An amazing gift

I'm starting to think about (not yet work on...) Quinn's baby album. In getting organized, I came across these photos, which I had not posted before.

In Beijing we visited Quinn's finding place, a subway station, and had the amazing good fortune of finding a security guard who was on duty the day he was found and told us which police sub-station he had been taken to. We went there, and were able to meet the man who picked Quinn up from the subway and brought him to the police station. Thanks to the generous staff and our wonderfully tenacious Holt representative, Leah, we left with a copy of his file - and pictures from the day he was found, at six days old.

The bed Quinn is laying on is still at the police station, and that blue-and-white-checked blanket is still on it! I plopped Quinn right down and got a picture of him on the very same bed where his journey began.

And here he is, Baby Jianrong, on June 14, 2007:

Our new American

The Fourth of July was special for us this year, since it was Quinn's first Independence Day as an American. So we got all decked out and got my brother to take our photo, then we ate sloppy joes, pasta salad and corn on the cob. Doesn't get more American than that!

About that shirt...

Several people have asked why Quinn is wearing a shirt to go swimming. It's a swim shirt! Made of swimsuit material with an spf of 50. We got his at Gymboree but have seen them at Target and other places, too.

Who knew???

To celebrate Quinn's birthday, we took an overnight trip to Phoenix (nice resorts there are CHEAP in the summertime) and went swimming. To our great shock, Quinn knew how to swim! He walked in the water up to his waist and then leaned forward, let his feet float, arched his back and started paddling. We couldn't believe it. We know he received physical therapy for his brachial plexus injury at the orphanage, and our best guess is that they did some water therapy.

Quinn and Ba-Ba head into the pool:


Hey, this is fun!


Here's how it's done:


Quinn kept trying to push Tom's hand away so he could swim on his own, but Tom wouldn't budge:



Whee!

Whew, swimming makes us thirsty!


And happy:




My favorite picture of the day. This is Quinn's cow impression, but here he looks just like a little monkey:

Happy Birthday, Quinn!

adoption, china, bonding, attachment
Quinn is 2!!!

We didn't feel he was ready for a birthday party just yet, so we had a family dinner with some presents.

Grandma Marj and I collaborated on a cake. She baked her famous angel food cake with chocolate chip frosting and I decorated with some of Quinn's favorite wheeled toys (we had sort of a fireman theme):

I bought some party hats, knowing my goofball family would actually wear them. I was right:

As you can see, Quinn LOVED his special birthday cake hat. Just look at the joy on that face:


Quinn got a swingset from Grandma and Granddad. He LOVES it.

Just some random cuteness

Trying to prevent surgery

We're closing in on decision time for Quinn's possible surgery to correct his brachial plexus injury. We're working with a new physical therapist who had an interesting idea to try to immobilize Quinn's good arm to force him to use his injured arm. Her thinking is that either he would start using the injured arm and we'd see he's making progress or we'd see pretty quickly that he couldn't use it and he needed the surgery.

So we tried it. Marge the PT warned us that kids typically get quite angry and sometimes hysterical when the temporary cast goes on, but then adapt. I was very nervous about Quinn, home just seven months and just now totally trusting us, feeling we had betrayed him.

Here's what happened: The PT put on the cast, which prevented Quin from bending his arm. He looked at it the cast briefly and then the little stinker went right back to the game he had been playing by backing up from the coffee table and using his fully extended, immobilized arm with absolutely no problem. Um, so much for that!

We discussed also putting a mitt on his hand, but the PT said he's using his two hands so well together - which is a new thing for him - that she doesn't want to take a step backward in that regard.

So in short, it didn't work!!