6 months already?!

Can you believe that this past Wednesday, November 7, was the six-month anniversary of the day we met TongJie?  In some ways, it seems that these past six months have flown by, but on the other hand, it seems like we've known TongJie for a lot longer than just six months.  Just for fun, I dressed TongJie in his little yellow jacket the other day from his orphanage that he was wearing when we first met him.  It fits him perfectly now.  Since the jacket is so special, I don't like to have him wear it very often, but we were going out to do some errands that didn't involve eating or anything messy, and it looked bright and cheery for a rainy day, so he happily wore it on our little outing.  Here he is in his jacket now, compared to a couple of pictures of him wearing it in China.  He's grown a lot in the past six months!

On the subject of growing into clothes, we've had a pair of striped overalls that are hand-me-downs from my sister's kiddos.  I remember her telling me on the phone a few months ago that those particular overalls were worn a lot by her older son, but with her younger son they missed the opportunity of him wearing the overalls much because they seemed so big on him and then all of a sudden he had already outgrown them.  And they really do look big when you just hold them up, but after I told my mom a few weeks ago that the overalls are still too big for TongJie, I decided to try them on him again, and lo and behold - they fit!  They fit good enough for me, anyway.  

  

TongJie has been taking a lot more interest in books lately.  He loves the big ones with the cardboard pages, and he oftentimes goes and gets one and finds a place to sit and look at it.

We had TongJie's post-op appointment at Seattle Children's Hospital on Monday, and Dr. Hopper looked in his mouth and said everything looks fine and he doesn't have any more restrictions as far as what foods he can eat or what he can do.  That's great news!  On the same day, we also stopped by the Wacap office to say hi to Linda, our social worker who was with us for the process of submitting our dossier to China, waiting to be matched, getting matched with TongJie, and waiting to travel to China.  She's great, and she hadn't got to meet TongJie yet, so since we were in the area we stopped by to see her.  A few other Wacap staff members also enjoyed meeting TongJie.  They said they love it when families come by to see them after they're home with their children.  At the same time, we also met with Zia, our social worker for our homestudy (back toward the beginning of our adoption process) and also for our post-placement reports.  We had our post-placement meeting #2 with Zia there at the Wacap office, and it was an all-around good meeting.  We really like Zia too, as I've mentioned before.  So, as you may have gathered, Monday was a long day for TongJie!  We were worried that it might be a rough day for him, especially with having to go back to Children's, but he did fine.  For our post-placement meeting with Zia, we needed some photographs of TongJie.  Since it's rare that we get a photo of all three of us together, my parents took some photos when they were over at our house helping us rake leaves last weekend.  We used the first one below, as well as various other pictures of TongJie alone or with one of us, that we've taken during the past few months.

We had fun raking leaves!  Actually, my parents did pretty much all of the work, since Jeff was gone for part of the time, and I was getting TongJie up from his nap for part of the time.  However, if you looked at our yard now, you wouldn't be able to tell that all the leaves had been raked recently, because it's covered with leaves again.  I guess it's time for more raking!  Here's a picture of our yard yesterday:

The weather is getting colder, but TongJie still likes to go outside, so we've still been out walking a lot.

TongJie with our cat, Caspian, in one of Caspian's friendlier moods last week before church: