Well, I am happy to say that Leo is feeling much better and we are back to seeing his little personality blossom. This is both fun and challenging as he is every bit a 2-year-old, and all the good and bad that comes with being one. He will go from playing happily and giggling over nothing to laying on the floor throwing an outright temper tantrum complete with screaming and kicking. We are trying very hard to distinguish between when he is crying and needs us to comfort him and when he is throwing a fit and needs to be left alone. His fits usually follow boundaries – like whenever we say no or take away an object he’s not allowed to play with. We don’t coddle him during these fits as we want him to understand the boundaries. But this is a challenge, as we are also trying to bond and attach, so we don’t want him to feel as though we aren’t responding to his needs. I’m sure all parents struggle with something similar, but it seems very gray in the adoption realm. I feel like I’m constantly second guessing my intuition, but just trying to trust what I think is best.
We had some fun times around the hotel yesterday afternoon and evening. Leo is very funny to watch as he becomes more familiar with us and the hotel room. He started to open up and bit and play on his own. His favorite game consists of carrying all of his toys (which include 3 empty water bottles and some other garbage he has managed to hoard – forget about the actual toys we had purchased and lugged all the way to China) to a surface and lining them up, then taking them down one at a time and lining them up on a different surface elsewhere in the room. He occupies himself with this for quite a while. He knows how to say, “Yeah!” and he will grin and say this when he stands up the water bottles successfully. It is very cute.
The hotel has also presented some opportunities for us to set boundaries – like not playing with certain items including the electrical outlets. He responds to “No!” very well most of the time, though he gets a little mischievous glisten in his eyes like he is saying to us, “Or else what?” His favorite game with Grammie right now is to go stand by the electrical outlet near her and put his hand on the wall nearby. He just stares at her with that little impish grin like, “What? I’m not doing anything…” It cracks me up. He is definitely going to be a handful.
I had my first big fail as a mommy yesterday when looking for his shoes (who knew that keeping track of shoes and THE sippy cup was going to become such a major deal?). I had Leo sitting on the bed – yeah, you know where this is going – and I was digging around the covers trying to find where the missing shoe had gotten off to. Leo was also helping me look, and he got too close to the edge of the bed and just rolled right off. Good thing he has a hard head and is a natural tumbler. He did a nice tuck and roll and he was okay, but it sure scared me. Caolon has been having a fantastic time holding this over my head.
Yesterday afternoon and evening, we explored the rest of the hotel a bit, as well as the surrounding area. The hotel is beautiful with a grand lobby and expensive boutique shops. It also has a beautiful, large garden with several waterfalls and koi ponds. Leo enjoyed walking around out there and looking at the fishies. There was a very posh wedding here last night, and my sister Heather would have been in heaven seeing that. I tried to sneak a picture of the bride for her as she loves all things wedding.
We decided to opt out of the group dinner last night as they were going to eat Cantonese food and we wanted to try something different that we hadn’t had before. We ended up at a Vietnamese restaurant, where we provided the entertainment (ah – the Americans with the Chinese baby!) and they provided the food. It was delicious. I had a curry chicken which was amazing (minus the chicken – why don’t they ever remove the fat or bones here?) and Caolon had the Pho, which is a soup with vermicelli noodles, beef, and shrimp. I thought Leo would share my rice, but he had none of that. What he LOVED was the Pho. He slurped down about half of the broth from that and was so content.
This morning has been quiet – well, not really as there have been several temper tantrums from the boy - what I mean is that we haven’t done much. I had to go to a conference room in the hotel for about an hour to complete paperwork to get ready for our consulate appointment on Monday. We were supposed to sightsee this morning and do paperwork later, but there was a marathon happening in town today, so all of the roads have been closed to traffic for that. Now we are scheduled to sightsee this afternoon instead. I think they are going to take us to a park and then a museum. I’m ready to go do something besides hang out in the hotel. Though, I think the time just to sit and play in our room has been really good for Leo. Also, we washed all of Leo’s clothes last night and nothing is dry yet, so he is wearing this hilariously small outfit that barely covers his rump or belly. I’m hoping something else will be dry before we venture out again!
This is the visa picture they took yesterday – such a sad little face. We’ve seen this look quite a bit today, too!
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