Tuesday, August 8, 2006

I I have started this update many times in my mind but never got it onto paper…. So much has happened and yet everything has gone pretty much as we thought (and hoped) it would. Faith WenYan is doing GREAT. We are amazed daily at her open heart and ready smile and willingness to be one of us.

First, let me say that this may be the last “public” update. I had a negative experience with a stranger online over our family’s experience and it really threw me for a loop. It made me re-think our openness in sharing our life but over the last several weeks I have heard from close friends and strangers that appreciate our story so I have let the one person with serious “issues” fade into the distance but I am still cautious. I don’t want to do or say anything that violates Faith’s privacy but I know that she is happy we have been doing this website so I am taking it one day at a time.

We have had a very “active” summer. (Jacky – that is for you since the first night we met you told us we were known as the “active” family) We have been very fortunate to be able to spend time with a lot of our family and close friends. Travel logs are boring when you aren’t in China but here is a quick list of the new things Faith got to do this summer (which is amazing when you think about the fact that she is 13)… go to a drive-in movie in her dad’s truck, go camping with her cousins, go to Girls Camp in the mountains with church youth group, stay at the beach for a week , learn how to boogie-board, aquarium, zoo, sleep-over, plus plenty of driving and flying to places with varying amounts of extended family, and oh yes, getting her ears pierced! I am sure there is more that I am just forgetting at the moment. Tonight she went with Michael while he voted in the Primary election and he taught her all about his passion for the political process.

Next week she starts middle school which makes my heart skip a beat whenever I think about it too much but I really think she is ready. She is by no means fluent but just in the last week we have seen a huge leap in her ability to communicate and understand. We are actually having conversations with her and it is so fun! A few days ago she asked to call her friends in China (the first time she asked us to do so) and she talked for quite a long time and it was so cute to hear her throw little English phrases in there with the torrent of Chinese. We kept hearing, “okay, okay, no, yes, stop, I don’t know”. I was so excited that she wanted to call her friends as she has been reluctant in the past and I have not wanted to make her call them.

I think she really turned a corner in her acceptance of her new life while we were on vacation in North Carolina last month. We meet yearly with many from our travel group in our adoption of Sophie in August 2003. This year 7 of the 10 families met at the beach and our whole family was more than excited at the prospect of staying on the beach with these great friends for a whole week. I know the build-up to the actual event was huge for Faith as we talked about our friends a whole bunch, looked at photos of all the little girls that were babies in China together, and just talked about being able to all fly on a plane together because with a family of 5, that is a big deal. The first few days were postcard perfect with both big girls mostly living in the ocean with their boogie boards. Faith enjoyed playing with the little girls and meeting our friends who were all warm and welcoming and she just fit right in as she always does.

Thursday was the “bad” day for our family. Michael and Shea were in bed with a stomach bug so it was Sophie, Faith and Mom at the beach that morning. Sophie was in bad shape after skinning her knee in the same place twice so she was cranky and crying. I think Faith considered herself an experienced boogie boarder so she headed right out with one of our friends to catch some waves. Next thing I know, Faith is headed for me on the beach with her head in her hands and she has a cut lip and large abrasion on the side of her face as it seems there was a collision with some kind of rock on the shore. We quickly confirmed it was not a major wound but of course painful so I gathered both my hurt kids and headed back to our condo down the beach. For the next four days we had a sullen teenager on our hands. I could feel how angry she was with me the rest of our vacation. She spent most of her time with her sunglasses on, including inside the airport on the way home which really bugged Shea and frankly it bugged me too by the time we got home. We gave her room to be angry but had to actually reprimand her a few times when she took it out on others which was again, a first for us as she is just not like that. We wondered to each other if it was the shock of being hurt, that maybe she had been so well protected by her life in the orphanage that she had never been injured in any way. We tossed around other theories to each other as parents do when they are trying to analyze their kid’s behavior but none of it really added up.