We can't believe that 6 months has passed since January 13th when we received our daughter. We celebrate a magnificent and busy 6 months.

We have come so far with our little Lin (GUO Xiao Qiu). As I was cutting her nails today, I reflected how when we first got her this was an impossible task, for the first couple of months at least. For the first few days, changing her nappy was not something she was happy with - now she is at the stage where she not only sits on the toilet but is also starting to indicate when she wants to go to the toilet. I remember in the first months after we came back there was no time for myself, not even sometimes for showering and certainly not for hair washing, as we struggled to find some routines. If I got one load of washing done and the dishwasher emptied, I considered it a major achievement. Lin would not play by herself and wanted constant individual attention (of course I wanted to play with her too!) Now she will watch TV/videos by herself for a while allowing me time in the bathroom.

Today for the first time she allowed someone else to take her in the pram to the swings up the road, WITHOUT me or her father. These are all major breakthroughs and it has taken six months. I don't think we could have pushed for these things to happen any earlier. Lin is a very spirited, brave individual but she still needed the time to build trust in us and find her feet in this new country.

For those about to pick up their new daughters, it is very exciting but also scarey, trying to understand what they need and what they want and trying to reassure them in their transition. Your mind is constantly going through possibilities - does it mean this or should we do that, what should we do next, is this the right way to do it, should we be worried about this, are we just imagining it, are we over-reacting, are we under-reacting etc etc?

And it continues to be scarey. The weekend of the 6 month anniversary was unfortunately spent in the hospital with Lin as she had very high temperatures and a suspected urinary tract infection. I was vomited on, wee'd on and poo'ed by my poor little girl and I slept on the floor of a hospital ward next to her whilst miserable myself with a cold so I figure I just passed yet another motherhood test. But she is worth it - after 2 days of intravenous antibiotics and fluid she has of course bounced back as if nothing was ever wrong - and the doctors still don't know why she was sick which is something else I've learnt - the pediatricians admit that with children, things are often a mystery.

It is certainly a mystery to me how CCAA manage to find everyone the perfect match but perfect match it is. Lin is our daughter, no two ways about it. Here's to the next 6 months of this adventure... She has taught us so much and we just love seeing her learn so many new things.

She practises new English words every day and understands everything we say. It amazes us how this is possible - their capacity to pick up a new language is incredible. Likewise their capacity to recognise patterns and mimic our behaviour. Yesterday when I put on my Australian Wallabies jersey she pointed at it and then pointed to her own chest thereby telling me that she wanted to wear her own Wallabies jersey. When I got it for her she laughed riotously.

Lin's current favourite activities include chasing her shadow and playing hide and seek with it and serving tea endlessly to all comers with her new toy tea set (including milk and sugar which is most un-Chinese and also not something her Mama and Baba add to their weak black tea, so where do they learn these things?) - Here "Auntie Noelene" is being served tea.

She has grown 6cm in 6 months but not gained a lot of weight so I'm still chasing around shoving food in her slow-chewing mouth for an hour each mealtime but I promise I'll stop if she reaches the 9 kilo milestone - she is 22 months this week and we are busily planning our first ever kids party - how scarey is that!

To all those about to travel and all those whose allocation is about to happen and to all those waiting, it is a journey well and truly worth it. "Parenting someone else's child", as DOCS so harshly put it when they're trying to put you off adoption, is an absolute joy and we cannot now imagine a better way to have a family than via adoption.

Maternal Grandparents Visit :- Poppa and Nanny came to visit for a few days. They continue to enjoy their tiny grandaughter who is happy to play with them. She remembers them even though they only see her about once a month. As usual there is something to do when they are here. This visit Baba purchased a cubby house and Poppa assisted in assembling it.

The Search for the Perfect Cardigan Winter arrived in Sydney (an ironic statement I know from an ex-Tasmanian) and we scurried off to find some warmer clothes for our growing girl. We noticed that the baby shops we went to did not stock cardigans, only jumpers and they were synthetic.

Wool was what we wanted! A cardigan was what we wanted! So Nanny and her friends at Sussex Inlet set to work knitting and all of a sudden all these cardigans started to arrive. The cream one was too small, the green one was a bit snug fitting, the apricot one was too big, but the red one and the purple one fitted perfectly. What a lucky girl she is.

Note about Mr Hanky The red silk material held to Xiao's nose is "Mr Hanky", her comfort object which we introduced to her after she had been with us for about 2 months. It is Ba's red silk handkerchief from his trendy days and it has been her faithful companion at bedtimes ever since. Mr Hanky has become so tattered that it has now been torn into about five Mr Hankys, one for the car, one for Mama's handbag, one upstairs, one downstairs etc.

Attempts to introduce a cream silk handkerchief belonging to her maternal great grandfather have so far failed even though red silk Mr Hanky continues to grow smaller and smaller. Xiao was not handed to us with a comfort object but we noted when she first joined our family that she would clutch her shirt, or our shirts, to her nose when trying to go to sleep, as well as of course sucking her much-loved thumb. It's funny that it took us 2 months to work out that she needed a comfort object as Mama remembers that she had a Ninny when she was a little girl, oh so long ago.

Nanny suggested sewing pieces of old Mr Hanky onto a new Mr Hanky e.g. the cream silk handkerchief mention above and it has worked - Xiao now uses her great grand-ba's hanky!!!

