More Oreos Please!

C'mon Manning. I've been saying GO BRONCOS since I got here. CRAP!! CRAP!! CRAP!!

Ahh. Broncos loss aside, Avi has been doing really great this month. So have we :)

English has started taking root in Avi's brain. She repeats everything. Everything! So we now have to be careful what we say. (How cute was saying CRAP 15 times last week). It's amazing how a child's brain can rewire itself for language. I don't think I'd be nearly so comfortable after 6 months in a new country. (especially if I had been taken there against my will). The first month was so was tough without any way to communicate. Other than tone, we had no way of getting any message through to her, and she had no way of telling us what she wanted. My how that has changed. We get requests for milk and water, cookies and potty. We ask if she likes things. We even work on making better choices in order to avoid time out. I do find myself jealous of the other kids at preschool. We're not at the point where I can come up to her and she'll tell me "I made an airplane" like her classmate did last week. But vocabulary has increased and with that, short phrases have started emerging.

The best phrase so far happened when she walked in to the side of our kitchen sofa. She hit her head, backed up rubbing it and said "Wake Up Avi!". The went about her business. We've been trying to get her to ask for things by name. Pineapple was a tough one for her, as was eggplant. But we found out that some words, when properly motivated, can't be stopped. After 6 months here, she was introduced to the holy grail of American cuisine. It's funny, we didn't ask her to say "More Oreos please." But it seems that one came out on its own. Again and again and again. Perhaps she was saying "6 months here and we're just now learning about these things. We could have been eating this the whole time. What's wrong with you people?!" but she seemed placated when we taught her how to lick the center out of her two cookies.

We've used the new found language skills to start potty training this month. That's going as well as it should. But the big news is revolving around sleep. Last month the decision was made to get tough with Avi at night. "Tough" is a relative term. We spent about a week where every time she would cry one of us would get up, go in her room and escort her back to bed. We weren't angry or soothing. In fact we didn't say anything. Just walked her back to bed, tucked her in and walked back out. We had nights that we did this 10-20 times. The idea was to make it so nothing interesting happened when you get up at night. After a relatively rough week, it all stopped. Without a word, she stayed in bed, didn't cry, didn't get up. Now she says goodnight, we hang out for about 10 minutes and she's good. I honestly feel like I'm getting my life back. I can't believe how rough the last 6 months were sleep wise. I don't think I really recognized how much it affected us. At it's worst, I created a d-bag cup at work. Every time I would come in unnecessarily grumpy, I would have to empty my wallet into the cup. Luckily I only needed it once and it cost me $7 total. My mood is improved, my days are easier. I'm still not 100%, but I think both Ann and I are doing much better.

Sure go ahead and sleep. I'll figure out something else soon.

 Swimming is awesome and we've found some kid pools around town and Avi has been loving them! I've actually been having a lot of fun too. Wednesday is my day off so we went to an indoor water park yesterday. It was a blast. The small slide was just too lame for her. She dragged me up the stairs to go on the huge water slide. I wish I had a way to record that because she giggled down the whole thing and yelled "again" every time we did it. We met our friend Freddy there and had a lot of fun! Afterwards we met Kiki and had lunch at Qdoba. Avi was very charming as always. It's wonderful how well she accepts new people. She held Kiki's hand out to the car and gave them both hugs when it was time to go.

Today she's decided that coats are stupid and we don't need to use them. She was so mad at Ann that she wouldn't even say goodbye when she was dropped off at school. You'd think -8 degrees would make her reconsider.

Seollal is Korean New Year. We went out to have Korean food. She's lost a bit of her taste for it so we've got to make sure we're working on keeping those foods incorporated back in to her diet.























I'm getting to be a very opinionated big girl now.

But I still make everyone smile daily.