Personality

Tuesday, October 16th

We have to wait a few days in Luke's home province for his passport to be issued, so we spent today sight seeing.  Xi'an is considered one of the four capital cities of the ancient world (along with Rome, Athens, and Istanbul) and is the eastern starting point of the Silk Road, so their is plenty to see.  Today we saw the Terracotta Warriors.  I wont bore those of you who don't care with the details, and I'll refer those of you who do to Wikipedia or some other more reliable historic source, but it was definitely neat to see.

Most of you reading this could care less what we did today and are more interested in how Luke is doing.  The short answer is GREAT!  He is coming more and more out of his shell and his personality is starting to shine.  We not only got lots of smiles today, but big ol' belly laughs too.   He is feeling comfortable around Kanhka and I, and Kanhka would be glad for me to report that he's finally got his child that is more attached to him.  After Eliana, the biggest mommy's girl you've ever met, and Miller, mister net neutral, he was hoping to have a child who favored him.  Thankfully Luke will go to either of us easily, but "Baba" is always Luke's first choice when it comes to being held.  And I'll be sure to remind Kanhka of that on the long 16 hour plane ride home 😜

Luke is playful, precise, and very smart.  He already seems to understand some simple commands like "put the toy away" in English, and he learned the signs for "more" and "please" today.  Those signs are almost exclusively used with food at this point, which was probably his big motivation for learning them...boy can he eat!

While we are pleased with his good appetite, I'm also painfully aware that many of the attributes we see as ideal things about a toddler boy may be strongly related to his time in the orphanage.  Things like his good appetite, his amazingly easy bedtime routine, and his abilities to play alone and self sooth would all be considered great if you didn't consider why he's developed these habits.  With his food, we notice he tries to guard it as he eats, literally blocking it with an arm on either side at times.  He also puts a lot of bites in his mouth at once and pouches them in his cheek, all of which is probably related to limited food supplies and many hungry children to feed in the orphanage.  And I'm sure the children were on strict sleeping regimens because they had to be in order to maintain order in a room of 20 toddlers.  Self soothing and playing alone were likely skills he learned out of necessity.  The analogy of a NICU baby keeps popping in my head.  No parent wants their child to have to be in the NICU, but when they come home on a clock work eating and sleeping schedule, you see there may have been at least one, albeit small in the big scheme of things, advantage.