Trip to Melbourne We flew to Melbourne for 3 days. Baba had to go overseas first so he flew directly into Melbourne from Malaysia. Mama had to cope with the flight to Melbourne with a squirming alert live-wire of a toddler, all by herself. Thanks Baba. She did not sleep at all. At least she had Baba's seat allocated to her which gave us a bit more room. About half-way to Melbourne she did a stinky nappy so I got to change her in those cramped aircraft toilets.

When we arrived, our plane was parked at the gate furthest away from the terminal. I let Lin walk because she had just been cooped up in the plane for nearly 2 hours but it took us forever to get to Baggage Collection. Our bag was the last one going round and round and round. Then I had to wheel the bag and hold the hand of an inquisitive toddler to get over to the hire car building which took another eternity. Finally we got the car and set off to visit colleagues at The University of Melbourne but just as we arrived Lin finally fell asleep so I sat in the car in the car park for half an hour waiting. Needless to say we missed lunch. Oh well we did finally find everyone and had coffee. Great coffee it was too - I miss Lygon St coffee!

After showing off Lin at the University, we set off for the Cook's house where we were staying for the weekend, but we left our run a bit late and hit Friday night traffic. Lin was not happy and cried all the way because she was so tired. Predictably she fell asleep just as we got to Mont Albert where two excited little boys were waiting to greet her. This is the second time we have stayed with the Cooks  (see Week 8)  and Lin learns so much by being with the boys. But we did seem to strike a weekend when the normally happy Lin had discovered the 2-year-tantrum and we spent a lot of the weekend timing car trips to get her to sleep and failing. Our pleasant tradition of ambling down Burke Rd Saturday morning for coffee and shopping at Cavalier was interrupted by a mad dash back to the car several blocks away trying to hold onto a screaming toddler who had lost it. One nice lady thought we were trying to help a lost child and pointed at an Asian couple over the road and said perhaps the child belonged to them!!! No, no, she's ours we protested and she looked very confused but we had no time to explain further as we whisked her away.

AAC Lunch in Melbourne On the Sunday we attended a get-together of the Melbourne branch of Australians-Adopt-China. We had been to one of these lunches the previous year when we were still awaiting allocation. This time we had Lin to show off and we of course loved it. There were about 90 people at the lunch including many who were waiting, waiting, waiting to travel to their allocated daughters but had been  delayed by SARS . It has been so very hard for this batch to wait, not knowing what was happening to their daughters in China. We waited a long time to get our allocation but at least once we were allocated we travelled fast. There have been no other people traveling to China since January when we were there so there has a veritable drought of new arrivals in this past 6 months.

Again Lin fell asleep just as we arrived and we did not dare wake her as she really needs her lunchtime sleep and it was going to be a long day so it was Geoff's turn to sit in the car in the car park waiting. At least he had me to go and get him a beer from the bar and bring back to the car.

At the adoption lunch I had just been telling other parents that Lin doesn't really eat meat yet when she picked up my veal shank and chewed it and sucked the marrow - she ate some of the veal which fell off the bone, I guess because it was very tender and she also ate 2 pats of butter!!! obviously she felt the need for fats.

What is your name? The day after we got back from Melbourne, I asked what is your name and she quite clearly said "Xiao Qiu" - this is a first - she has never said her name before so the weekend with the boys shouting her name over and over really helped - she does learn so much from them. It is interesting that she did not say "Lin" even though so many people call her Lin. For the next two weeks, we regularly asked her this question and got Xiao Qiu as a reply. Then all of a sudden she dropped the Qiu and only now answers Xiao - she is quite definite about it and she says it so nicely that we are now calling her Xiao. Geoff recently bought her a small yellow ukelele (which she calls "tar" for guitar) and he composes little ditties on it rhyming with her name. She can now help sing the songs by filling in the words eg:

"There was a girl called… Xiao
You should see her… now
She continues to… grow
And we should… know
Because she's our daughter… Xiao"
And she laughs uproariously every time he performs HER song.

And another :-
There was a girl called Lin
She was our next of kin
She called herself Xiao
'Cause it rhymes with meow
But everyone calls her Lin

Ladies Lunch at Lilli Pilli About 10 adopted Chinese daughters and their Mums trekked out to Lilli Pilli for a mid-week lunch, one of the luxuries of being on maternity leave for all of us at the moment. It was quite a chilly day so the girls had to spend most of the time indoors which was a shame but the house survived!!! Isobel, Xiao and Erica are seen here watching the Wiggles.

Kangaroos and emus roam freely at this Australian zoo. She really loved the pig and has perfected her oink oink upon visiting this one. Being a Year of the Snake girl she of course loved seeing the snakes (Mama definitely did not enjoy that bit and was glad we did not have to pat them).

Guangxi Daily Advertisement of Abandoned Children Thanks to Aileen of NSW Batch 6, most of NSW Batch 7 now have  a copy of the newspaper  in which their abandonment is advertised in the hope that the parents will come forward to claim them.

 Third Self-Report  finished and sent to DOCS In these first three reports I have recorded every new word she said as she learnt them. Now she is saying new words so frequently, I cannot keep up with the record. She is so literate that she wonders why the same word is used for the nails on her toes as well as the nails in her builder's toolkit and why the word for the thing I wear on my finger (ring) is the same as the noise the phone makes (ring ring). When we were discussing this phenomena, she got the hammer and nails from the toolkit and pretended to hammer them into her toes! And when I'm putting on my rings she pretends to make a phone call! We think she is so clever, totally biased parents that we are.