Emilia!!

It's amazing what a difference mere hours make! Slowly but surely our little Emilia's personality has begun to emerge. The initial unemotional front she gave us was a just a cover for a sunny, smiley, and mischievous little character. She has a very happy disposition, and we think she'll be keeping us both very busy with her active nature. I'm thinking her cousins have nothing on her when it comes to her level of activity! She knows what she wants and she knows how to ask so that we can't possibly deny her.

She only got in a couple cat naps during our back and forth to the civil registration office yesterday so we thought she'd be zonked by the time we put her to bed. We laid her in her crib and found that she was fighting falling asleep. She was holding her baby, her bottle and just starting up at the ceiling. We've often expressed to each other over the last 24 hours..."what do you think is going through her head?" because she often becomes contemplative, particularly when she is tired. We think she was trying to take it all in and make sense of it once we put her down. When she started to cry a little, we laid her in our bed with the two of us on either side of her just holding and watching her. She watched us until her eyes got so heavy she fell asleep. That was around 7:30 p.m. and we didn't hear a peep from her until 6:15 a.m. (although she does move around a lot at night!).

Her voice has a little raspy sound to it and she now is using words. We've caught "neehow" (hi) a few times, but most of it is gibberish to us and we just nod, smile and say "yes". After breakfast this morning, we gave her her first full bath. She absolutely loves the water which is great! She has discovered Cheerios, peanut butter crackers, and raisins. It's funny because instead of taking a raisin (or anything else for that matter) and putting it in her mouth herself, she holds it out to one of us to feed her. We think she's discovered that she's now living pretty large and is taking full advantage of having two parents at her beck and call!

At 2:00 p.m. today we have sightseeing plans. It is raining so we are going to a local museum. If it had been nice, we were supposed to go to the countryside to visit a garden of some sort. Hopefully, we'll be doing that on another day prior to leaving Changsha. That's it for now, but we'll make every attempt to continue to keep you all posted.

Thanks for all the wonderful comments. We enjoy reading them and feeling in touch with home!