Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Adoption Day...One Year Later

It's already been a year. 

Little Miss has been officially, legally ours for one whole year. She has lived in our lives for 4 years now. 

We have changed each other.

She is louder than I could ever have imagined, out doing my boys hands down.  She can climb a tree as well as her brothers. 

Little Miss is fiercely determined.  She learned how to ride a two-wheeler through sheer will power, last summer, right after she turned 4.  She did it out of the frustration that her boys could do something she couldn't.

Little Miss and Littlest Mr. are siblings in the most natural way ever.  They do all the same things birth siblings do and then some.  They roll and tousle and laugh and joke, each reducing the other to tears and giggles.

Little Miss and Little Mr. share the same affinity for all things screen, TV, games, computers.  As long as they have a screen they're happy.  We often find one "working" on the computer with the other scrunched up behind the working person.  Two peas tucked into an old office chair.

She has brought color into our days, our world.  We were a beige and black kind of family.  We didn't really do bright.  It just wasn't us.  Enter Little Miss and suddenly we all have clothes in colors we never would have before.  We wear them in new combinations. 

We have invented new places to keep things we never had in our home before.  There are special spots for the many bottles of nail polish, all in big bold colors.  There are baggies for beads and barrettes and bows.  There is lip gloss and glitter and frills and ruffles and things I actually have to read the label on before I wash now.  It used to be black and bleach loads only.

She's a story reader and quite a tale teller.  She is a woman unto her own, already.  She commands the attention of everyone in every room she enters. She is never ending at playing teacher.  Her inner diva is not inner at all and it reigns our world.

Little Miss rocks our world too.  We've learned the bliss of the 5-7 dinner time rock out in the kitchen.  The music blares, new music we never would have picked on our own, loud and thumping.  She tries in vein to teach us the "booty shake" that comes so naturally to her.

She changed our language too.  She is "the attack".  We snicker when she's "hopping mad".  We love "Miss Beff-es" just as much as she does.  We automatically understand what "cuddle baseball" means. 

A whole year later we'll celebrate with her favorites.  Chicken nuggets.  French fries.  Ketchup. Mini Cup Cakes--pink of course.  We'll rock it in the kitchen and we'll cuddle baseball and we'll be insanely thankful for this very full year.