Sometimes I’m amazed by how things change around here so rapidly.  I wake up one morning, go for a run, come back an hour later, and my daughter–who barely could muster her way through the word “down” is saying, “hi,” and “mama” all on her own.

That, my friends, is progress.  And that, to me, is the best part of raising a child–watching the progression.   For adoptive parents with children who have significant delays, the progression tends to happen sporadically.  We go from asking ourselves whether or not our children will ever catch up, to being completely satisfied that, yes, it will happen just–in its own time.  And when it does, it happens–literally–overnight.

Audri still isn’t speaking regularly; but she also isn’t producing those blank stares that have come to haunt me.  She’s repeating the words she’s hearing and she’s using them within relevant context.   I’m no expert, but I have read that children who are taken from their native language sort of go into a “language arrest” of sorts because they’re bombarded with new words and new sounds.  It takes a lot of effort for children to reproduce these sounds.  I can tell this, too, by Audri’s version of “yeeee-ha!”  We have a Mega Blocks farm with sounds and music, including “yeeee-ha!” Audri repeats it as “yeeeee-kah!”  It’s almost like she has a little accent.  She’s going from a language filled with hard sounds and clunky consonants to words with more vowels and new letters that produce altogether different sounds.  So, it’s no wonder these kids can’t talk right from the get-go.

But the progress I’ve seen over the past three months has been tremendous–and not only in the speech/language area, but also by Audri’s comprehension, her motor skills, and–well, basically, the fact that she’s engaged speaks volumes.  Four months ago, this little girl was just playing with lace curtains because they were nothing like she had ever felt before.  Now she’s engaged in toys and activities and people.  And when I say, “look at mama” she looks at me square in the eye–something else that was unheard of back in Ukraine.

So, yes, things are going well.  We’re actually on some sort of a schedule, finally–and she’s napping now for two hours during the afternoon.  She’s still tiny, but she fits much better into clothes sized for a 24 month-old instead of an 18-month old.  She’s having far fewer tantrum, which, I suspect, is due to the fact that she understands us much better.  She’s still a toddler, though!

Audri saw a cardiologist last week who performed an echocardiogram and, despite the doctors in Ukraine who diagnosed her with a mitral valve prolapse , he found nothing wrong at all with the exception that her heart, and all of the chambers, is sized for a three year-old, though her body surface area is not.  He was confident, though, that she will catch up soon enough.  Next week, Audri visits with an audiologist, just to make sure her hearing is ok, and we feel confident everything will be fine.

Yeeeee-ka!