What's in a name? The Conclusion

Things continue to be insane around here with regularly scheduled activities and with intervention of one mini crisis or another (be it elderly g'parents or detached Tinkerbell legs - the doll's, not The Girl's). My time on the computer has been limited - I've stopped taking it to bed to help with my insomnia and while the past week at work has been empty with respect to appointments I've been participating in a training course that has taken all of the available time. But I had to take some time out of all that to give you this update:

When we sent Wen a package we included two photo albums with pictures of us so that she'd recognize us and the kids. In my first glimpse of her, Wen walked through a lobby with a stuffed turtle hanging around her neck and one of those photo albums in her hand (the other didn't come back to us). As she sat with her nanny, the woman showed her the pictures of Steve and I and pointed from the picture to us labelling us "Momma"... " Baba"... I brought a longer album to China with us, in case she hadn't seen the others, so that she could see the kids (and extended family and cats). In those first few days she spent a lot of time pouring over those two albums, pointing at the faces and studying them with great interest. At times of upset, she was consoled by the ritual of going over the pictures. As she became more comfortable she started labelling the pictures herself - "gege, jaijai, mama, baba, yeye" (big brother, big sister, mommy, daddy, g'father - who was actually a photo business card of the local MLA who gave me Canadian pins to hand out in China, Julie thought he should be included in the family album). When we got home, when she was upset, she continued to be soothed by the albums and will take one or both to bed with her from time to time, including tonight. The other night she asked to "read" one with me so we flipped through and labelled each picture with me pointing and her naming them "gege Jack, Lala, Passen..." then she closed the book, pointed to her picture on the front and said proudly "AnnaWen!"

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