Celebrating Gotcha Day!

This month, we celebrated our one year anniversary of gotcha day with a cake! The last year has flown by so quickly. Traveling to Poland is starting to feel like a distant memory. Katie has grown and developed so much. Her fine and gross motor skills are on target and she is eating well. Her biggest challenge is speech at this point. Katie is babbling and we can make out some words, but we are starting speech therapy services through our county early on services since she is behind on both expressive and receptive speech. As a mom I worry but we have faith that more speech will come. Right now we are working on kissing. I am trying to teach her how to make a "kissy face" with her lips puckered up so I can kiss her. More ways to bond. :)

Katie is a very smart little girl. She knows how to undress herself, so after a mishap in the crib that resulted in a wet mess during nap time, she sleeps in a onesie! She loves to imitate her brother and sister so she likes to read (or at least flip) through books and color and plays with Legos (with supervision, of course).

She is also fearless! I am amazed at how fine she is to jump in a pool and go underwater, popping right up like it is no big deal! I can see her becoming quite the athlete.

Bonding is going well. The kids all blend together so naturally. It feels like adding Katie to the family had no negative impact - it was a very fluid transition. I'm not sure what to attribute that too but I am so grateful for it. My oldest regularly states how glad she is that we adopted Katie. It warms my heart to hear her say that.

The biggest challenge we have these days is juggling 3 kids at one time. We certainly have our exhausted days from chasing, chauffeuring, and care taking. I know some people wonder why we would add to our family when we already had 2 kids who are older and getting more independent. I get the comment that our life was just getting easy, why make it hard. Maybe we are crazy but I honestly can't see us having it any other way now. It is hard to remember life before this little one was in it.