Today we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Phoebe joining our family. In the last year, Phoebe has learned to run and jump, gotten over her fear of walking on grass, learned to speak English (a work in progress!), discovered her great love Diego, received 8 stitches in her forehead, learned how to ride a tricycle, became her sister's best friend, mastered the rock wall and can climb it in 8 seconds flat, moved into a big girl bed, became obsessed with horses, honed her slapstick comedy chops, and generally made our lives fantastic. She was a sweetheart when we first met her, and she has continued to blossom into a happy, funny girl who loves to make people smile. In the meantime, Zoe has really grown into a superb big sister; granted, Phoebe has learned a trick or two from Zoe that she might not know (yet) on her own, but it's sweet and fun and special to watch their relationship develop. They are great friends, which feeds into my deep-seeded desire for them to be there to support each other as they get older.

 

March 2008

 

March 2009

 

I have been looking forward to this day for many weeks because we were going to go out to dinner with our awesome guide from China. We are in the unique position to be living in the same city as our guide; the guides used for adoptive families are Chinese guides who live there and fly around China to escort adoptive families through the process. In our case, our guide happened to be moving over to Seattle to open a business right after we adopted Phoebe, and we recently reconnected with her. So we had plans to meet up with her and her 9 year old daughter for some Chinese food, but for the 7000th time this winter, our plans were changed because of SNOW(!!!!!). This is our 11th winter in Seattle, and I can't remember ever having more than a few brushes with snow each year; like much of the rest of the country, we are experiencing a hellacious winter that does not want to end. And while most times it melts soon after it falls, today we had a torrential downpour of tiny snowballs (more often than not, our snow seems to be of the hail/pellet variety), and what with the general inability to deal with snow around here, we decided to reschedule our dinner since we were going to drive about 20 minutes south to meet her. By dinner time, the skies had cleared and the roads weren't bad, so we ended up having a family dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant. As the dinner proceded and the girls attention spans drifted, I reflected back to a dinner we had almost a year ago today with some friends we made in China...our two families thought we coud possibly pull off an actual dinner at a Thai restaurant in Guangzhou and instead took turns dealing with crying children (Lori, you know what I'm talking about here. Special shout out to Mac and Max...happy gotcha day!).

 

We appreciate each day with our girls, they are different as night and day...it's unbelievable how much they have taught us about life.