Pictures, happenings and reality

So we have been super busy with life in general. Not our real life but life as a stay at home family of three. Tuesday that all comes crashing to an abrupt halt. We are both returning to work on Tuesday morning. On one hand we are really not looking forward to it and on the other it will be nice to finally get us all back to real life.We feel very grateful to have had this time as a family and very grateful to have jobs to return to. We will all be going through an adjustment us having to get back into the swing of working again after 12 weeks off. Sophia will be adjusting to not being with us 24/7. The good thing is my schedule is flexible and my mother and Riz's parents is semi retired so between us Sophia will still be in our home with family around her toys and things that are familiar to her.

This last week we have been enjoying our last few days of time off. We spent the beginning of the week in Savannah visiting our good friend Wendy and her beautiful daughters Kate and Claire. We were so excited to see them and to introduce Sophia to all three of them. Kate and Claire were so excited and too cute. They had fixed a table full of "Sophia safe" toys and books. The girls all got along great and played so nice together. We are so happy about that because Kate and Claire are so special to us. We know that we will have many more years of memories with them. Something else that was super cute that happened while we were there was Claire feeding Sophia applesauce. Claire is going to be a GREAT Mama one day....

Our beautiful girl

Kate in my lap and Claire feed Sophia applesauce

Sophia and Claire the two Nanchang sisters

too cute

Yesterday we spent the day at our favorite place on earth Walt Disney World. We took Sophia to The magic Kingdom for her fist visit. She was a trooper and enjoyed the day, although she was not to sure about the photographers. She did LOVE all the rides we took her on some of her favorites were "It's a Small World", "The Haunted Mansion", and "Pirates of the Caribbean" She smiled and waved as we rode through each of the rides. It was adorable to watch her and something we had always dreamed about. We kept saying to each other all day "how great is it to be here with our daughter"? I must admit I got teary eyed a few times.... It was a great day....

Sophia's progress continues to amaze us. She is a happy little girl with a smile that lights up her whole face and the room. She is now saying Thank You, Night Night, Mama, Baba (sometimes means Baby some times Daddy), Dada (Daddy), Again, Bye (now with a southern Accent), Hi. We have been working with her trying to teach her some basic sign language. In the last few days she has started to use the sign for Drink, eat and hungry. I am amazed that she was able to pick this up. We are learning more and more about Sophia every day. One thing we are learning about her is that she is always eager to learn and is always trying to communicate with us. Shortly after we came home from China we put her potty chair out and she would go and sit on it a smile at us. Then we noticed that she would pull at her diaper in the morning shortly after waking up followed by a sound and wave her hand in the air. We started to take her to the potty chair and she would sit there sometimes she will tinkle and other times she would just play but we started to pay more and more attention to these sounds and this morning she did number one and number two on the potty. She followed that up with several more number ones on the potty later today. We don't think that Sophia ever wore a diaper while she was in China (very common in China). We are really hoping that potty training will be easy for us but we know that it may not be.......but we can always hope...

* Please take a moment to go over to my freind Sharon's Blog. She was united with her daughter MaryAlice today and she is beautiful......