Wow – What a difference a year makes!

With the business of our everyday life I don’t often get time to reflect on the past. We just got an email reminder that we need to schedule our one year post placement report. The visit with the social worker will have to be done in March so that the report is certified and in Moscow by April 14th. I have been thinking how much time sure flies. THEN I remembered February of last year. I took a look at some of our blog entries from February 2009 and I can remember the horribleness of the wait. Of course it becomes an interesting part of our adoption story, but thinking about it still brings back the feelings of heartache. I can not tell you how thankful I am to be done with that season on life.

This past week or so people have really been commenting on how far Blake’s language has come. He is really stringing words together and is capable of getting his point across. We still have several letter sounds to work on. For instance all f’s are p’s (fall=pall; five=pive) and h’s are a variety of sounds depending on the word – but he is consistent each time (house =kouse; hand = nand; help=yelp). We have quickly discovered that we need to help him with tone and inflection before he gets himself in trouble. I should get a recording of this to help describe it better. When someone asks him an obvious questions he say (picture teenage girl with attitude) “Well yeah!” He also has picked up one of my bad sayings and is using it at the wrong times… “Whatever.” Something that is cute and I am not sure where it comes from is that he says “all day” at the end of phrases. It is sort of like he is meaning to say a lot. For instance, “I like daddy’s truck all day!” “I like M&M all day!” “I wanna go to speech all day!”

The most endearing language development is the clarity and sincerity that he tells us he loves us. He says “I love-a you mom!” and I will say “I love you Blake” and right away he adds “I love-a my daddy too!” So sweet. We are such a blessed family!

This past Saturday Justin and Brady went to the Dolphin swim meet and Blake, Maddie and I headed to Peoria for our niece’s birthday skating party. Of course Blake insisted that he wanted to skate. At first he couldn’t do a thing in the skates without falling – even while holding my hand…. Uncle Jake was a trouper and tried to help.

Madison also tried to helped.

By the end of the party he was actually able to navigate his way around the exterior of the rink. It is pretty amazing how fast you can improve when you have no fear of falling!

On Sunday Maddie lost her fourth tooth. This was her first one in the first grade so she was very excited to get her initials on the tooth chart at school.

Boys will be boys!  They have so much fun playing with each other.