One of the dictionary’s definitions of birth is: any coming into existence; origin; beginning

It wasn’t the day she came out of her birthmother’s womb, but today is the day, one year ago, that my baby girl, named Mai Thi Nguyen by her nannies, was given a new beginning. She was born into hope and possibility the day she was delivered to an orphanage by a woman who undoubtedly wanted better for her than she would ever get in the situation she was in.

Today I celebrate my daughter.

I’ve written monthly overviews of Addison’s since we brought her home six months ago but this one feels so different. Today I write about a toddler, not a baby at all. I look back on those pictures we first took - our Addy-Mai - and it seems like just yesterday but who is that girl in those photos? That bald girl with the wide eyes. Certainly not the one who toddles before me today!

Six months ago my girl didn’t cry. Ever. She babbled a little but she did not fuss. She did not express her wants. We met them anyway. She did not express her needs. We meet them anyway. Who knew that crying would be such a sweet sound? Yes, my girl can cry. And she will tell it like it is. Sometimes it is through a series of attitude-y babbling and pointing and hip-wiggling. This is particularly funny when she’s telling the dogs to shush through a series of what I think is Baby-Babble Doggie Swear Words. For a long time, she was tough as nails when she would fall or hurt herself - only crying for very serious injuries. But now she’s not only a little annoyed and sometimes scared by the whole thing but she’s pretty good at recreating the scene of the crime and faking it. Haha. My girl who could not utter a sound of distress can now fake it with the best of ‘em. I’m a proud mama!

Addy-Mai has always been very mobile, considering her muscle weaknesses when we met her. She couldn’t really hold her head up, steadily, for about 6 weeks or so after we adopted her. She definitely could not sit for awhile and couldn bear weight on her legs for months. But she made due through a series of rolls and belly-crawls helped along by her insane flexibility. She learned to stand and cruise right on schedule and spent months just standing - up, down, up, down, up, down. I thought for months that her first steps were imminent and when she took them, she limited them to just 4-6 steps for weeks. By now she had perfected her bear crawl and was FAST. But she was frustrated by her inability to walk, watching other kids whirl past, unable to keep up. Still, that alone wasn’t enough to convince her. Instead she spent her time getting vertical - climbing whatever stood before her. What eventually won her over to lateral movement was laziness and lack of ingenuity! haha. She had stuff in her hands, she wanted to carry it from point A to point B and had no way of getting it there…it’s too hard to crawl with armloads of junk. So she stood up and walked it over! A-ha! A light bulb went off and within days she was off and going.

Now she is perfecting the world in reverse. She can get off of most high surfaces ‘properly’ and can climb down the stairs herself, although I still don’t trust her without me a few steps behind. A few days ago she also took her first unassisted backward steps which pleased her to no end. So now I will occasionally catch her practicing walking backward between two obstacles. Plus her favorite thing to do is the “trust fall” where she stands and then suddenly just falls straight back into your arms. I can usually tell it’s coming, thankfully.

Two days ago Addy discovered the Somersault. She loves taking directions: “put your hands down, now your head…” and then we FLIP over. She loves this and will do it over and over and over. One thing about Addy, like most babies, she just never tires of her games. Another fun game she will play for hours on end is Hide and Seek. She LOVES to hide and stays hidden for a little while, sometimes quietly giggling or making little noises to cue you in, and then will jump out and say “Boo!” or “Ahh!”. It is such a crack up, particularly becuase the places she chooses to hide are under pillows, behind Daddy’s back or with her face buried in the couch cushions. She is oblivious that we can see the rest of her body sticking out, clearly.

She is still the blossoming engineer. She can screw tops off and on, pop lids off and on, she has mastered all her little stacking/ring/toy-in-hole type toys and games. Along with that, she woke up one day apparently full of life’s knowledge about How Things Work. It really did seem like it happened over night. Now she will grab a toothbrush and brush her teeth, grab a hairbrush and brush her hair. if she sees hair ties or clips or rollers, she has to put them in her hair (or mine). She puts her bracelets on her wrists, her hats on her head, she lifts her little legs earnestly for her skirts and pants. She figured out the fork. The other day she grabbed one of her brother’s portable video game systems along with the stylus and just went to town, playing like she knew what she was doing. When she was done, she spent 20 minutes figuring out how to put the stylus away. She is also into body parts, exploring inside of our noses, ears, eyes and mouths. She just needs to understand it all. She just loves conquering the Meaning of Things.

But she is not all Sunshine & Roses, oh no! She is full of mischief and sass and I *love* it!!! The other day she discovered that she could open our dresser drawer and throw out our clothes, item by item, all the while shaking her finger at me and telling me “no, no, no!!” I’m pretty sure what she meant was “I know I”m not supposed to be doing this! hahaha!”. Sassy girl. She is also becoming very toddleresque in her temper and lack of desire to share. She gets what she wants and how dare you try to take it from her. You WILL get an earful!! The worst of all is food. She insists you share everything on your plate or in your cup and, well, I can’t always share. She eats pretty much everything (and ALL of it) but I like my food spicy and my drinks carbonated. This causes much disruption. I have been known to wait for meals until she is napping just to avoid the inevitable fit. But she takes after her Auntie Leslie, for sure, and I’m so proud. These traits will serve her well in adulthood, hopefully I can guide them toward good and not evil! haha.

