Week of August 13 - Cool Things! :)

Four things probably become apparent to you as you look at the picture below.....


.... 1) Emily IS COOL...hehe..goes without saying of course :) 2) Dad has a sense of humor...definitely 3) Emily is a good sport, and always ready to try new things...very definitely 4) Dad is a fashion dufus for forgetting to remove the UV tag on the glasses...well no surprise there :)

On the matter of other cool things in Emily's life, below is a picture of Emily with Nancy's parents. They just adore her too. Given that initially there was some aprehension on their part at the concept of adopting a baby girl, I can absolutely say that grandma and grandpa totally Love her, adore here, and enjoy her. Nancy's parents very much have old traditional Chinese values, having been born in China many many years ago. If you follow that tradiiton, adoption is not something that you do. However, once they saw Emily's referral photo, and especially when they got to hold her in their arms, all the traditional feelings were quickly melted away. Emily simply clutched there hearts and the rest is ..... as they say... history.
And I must say, I very much respect and admire their loving warm hearts for Emily. This is a very very proud pair of grand parents.... *a round of applause for them both*. Of course like good grandparents, they are absolutely resolved to spoil Emily. :-)


One of the things Emily loves to do when she is at her grandparents house is to spend time on grandma's lap looking at the fish in their aquarium. It is not unusual at all for us to pick her up after work and find that she is in fact on grandma's lap studying the fishies.


Speaking of the grandparents, Emily is able to say grandma and grandpa in Shanghainese now. Though my lovely wife has commented that I am a bad influence on Emily as when she doe say grandma and grandpa, it seems she does so with an american accent. Bad baby... errr... I mean bad daddy.... bad bad daddy. No worries though, as Emily spends 4 days a week at the grandparents house, she will come to speak Shanghainese and Mandarin with the appropriate accents over time. Emily actually has an ever expanding bilingual recognition of words and phrases. She understands thank you in both english and Chinese, and will cup her two hands together and shake them forward in the traditional hand gesture for thank you at hearing the words in either language. That's a huge proud grandparent thing by the way as their little granddaughter is already showing respect and gratitude in the traditional way.

On the language front, Emily is an almost constant flurry of chatter these days. Much of it does not quite make sense to us, but the variety of syllables she uses now is impressive. Some work to do yet to get them all connected up correctly of course. Sometimes she just stares at us, a bit dumbfounded, after she says a long sequence of words that actually mean something insider her noggin, but she sees us just standing there with blank stares on our faces like a couple of fools. We have even seen her repeat almost the same string a second time at Mom, only to be more dumbfounded that Mom doesn't get. Oh well.. I guess all three of us get to learn and meet half-way there :)

Take care everyone, and thanks for visiting Emily's weekly blog :)