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Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Jia is 14 months old today – and we’ve had her for three months as of yesterday!! She has been showing us more and more of her spunky little personality. Her verbal skills are exploding! “Hi” was her first word. Then “more.” She says these two words all the time now. She also periodically says the words for her favorite things: cheese, puff, ball, walk, keys, baby, peas (yes, she loves them!), apple, bird, out, up, please and “brrrrr” (because it’s already cold here!). She still says “arf” for dogs, but when we ask her what a cat says, she makes this funny wheezing noise because that is, indeed, how our cat Harry sounds. We have been astounded by how much she understands us. She can follow requests like: please lay down, sit up, give it to mama, put it in, open the door, etc. She also will point to various body parts when asked where they are. We didn’t expect such progress so soon! She is trying to feed herself with a spoon and fork. She is learning quite quickly and becomes very proud of herself when she does it correctly. She gets excited when we clap for her and she then claps for herself – while flinging food from her utensil all over, of course! Jia is nearly a walker. She has walked across rooms many times and is becoming more and more confident in trying it on her own. We have had many funny moments this month. We’ll share a few… There is an indoor park where we sometimes go to play. We were jumping together in a bouncy area there when I realized that Jia didn’t have any pants on! She had bounced them completely off! While I was holding her! They were laying about five feet away so she had clearly been partially nude for a while! As far as we know, Jia has not been exposed to television nor have we ever turned it on in front of her. We do allow her to play with the remote though. One day Jia turned on the TV with the remote and flipped channels until she found Barney! Then her little jaw dropped open, she squealed with delight, started dancing and clapping her hands! It has to be a series of random acts but wow! It took me two months to figure out how to turn on the TV when we first got it as it requires pressing a few buttons in a specific order. Apparently Jia is much smarter than I am! Joe drove us to dinner the other night. I was sitting in front of Jia so I didn’t obsessively check on her like I do when I’m the driver. She was quiet until we got to the restaurant (which means we should have realized something was up). When I opened the door to get her out of her car seat, I saw that she had gained access to a large, brand new tissue box. She had piled so many tissues on herself that I couldn’t see any part of her! It took her just a few minutes to empty the entire box. She was very efficient! Jia has become very taken with giving hugs and kisses to anyone who is her size or smaller. Cousin Han gets five hugs in a row quite frequently when she sees him. She also repeatedly hugs and kisses all her dolls and animals and wants us to do so as well! Jia still loves being outside. We went to an apple orchard and she wanted to stop to inspect every apple on the ground and to sit on every pumpkin. She also pretended to drive a big rusty tractor. One of Jia’s cuter moments is when she sees us open a can of soda. Every time we take a drink from it she looks at us, smiles and says “Ahhhh” like she just had the drink herself! We’re including a photo from her first birthday party. Nearly everyone had camera issues but we thankfully just received this good one of Jia enjoying her cake! We love her so much. She is still making us laugh and laugh every day. We’ll post another update in a month!

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