Addy is a babbler. She likes sound. A lot. She doesn’t say a lot but when she does speak, it is  humorous how clear her words come out. Her earlier words are pure babytalk - mama, dada, baba. But now that she is trying out new vowel sounds, her words are clear as day. Like “hi” or her new word, accompanied by a very strategic finger into one’s pupil: “eye”. She also likes “boo”, and “more” and her newest words “book” (which isn’t so clear - still working on the consonants), “hat” and of course “no, no, no”. She has noises for kitties and doggies and sometimes tries other noises if we initiate. She has signs for ‘more’, ‘music’, ‘kisses’, ‘bye-bye’ and sometimes ‘food’. She loves to pick up any phone and babble away. And she lives to sing along and, just like her mama, she doesn’t even need to know the tune or the words! haha

Addy-Mai is a girl who needs her sleep and, even more, her schedule. She is a slave to her schedule, in fact. Mess with her schedule and you have one unhappy, disoriented girl. She sleeps at noon every day, for 1.5 - 2 hours and then, for bed, at 8pm until 7:30-8am. She likes Daddy to put her to sleep, always, which is really fun when Daddy is at work She isn’t fond of the times Daddy is gone for any longer than your average work day. She gets really mad at him and confused. When I’m gone for even a few hours, she gets really clingy and won’t let go of me for anything. It is nice to be loved. Despite this, she is pretty outgoing. She loves other kids and, of course, her 6 siblings. She LOVES her Auntie Dorin who she sees many times a week. She warms up pretty easily.

Have I mentioned that she likes her food? She is still a human vacuum. She isn’t picky but her favorite food is avocado…she lives in the right place for that food! There are ALWAYS avocados on hand. She also LOVES chicken. There is really nothing she won’t eat although I can pick out her food preferences if I put a bunch of food in front of her at once. She’ll eat the chicken and cheese and avocado and black beans over the tofu and rice and bread. She is still on formula, still takes a bottle. She only has 1-2 bottles a day and a few smaller bottles at night. We have tried to replace the formula with other things but ran into a big problem: she likes her bottles at room temperature! The very thing we thought was such a blessing six months ago has turned into a nightmare! We LOVED not having to worry about having ice-cold refrigerated bottles or heated bottles for her. Just mix up the powder with some room temp bottled water and you are good anywhere you happen to end up when she is hungry. Well turns out this isn’t such a great plan when it is time to wean. Apparently they don’t make room temperature organic milk. Or rice milk. Or any other milk. It ALL has to be refrigerated, go figure! Short of buying myself a cow, I’m out of ideas.

Here are the down-and-dirty stats: Addy has grown quite a lot since we first got our referral and then brought her home. At referral, at 2 months old, she was 23″ tall and 11 lbs  - almost exactly the same size as Noah was on the day of his birth.  When we brought her home at 6.5 months she was 16 lbs and 26.75″ Now at a year old she is 22 lb and 29.5″ tall.  This puts her on between the 50th-75th percentile for both weight and height on the American charts. She wears a 12-18 month in almost everything. I think the part of her that grew the most is her head. I don’t know if her head *shape* changed entirely or that her head really grew a lot but I know in Vietnam, at 6 months old, we could not find a hat ANYWHERE that was small enough to fit her. All the tiny newborn hats we brought her were too big, the hats we bought in Vietnam were too big. But now she has a big ole honkin’ head. She wears the ‘toddler’ sized (12-24 month) hats. She wears a size 3.5 shoe which essentially doesn’t exist. So that’s fun. She does ok in a size 4 and most of her shoes are soft-soled shoes like Robeez, where she *almost* wears a size 6-12 months.

I miss my baby girl already. When you watch a child’s first 12 months go by in just 6 months, it is really really hard. It is really super obvious how much she changed and grew from one week to another. I’m so proud of this girl, my daughter, so big and so strong in body, mind and spirit. I look forward to every single day of toddlerhood, watching her learn and grow and experience all the new things that toddlers stumble upon: her first shadow, her first trip to the zoo, her first sniff of a flower, her first band-aid, her first sentence, her first Popsicle, her first puzzle. All of this and one million things more.

Addy-Mai - I hope we can give you all of what you hope for, all of what is possible every year as we celebrate this day: a celebration of you! Happy Birthday Addy-Mai, my baby girl. Today we celebrate your very being and we are thankful for every gift you have given us in the short 12 months on this Earth and can’t wait to see what you have in store for us in the future.  Big girl life awaits!

note about the photos: These are just some of my favorites, they aren’t in chronological order. Some of them date back from Vietnam, others are from this week. You can click each photo to visit the description on our Flickr site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Adoption, Holidays & Vacations, Milestones, Photos & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.