleep and doesn't do it during the day or when she is trying to get to sleep-- these 2 hours were quite a challenge as sleep often is with kids-- it seems though that when she is finally out, she is out and that is a good thing--

 

Once again this is a middle of the night posting-- no editing-- just trying to preserve the memories here to share with you and her someday-- back to bed I go--  D