Amelie’s Gotcha Day 2011 – 1 year ago

Amelie Gotcha Day 2011 — Click on the photo to see album

Click the photo above to see the Gotcha Day 2011 photo album, and see the blog post from that day.

It’s amazing to us that it’s been 1 year since we adopted Amelie in Yinchuan, China.

Gotcha Day 2011
Our first family photo.

China_2011-02-23_09
Amelie’s swearing in day shortly before we left China.

Amelie has come so far in the last year that she hardly seems like the sad little toddler we met one year ago. She has grown 10.5 pounds and grown 4.75″ in the last year. Yes, you read that right. In China she was wearing 18 month footie jammies – last night she wore 4T footie jammies to bed. Now she is lean and strong and does everything in her power to keep up with Nadia. She doesn’t let her hands slow her down one bit and really I don’t even think of it as a special need. Amelie is very smart. In so many ways she was like a 12 month old the day we got her, but she has grown by leaps and bounds in every way. Now some quick stats about Amelie that I don’t want to forget.

She sucks her thumb when she goes to sleep. This is a vast improvement over her sucking her thumb 90% of the time when we got her.
She loves food. She still cries over food a lot, but instead of every meal every day it’s more like once every couple of days.
After 11 months with us she finally told me at a meal that she was full. It was startling since I didn’t think she would ever say that.
She loves sweets, especially chocolate. But eggs are her favorite food. Someone asked her that over the weekend and she said, “eggs!” right away.
She is a snuggle bug.
She loves music – any kind of music.
She loves to color and play dough.
She loves “choo choo trains”
For 7 solid months, every time we drove past a car dealership she would yell “balloon” (or at least her variation of it)
Now she obsesses over when we pass bodies of water or playgrounds and asks, “go? go?”
We see her smile so much now and she is even starting to make jokes.
She asks me everyday to do “cool cool” (school) so I have a set of toddler activities I pull out for her and she feels very important and says, “big guurrrlll”
She asks Mike everyday to do “woo back” which is a phrase she made up that involves being thrown up in the air and flipped. She would let Mike do this until his arms fell off.
She LOVES to be outside. And in fact asks to go outside constantly – rain, shine, day or night.
Books are her favorite toy. She will say, “ree ree ree” to anyone who will listen while trying to get a book in their hands so they can read to her.
She is stubborn and tenacious and feisty. And some days that really wears Mommy out 🙂