Marie's Web Log

Trying to do these a bit more often. Sorry to hear about all that snow in eastern Canada, those of you who live out there. I have to say that people here don't know they're born when it comes to winter, if you know what I mean. The other day on the weather forecast, they said "England is going to be in the icy grip of winter" - it was going to feel like -2C. Hee hee hee. It has rarely gone below 0 here. I don't miss the extreme cold, but it still seems wrong to just have one long spring/autumn.

Amelia has been back at day care for over a week, and no knew illnesses so far. We're keeping our fingers crossed. The stomach flu bug has been going round the centre, with a lot of kids off. We've been giving Amelia new vitamins twice a day, so we hope that has helped. She's been eating a lot more lately, and saying a lot more words, even long ones like "buttefly," though she says "buttabye." And on the weekend she suddenly started saying "hello," though it sounds more like "haddoe," like someone with a cold. Funny!

I took her to a swimming lesson for the first time last week. Actually, lesson may not be the right word - it's more like paddling in the water and playing with the toys. But it's great progress for her. Not all of you know that when we first brought her home, she screamed every time we tried to put her in the bath. She's OK in the bath now, but when we took her to the beach in PE County last summer, she wasn't too keen on going in to the water. She was a little hesitant the first time at the pool, but was fine this week. She still holds on to me and won't try kicking or anything like that, but it's a start.

We have two things planned to celebrate Chinese New Year, which falls this year on Feb. 9. The weekend before, we are going to a Chinese restaurant in Plymouth with a group from the local chapter of the Children Adopted from China group, called SWAN - Southwest Adoption from all Nations (it also includes kids adopted from other countries). And the weekend after, we plan to go to London, where they hold a parade and dragon dances and other events centred around Chinatown and Leicester Square.

Then in April, we have booked to visit Ian's brother's place in the south of France for 5 days. Looking forward to that.

Hope you are all keeping well. Thanks to those who have sent e-mails. I miss you and still feel very homesick at times.

Marie

Posted by marie at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh dear, I have really been neglecting you. My excuse - Amelia has been ill yet again (twice) and she passed both bugs on to me, which means I haven't been able to do much for two weeks. The last one was quite a nasty stomach bug. We've taken Amelia to the doctor's office so often in the past month I almost feel like we live there. Usually they can't help much, but we still like to take her just in case.

She's most likely picking the bugs up at daycare, so we kept her home this week. I'm getting quite depressed about it. If she gets ill again, I don't know what we'll do. We may even have to take her out of daycare entirely.

Apart from that, not much has been happening. We went round for drinks tonight to the house of a couple who also have a child in daycare at the Family Centre. They are both either lecturers or professors at the university, and had invited some of their work colleagues and some of the other parents. Needless to say, at times the conversation was a little bit more - I don't know how to put this - intellectual than we're used to. I don't mean that they were pretentious or that our usual conversations are stupid, just that people who work in universities tend to discuss things that the rest of us would not usually talk about. The couple who invited us are really lovely people, though - she's French and he's Irish, and they live in a beautiful semi-detached house with a long, walled garden.

Amelia has discovered how to fit puzzle pieces together, and she has also worked out how to put the stickers in her sticker books in their proper places. She's doesn't always get them right, but I was quite taken aback when she suddenly started doing some of them. I didn't expect her to be able to do that for a while yet. And she's been having great fun with playdoh, and also drawing pictures with her markers. (Or as she calls them, "colours.") She likes to draw round and round and round until the end result looks like something you would draw with that old toy - what was it called - spirograph?

She is currently a big fan of her doll Mei Mei and has to take her everywhere she goes. She often tries to feed her things, and Ian said last night when he was sitting beside Amelia's bed reading her a book, she leaned over and said "sshh" and poined to Mei Mei, who apparently was trying to sleep. If we go somewhere without Mei Mei, every once in a while Amelia will look around and say plaintively, "Mei Mei?"

The weather was so nice while I was sick, and now that I am better it has turned to fog and rain. What I think of as a Sherlock Holmes sort of day.

All for now.

Posted by marie at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)