Fun...

...in the sun!!







... with peek-a-boo!

Baby's first passover

Turns out Kyla likes gefilte fish and matzah balls (R: I admit that I eat the gefilte fish too, and with horseradish no less. Anyone who knows my eating habits might be surprised by that!).


Things you never knew existed...

An inflatable matzah ball:





Stuffed plagues:

court day cont.

Kyla's grandma was interested in what pretty dress (thanks Trish!) Kyla wore to court so here is a closer pic. A week ago I was wondering what we should put on under the dress to keep her warm but since it was nearly 80 degrees here, sleeveless worked just fine.



Last night we celebrated by going to see the Padres play (Dan's work rewarded their hard work with tickets) so Kyla saw her first baseball game. It wasn't the most exciting game... we left at the end of the 9th inning when the score was 0-0. Read in the news today that the game finally ended after 22 innings! whew! I wonder how many die-hard fans stayed to the end. (Kyla's uncle Kirk probably would have stayed!)

Legal family!

Here we are at the courthouse after our hearing, which lasted all of 5 minutes.



They pretty much commented on how cute Kyla is (we knew that), we all signed a form, and the bailiff took a polaroid picture of us with the judge. Oh yeah, and the judge stamped the back of all of our hands with a cute mouse holding a heart.

It was a short event with large significance.
: )



Here's Kyla preparing for our hearing by picking her nose:

news from Kylanet!

Wow, has it really been a month since our last post? Well, it's not for lack of Kyla material!

First, our big adoption news is that we have, at long last, scheduled our finalization hearing. It will be April 17th, sometime between 2 and 2:30pm. To put thing in prospective, most people finalize around 6 months after meeting the baby. Kyla will be 10 months by the time we go to court and will likely run up, pull the judge's hair, and throw in a fake scream (she loves to pretend to scream --- much better than loud, piercing real screams, for sure). Okay, the "run up" part is a bit optimistic, but not for long. More about that in a minute.

Our post-placement experience has included several steps of snail-paced paperwork, a correction of Indiana paperwork requested by California discovered, oh, four months later, a couple of typos (including Kyla's birthdate) that needed to be corrected, and finally, a couple of weeks delay because when they are all finally ready, Rachel starts teaching on Thursday afternoons! (mind you, she’s had Thursday afternoons, the only time adoption hearings are held, open for months and months and the first week she starts teaching is when dates are available) The original plan was to dash back to work and be there for the rest of the afternoon but a very kind co-worker offered to cover and suggested that we both take the rest of this very special day off to celebrate!

Unfortunately we probably won't have any family here to share this with us. Maybe we'll have to post a video so you can all share with us afterwards. We'll, of course, have a party the weekend following and will be missing all of you who are too far away to celebrate in person with us.

The hearing itself is apparently a very fun formality. It takes about 5 minutes and involves statements like "do you take this child...". I'm sure they have a good supply of tissues on hand. :)



As far as the girl herself, the progress report is varied and exciting.

Standing/walking: She has been on the verge of walking for a while now and is quite adept at standing and walking along things. She can stand unassisted for a good 10 seconds, but then gets so giddy from the experience that she collapses in an infectious and quite maniacal giggle.



Crawling: She crawls with the best of them, scooting along the ground at a high rate of speed. Our latest game is chase the crawler, and she will back you into a corner, get a monster smile, then pounce on you with both hands. See yellow overalls pic for a visualization of the pounce event.


Talking: Not in English, except for some serendipitous syllables that happen to be words. But she is talking constantly. Dahdahdah, bahbahbah, trilling her tongue, brrbrrbrrbrrbrr, mehmeh (we think this one is “milk”), mahmahmah. She also has a 3 octave range which manifests itself in a swooping kind of “Ahhhhh”, as in “Oh, I get it now”.



Eating: We have been a little slow moving her in to the next phase of her life that we cherish a little too much, but have really started to mover her into new foods now. She loves yogurt, most fruits, a little rice, biscuits, and red hot chili peppers doused in wasabi. Still reading? Good, then you likely realize that last one was farcical hooey. But she pretty much sticks anything into her mouth. She makes a great face when trying new foods, scrunches her face in disgust “what the heck are you doing to me you scoundrel???” Then after a few seconds she opens her mouth for the next bite.

Sleep time: We recently had the unenviable task of forcibly changing Kyla’s bedtime from 10-11pm to 8pm. Everyone we heard from and all we read suggested to put her in bed and let her cry thru it, self-soothing. Boy, were we excited to do that! And then after that we could stick needles in our eyes! All kidding aside, we made the decision to try it, and she cried. OHhhhhhh did she cry that first night….for nearly, uh, uhm, 6 minutes. But they were a continuous 6 minutes!!! It was like Armageddon!! The next night was equally horrific, it was nearly 2 minutes.

☺

Suffice it to say it worked better than we could have possibly imagined and now she is down when we put her down and there is very little fuss. It really makes doing anything in the evening easier, since when she is up, you really don’t do anything else without a tag team effort.



Also new is what we call Kyla. We are continually coming up with nicknames for her since she is such a character. It’s almost impossible not to. Some of the more used ones are:
-Scoochy McPants (requested to be retired by Mommy due to overuse by Daddy)
-Cheeks McGirk
-Chickadee Choo Choo
-KG
-Mini Miss
-Junior
-The Squirt
-Pippy the Squeak

Finally, an update!

Hello from the land of Kyla!

We've had a crazy few weeks here, starting with Kyla coming down with her first real winter virus. She had a fever for several days and followed that up with her first ear infection. It was great fun for all of us and of course we slept well too (not!).

Here she is with an attractive runny nose but feeling better:




Luckily the illness wasn't a week later because Kyla's birthmother and her sister came for a visit. She hadn't seen Kyla since last June (at her birth!) other than the pictures we sent so she was meeting a little girl for the first time. It seemed to go well so we hope that she and Kyla maintain some sort of relationship with each other. From everything we've read, that kind of contact can be helpful for an adopted child.


In other adoption news, we might *finally* be able to have our finalization hearing sometime soon. It usually only takes about 6 months but we've had one paperwork delay after another (seemed like there were people sitting on things which was very frustrating). Most of the official papers were signed long ago but this is the paperwork and the agency telling the state of California that we are doing okay as parents, etc. The hearings are mostly ceremonial ("do you take this child..." really!) and happy. After this is complete then we will get a copy of her new birth certificate with our names and the name we've given her and all of that, so it makes it all official!
We'll have a big blog-world toast on the day of our finalization!!

It's possible that Kyla will be able to walk up to the judge on that day because she is spending lots of time in this position:


Needless to say we've been quickly making sure everything is babyproofed as this curious child explores up and down:

Celebrating 8 months with a new important skill!

It's so much fun to be able to move around and get to stuff! She has been super happy with her new found talent.

Here are some more pics; enjoying the sun, checking out her valentine's card, and playing guitar.