April 7, 2009 Crawling and babbling

It was a mysterious morning! We went upstairs and fed Nathaniel. As we were changing him, we were told to hurry up and get all of our things because we needed to go downstairs. We were hurried through the halls and went into a playroom with the other 2 adoptive families from the US and the Spanish lady who is adopting older siblings. We were given no explanation and had to stay in there for about an hour. It was very strange! Irina and Nathaniel enjoyed the ball pit in the room as well as a little xylophone that was in the room. We had a little time to play in his normal playroom after wards and he was doing a lot of babbling. We were on the carpet and Nate was doing his usual rocking on all fours and then it happened-he actually crawled a little bit! It was very exciting!!!!

We went home to lunch to find some men fixing our stove. It was our second day being surprised with someone in our house at lunchtime-the day before it was the cleaning lady. With about a week left, we finally have a working oven.

Nathaniel did a lot of talking in the afternoon and kept saying, "the da" to his little blue car. Listening to him babble is fun to listen to and we are glad to hear him talking.

We had to leave a little early so that we could go to the social workers. We didn't know what to expect. There were two ladies who asked us just a few questions such as what Kevin does for a living, who will care for Nathaniel when he comes home, if we are financially stable, and then they were interested in Irina (what else is new!?!). They asked her to sing a song in English (the ABC's) and they asked her questions about her school. Our translator told us that they were totally amazed by her. They kept commenting on what a beautiful little girl she is. Our session only lasted about 5 minutes.

Irina has been very funny in the apartment. She keeps wanting to "fight Daddy." They wrestle and she told one of the translators that she has to learn to fight because Daddy told her that boys are going to be mean to her. Luckily he hasn't started weapons training yet...