I was going back through his pictures and videos from our trip to China last year and it feels like a lifetime ago. He was a different kid, and we were different parents. We've all changed so much in a year! Such a journey.
Gotcha Day - Dec. 2017
Day 2 with Mom and Dad
Day 3 - Even got a smile!
We celebrated by procuring a cake and a free balloon from the cake lady, and presenting our little Panda with a gift. I had created a photobook for him depicting our adoption process. I thought it would be cool for him to look at later in life when he starts to have questions. Well, I was mistaken. He was obsessed with it as soon as he realized what it was. He spent well over 30 minutes going through it again and again, sometimes making up his own story and sometimes asking us to tell it to him. Even now he regularly goes to take it off the shelf and browse through it.
I had gotten the idea from some friends who also adopted and created a similar book for their kiddos. It is one of their children's most priced possessions! It's a challenge for me to empathize, as my childhood all makes sense to me in my head, and always has. Considering Panda spent a good year or two with his birth mother and then another couple years in a Chinese orphanage, and then all of a sudden was picked up by two (awesome) people and brought to a brand new country, I can understand why he is grasping for anything to help explain the disjointed and jarring bits of his life. Plus add the lack of language skills to try to sort everything out and talk it through. I just wish we had more to give him from his early childhood - some sort of something from his time with his birth mother, or even more than two pictures of him in the orphanage. (We were not permitted to visit his orphanage, so even we have no idea what to tell him about his time there other than the basics.)
Speaking of language skills, the book has opened up a whole new subject and word for Panda that he didn't seem to understand before - "China." So get this. First of all, Panda's comprehension is so much higher than his expressive language. He is still learning English and communication skills, and he is surprisingly savvy navigating what words and concepts he knows in order to ask me questions or tell me something. So the other day, he crawled up into my lap and started singing "Jesus Loves Me," inserting the word "China" into the song and adding a question mark to his words, obviously trying to ask me something. Taking a stab at it, I answered two questions that I thought he might be asking. I told him yes, Jesus loved him always and will always love him, while he was in China and now that he's home. I also told him that Jesus loves everyone in China, just like he does here in the United States. It doesn't matter where you are, Jesus loves you. It seemed I satisfied his curiosity, so he smiled, nodded, and got back down to go play.
Um....talk about blowing my mind.
He now adds the word "China" into Jesus Loves Me every time he sings it. Wow.
Just a couple of pictures of our celebration.
