Round two of Second (second) Birthday images...

Round one of Second (second) Birthday images...

Morgan's Birthday!

This is a very busy week end so I'll have to keep this short - much cleaning and 'stuff' to get done while M and Baba take a trip to Wallyworld for balloons and diapers...

Tomorrow we will be having a party for her at Loggerhead Park in Jupiter and 16-20 of her closest friends will be there to help her celebrate...I wanted some sort of decoration to combine both her birthday (today, by orphanage approximation) and the Chinese New Year, which begins tomorrow...so, while Nana and I were out with M the other day, looking for everything birthday, we found a basic black dragon piniata...Mom bought it, and after I thought more about the matter, realized it would be difficult to explain to two TWO year olds (M and Connor) why it would be acceptable to bash this poor thing to empty the innards but NOT OK to beat the tar out of anything else...so, with logic firmly processed, I decided to instead make the dragon a purely decorative addition and began a hasty reconstruction...the pictures will most likely post in reverse as I'm using the PhotoBucket blogging tool, but you'll get the gist of it...I'm not quite done, but I think I have captured well enough the Asian flavor considering my limited resources.

The other pictures; our Morgan, are from this morning when she woke to her plush buddies singing 'Happy Birthday' to her and then trying on her new play-time outfit; a black leotard (a LITTLE too big) and custom tutu, which at first scared her...but now she's swishing around, just as little girls in tutus should do.

We'll post an update later with pics from the party.

 

January Status - Closing In On Age 2!

Chaz reporting:

Morgan will turn 2 this coming Saturday, and her development has been pretty fast and furious lately. She is talking ALL THE TIME now, her vocabulary is exploding, and she is starting to put sentences together (albeit bery short sentences). We feel like we are finally starting to really communicate with her, not just say things back and forth. She is able to tell us what she wants at any given time (and we can usually understand - and if we don;t she will just keep repeating until we do!). A week or two ago she actually made the call as to what we were all going to have for dinner. Trish asked her one afternoon what she wanted, to which she replied "PIZZI!!!" So, pizza it was, the perfect Friday night dinner.

She is happy almost all the time now, she loves to laugh and still loves a good joke whether she is playing it on us, or we are playing it on her. This morning when I had to leave for work she ran and hid - I guess she figured if I couldn't say goodbye to her I couldn't go to work. Works for me - wonder if the boss will buy it? She is also finally getting back into being able to go with me while Trish does something without whining too much - this morning we went for breakfast while Trish did her dentist visit - and there was no whining or crying and only the occasional "Mama?"

All of the sudden she is really into cars, wants to see them all the time, and will wave at them and say "Hello cars!" Very odd. We went to Tampa this past weekend for a Chinese New Year celebration and she kept wanting to look out our hotel window at all the cars below, and would wave and talk to them over and over again. She is afraid of loud motorcycles and scooters though, and will bury her head in our shoulder saying "scared, scared!" until they pass. It's charming.

I'm going to steal a little bit of Trish's thunder and poach one of her pictures - here is a shot of the three of us at the New Year celebration Sunday. Morgan got restless and we had to leave not long after it was taken, but it was a fun party while it lasted...

I could not pick just one image...

With the New Year celebration coming up, I dug out the little hat we'd bought from one of the courtyard markets near the White Swan...I wasn't sure if Morgan would appreciate my request to try it on, but once secured on her head, she ran around the house while we growled, snapping digitals during her brief pauses. I suspect she will want to wear this to the festivals this w/e and next.

It is pretty safe to say Mo' had a goooood time...

SOUTH FLORIDA FAIR, JANUARY 2006.

 

She has never had, nor will she ever again have so much grease or sugar in one evening.

The smile was seen often and so photographed to bear witness.

What's next?????

Wisdom beyond her years...

Morgan LOVES tractors, cars and trucks...

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Ya think she liked it?

Sweet Pea is bustin' out the Chinese...

Chaz and I noticed some time after we got home that M would jabber on in something other than typical baby babble or the simple English words she was learning from us - the more we listened, the more we suspected that she had in fact already started speaking Mandarin while still in the orphanage and had regressed after being adopted. Her referral had included some mention of her "talking", but this was attributed at or near age 5-6 months; an age I found hard to believe would allow such an acomplishment...
Well, I may have posted that M was starting to sing to me, but until the past two weeks it was more a sweet melody.

BTW, the past two weeks have been HUGE for maturing milestones...she is talking ALL the time, whether or not it makes sense...singing to herself and her 'friends', actually watching TV and talking back to the characters on Sesame Street, has full recognition of the who and what - she can tell me what she wants to eat (or not) and will say usually say PLEASE and THANK YOU...cleans up her messes, brings her own plate to her highchair when she has a meal and then brings the empty service either to me in the kitchen or to the opening in the gate that otherwise closes the area off (getaway for the cat) if I am detained...insists on showering and brushing her teeth daily and is always in want of trying to go on her potty...(I'm not pushing at all - it'll happen when it happens). She repeats almost every word I say (careful, Mama...) and sings along with commercials or music...has finally figured out how to be gentle...brushes her own hair...dresses herself, albeit sometimes backwards...throws away her diapers if I don't grab them first and also discards her used napkins/paper towels...
WORDS, man - too many to count now...the coolest part is that she seems to grasp the meaning as well as the word, even if her pronunciation is, uhm, a great variable of proper English.

OK, back to the singing...she is now starting to sing more clearly, and what she serenades me with sounds like (phonetically) "Coco - yuan-in-née".
Your guess is as good as mine...
I will continue to analyze her song and hopefully get a better rendition to try and place it - is it her own composition or something the Nannies taught her?

Also, her hair is finally starting to fill out...she had a second, shorter layer growing in that gave the choppy appearance, well, more than the challenge of cutting her hair while she moved...I was going to skip bangs because I wanted it an easy bob, but with so many patches of fuzz or void still on her head decided to let it gain a bit before going there...

Morgan will be two years old on the 28th of January, and I'm hoping that Chaz and I can get something put together in time for a party at the park, location yet undetermined...I've been mulling over this for months, but now we need to set a time and place...fast. I think this one, her first actual party, should be something special. :)

Just a quick smile...