Bring it On!

Daughter of Purpose is ready to take on the swimming world. Today is our first venture into the pool and Daughter of Purpose is going to explode soon if I do not take her into the P-O-O-L!!! She has been counting down the days, as you can imagine. Now that "The Big Day" is here it is pure torture to her that she has to wait until 1:00 pm!! What were these party planners thinking? She was ready at 7:00 am!!

1 Samuel 1:27 "I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him."

Gotcha Day

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Who Would've Known?

Just about one year ago Daughter of Purpose was in Russia knowing nothing of the English language. Tonight Daughter of Purpose received her Awana Cubbie award for completing her whole book. Do you know what that means? It means that every week for the past school year, she has memorized one verse from the Bible--in English. Pretty amazing if you really think about it, don't ya think?

1 Samuel 1:27 "I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him."

Directions

Another interesting thing I've noticed about Daughter of Purpose is her ability to know her surroundings. I noticed this awhile ago, but was watching to see if it was a fluke or not. We can be driving somewhere and if she knows our destination, she knows if we are going in the right direction or not.

For example, when we get off the freeway, she knows we are almost to church. We can even be driving somewhere else but is near the church and she can identify where the church is in relation to us.

It is not uncommon for her to direct me that I am going the wrong direction if I change course from what I told her our agenda was. Just the other day she knew we were going to our school group, but I decided to stop somewhere else on the way without telling her. As we pulled out of our neighborhood and I went left, she piped up from the backseat, "Hey Mom, you are going the wrong way. School is the other way."

The other moment that cracked me up was when we came out of In-n-Out Burger. In order to get to our house from In-n-Out Burger, you have to go right and then make a U-turn, but yet our house is to the left. Daughter of Purpose let me know that I was going the wrong way because home was back that way. I had to explain to her what I was doing. She still didn't really get why I couldn't go left, but once we got back to heading in the right direction she relaxed.

Since I'm directionally challenged, it is good thing that God gave me Daughter of Purpose. Apparently with her in the car, I'll never get lost!

1 Samuel 1:27 "I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him."

Language Acquisition

It has been almost a year that Daughter of Purpose has been with us. If you've been following her blog, you know that she picked up the English language a lot quicker than we expected. It was at about 6 months, she was pretty fluent.

Now we're seeing something interesting about her language. Based on the questions she inundates us with daily, we're starting to realize that when she appeared to be fluent, she really was just repeating phrases. She'll hear a phrase and repeat that one. Surprisingly she'd use the right phrases in the right circumstances. In retrospect it doesn't surprise me since I'd often hear one my other kids say something like, "My tummy hurts" and then within minutes her "tummy would hurt" also, but I just didn't realize until now that she's been repeating these phrases without ever really knowing what she was saying.

Nowadays she spends her time picking apart the English language. She's beginning to ask questions about what those "phrases" mean. For example she will randomly say, "What does 'died on the cross' mean?" or "What does 'eating' mean?"

Because her talking is constant, it can drive me crazy at times, but when I put it in perspective, I try to give it as much patience as possible. It's just like having a two-year-old that asks the "why" question all day long. It is just a phase and I know it will pass.

No one really told me about the part of adopting a child from another country, but in retrospect it makes sense. As Nathan and I attempt to continue our studies of the Russian language, it also gives me perspective into our language learning. We do the same thing. We learn phrases of Russian and then later we figure out what parts of that phrase mean and then move those parts of speech around and mix them with other words we've learned.

Ahh the things you learn from adopting...

1 Samuel 1:27 "I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him."