Chloe is 21 months old today! I still have not found my camera so there may be some intermittent whining about that throughout this post. I promise that once I do I will add lots of recent pictures to make up for the long stretch without any.
At 21 months Chloe is really light years ahead of where she was 11 months ago when we first met. In the last couple of weeks everyone has started commenting on how tall she is starting to look. I’m sure part of this is because she’s growing, but I think it mostly has to do with how straight she is standing and how well she is walking and even running these days. She is getting the hang of climbing on and off of furniture and is especially fond of her little rocking chair in her bedroom. Her muscle development is really coming along, but she might still need a little time to work on coordination!
Chloe eats almost everything. ALMOST means the only food she has refused to eat is cold pudding out of a snack pack or off of a salad bar. At day care she gets warm pudding and even homemade pudding (which I didn’t even know existed) so I can only conclude that this has spoiled her against the inferior instant variety!! She will chomp on olives, green peppers, mushrooms, and onions off of my pizza, but not pudding?! She eats a wide range of foods and a large amount of it. People say that one of these days she will start eating like a picky toddler, but so far I haven’t seen any indication of that.
It is so much fun to watch her playing these days. She plays with and talks to her best friend, her Baby Boy doll, and takes very good care of him. She doesn’t need me to be with her all of the time, but I’m frequently requested (ordered) to participate in whatever game she decides it’s time for. She likes playing with people more than with toys. She gets very excited about books and loves Old Mac Donald.
Verbally she is taking it slow, but she’s probably quite average or slightly ahead of most 11-month-olds and since that’s as long as she’s heard this language I’m not getting overly worked up about it. She is using several words and a few phrases, which I mentioned earlier in the week, I think. She understands basically everything I say to her and is starting find things for me and bring them to me when I ask her where things are. The great news is that she seems to have a much better memory than I do so maybe she will find that ridiculous camera one of these days!!!
She makes a hundred different faces, which are all my favorite. She is very emotional, dramatic, and sensitive and that makes for some very interesting days around here. She is really funny and really smart, too, and I don’t feel a bit like I’m crossing into mama-bias here. Everyone says so!!
A year ago last week I got my approval to travel to get Chloe from Vietnam. Something every day from July 19 to August 18 will remind me every year of what I was doing that day in 2007. A year and a week from now I was trying to get on a plane, but was delayed by a day due to summer storms here in the U.S. A year and a week from tomorrow I finally got on the plane! You see how it goes from here.
When we went to St. Louis a couple of weeks ago I used the same suitcase that carried our gear around the world. I almost cried when I opened it up. I don’t know that it has the scent any more, but I remember what it smelled like when I opened it every day for 16 days. I can smell the formula, the starch in the sheets, the food on the breakfast buffet that always ended up on my shirt, and the scented plastic diaper disposal bags that didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped to cover the smell! I can’t get any of it out of my head and I don’t want to.
I’ve started obsessing over our pictures from the trip and trying to rememorize every minute. I have two scenery pictures framed in my office that I stare at all of the time. I bought Chloe a huge suitcase of souveniers to open on her birthdays for the next 20 years, but I think it’s going to be pretty tough for me to wait and bring them out one at a time. It is not going to be feasible for us to go back for several years, but I just feel like the stress and exhaustion I was dealing with at the time kept me from enjoying the country to its fullest even though I loved it, and experiencing everything I wanted to see and do. I can’t wait to go back for a vacation.
Along those lines I am sad that a vacation is about all I have to look forward to in the foreseeable future. To say the current adoption scene between the countries is in chaos would be putting it mildly. I thought that as of next week I would be getting back on my agency’s waiting list to wait 3 years for Chloe’s little brother, but there’s not a list to get on at this point. I really feel for others that have to face this disappointment without Chloe around to distract them! I’m not in a big hurry to figure out what our options are because I just feel like the right opportunity will present itself at the right time like it did when I started my journey to Chloe. I am the first to admit that our adoption process was quite charmed and I’m not ready to jump into anything else at this point. We’re having such a great time together. I definitely have my hands full, and I think Chloe at ages 2-3 will be more than enough to keep me busy!!
Wow this got a little random, but since I only have a handful of readers that are all used to emails from me, no one should be surprised about that. I will add a little gallery of random pictures from last August through April to reward anyone who stuck through to the end:)
and “sit here” meaning, I’m the new boss mom and I want to assign seats! ”Me” is another new favorite of hers and she uses it to try to convey that you are not doing what she wants you to do and she would like you to let her be in charge! No temper tantrums or anything so it’s really just amazingly cute and such a great development in her journey out of babyhood. 
