8 Months...

...ago today Keeghan and I landed back on US soil. It's hard to believe it's been almost a year already. Some days I feel like she's been here forever and other days it seems very odd to me that we've had her so long and I still don't know her. We've had her 1/3 of her life now.

A year ago (the 15th actually) we got a phone call at 5:20pm on a Friday afternoon from our agency that our pre-approval (PA) had arrived from China. The PA basically says the CCAA had approved our application to adopt Keeghan and once they went through our dossier with a fine tooth comb they'd issue a letter of approval and travel approval for us to bring Keeghan home. It was once we had our PA that we were able to share the news of our new addition. It was a tough 2 weeks waiting once we'd sent our letter of intent. I was ready to shout from rooftops that we had a new daughter but knew I needed to wait.

We still seem to be doing ok attachment wise. Keeghan certainly does not like it when I say bye to go to work and she gets excited to see me when I come back. She asks for everyone to say goodnight when she's going to bed and gets a bit sad looking if one of her siblings or her Baba aren't here. She is certainly a demanding stubborn little girl but I guess that makes her fit in all that much better.

Speech is still very much an issue. Keeghan generally won't make an effort to try and repeat a word if you ask her to and much of what she says is very difficult to understand. She's not even close to putting words together. It's very clear that she knows exactly what she's saying and what she wants but sometimes I just have no clue : ( She understands us well and follows directions when asked. I'm really not sure where the expressive language breakdown is...it could still be the barrier of Chinese to English but I'm starting to suspect it's more than that. We'll keep at it with early intervention and at home in general and hopefully start seeing some progress.