All Night Long (Updated)

I forgot to mention in the big post that Ms. Annika Lin LuMu slept through the entire night. And to top it off, she didn't get up until 6 am instead of the obnoxious time of 4:30 which she had been favoring.

I have been telling everyone all day that Annika finally slept through the night and just now David told me that she woke up at 2:30 and drank a bottle. I don't know how I slept through that.

The Week in Review

I wrote a real long post on Thursday night and some how it didn't end up posting or saving on Blogger. Don't know exactly what happened there, so I am trying again.

We had a very busy week and Annika is doing new things everyday. Here are a few things that we learned about her this week.

• She loves to swim. We took her to the pool at the Y on Wednesday evening and she thought it was pretty cool. She tries to put her face in and loves to be pulled around on her stomach while she kicks her legs.
• She doesn't like to share Mom's lap. Alex got into my lap while I was holding her and she started to whine and try to push him away with her feet. She smiled really big when he got up. Alex says that she is going to have to get over it because he is not going to start sitting in my lap.
• When she doesn't want to eat something, she refuses to open her mouth. She is not a fan of fruit and will not drink anything but formula from a bottle. If you try to give her either of those things, she tightly closes her lips and refuses to open her mouth. Sometime she will even shake her head back and forth.


• She is starting to roll over more and is able to sit for longer periods of time. She loves to jump and really enjoys the jumper that a friend let us borrow.


• One of her favorite things is a good stretch. After she wakes up or has been sitting (in her car seat or stroller) for a long time, nothing is better than to lay down and stretch.


• She loves to look at things upside down. She is always flopping her head over when you carry her. She started this in China and is just doing it more and more. She has discovered ceiling fans and likes ceilings that have patterns on them.


• She still loves her brother and really enjoys their play time every afternoon when he gets home from school. They play on a blanket on the floor in the living room.


• Annika really likes television. I have figured out that when she watches it she will let me do things to her hair. I have done really bad piggy tails the last two mornings. It is kind of hard to get them even when you do them from behind and above. I definitely need some more practice.

Alex had two fun events at school this week. Thursday was field day. We stopped by for a little while and it really looked like fun. He wanted to introduce everyone to his sister. On Friday, they had a wax museum of famous Americans. Each student had been researching a famous American. For the museum, they each dress as their person and then stood behind their desks. You would push a circle on the desk and they would raise their heads and tell about who they were and then put their heads back down. It was really neat. Alex was Thurgood Marshall (the first black supreme court justice). We have been calling him Thurgood for the last few days. He looked really cute in his costume. He only has 4 and a half more days of school and then it is summer vacation. He can't wait.

Our Little Peanut

Annika had her first doctor's appointment this morning. She is 27 1/2 inches long and weighs in at 15.3 lbs. When she had her physical done in Guangzhou, they said that she weighed 6.9 kg (which is 15.2 lbs). I think their scale was wrong (the one in China) because she is getting all sort of rolls and dimples that weren't even there when we got home so we know she is gaining weight. Plus she is eating everything that is put in front of her and lots of it. People can't believe how little she is when they see her in person. We took a picture with the bear that Alex built her to give everyone something to compare her too. She is currently wearing 6-9 month clothes.

We also had the fun experience of getting lab work done. I really hope they got all they needed today and we don't have to do that again any time soon. They had to draw out of both arms to get what they needed.

Misc. Pictures and Chinese Baby Food

Here are some miscellaneous pictures of Annika from our last day in Guangzhou and our trip home.Over a business lunch at Lucy's, David asked Annika's opinion of the latest email we received from the office. I missed her laying her chin on the table as she concentrated on the screen. She loves the Blackberry almost as much as Daddy, although her favorite things are the pictures of the cute Chinese baby and the big brother. Any time David took it out she would angle her head so she could check out the screen.

It's much easier to get a good Red Couch picture when there aren't 16 other screaming, squirming babies and your in a comfy dress.

"Hey Mom, quit taking my picture and get me out of this box they call a bassinet. I'd much rather be sleeping on Dad right now." Everyone recommended getting one of these things on our way home. First of all, they had a very hard time anchoring it into the wall so that made me a little nervous. Secondly, they placed a cardboard box like you would sort mail into in an office mail room into for her to sleep in. The male flight attendant was going to just leave it at that, but the female attendant filled it with pillows and put a blanket over the top of them. She woke up as soon as we laid her in it. We didn't even bother to ask for one on the flight from Tokyo to Minneapolis.

I wanted to take our little American citizens picture as we came out of customs, but four carry-ons, a stroller, and three large suitcases made it a little difficult, so I waited until we got to the lounge area to take her first picture in America. She insisted on getting dressed up for the occasion, even wanted to wear her new shoes with the roses on the toes. Who am I to argue.

So on to baby food. Be sure that you don't have any baby food that contains meat products when you go through customs. They confiscated our last bottle. It was marrow and vegetables and I wasn't going to feed it to her anyway because how gross does that sound!!!! They were concerned because they weren't sure what kinds of bones it came from (no one could read Mandarin) I also ended up with a bottle of shrimp and vegetable baby food (I know some people that would have serious panic attacks over that one). It was in a three pack that wasn't labeled in English on the outside of the packaging and went directly into the trash once I saw what was in it. So two important lessons on baby food from China (1) read the small English label very carefully before using (although there are helpful pictures on the front of the jars as well) and (2) don't take meat foods through customs (although I think they are mainly worried about poultry).

First Haircut

We took Annika to get her first haircut yesterday. Her hair is incredible. It is long and thick and gets really stinky when she is sweaty. We couldn't do anything with it so we decided the best thing to do was get a trim. The woman who cut it is related to the author of Daughters from Afar (have never read it). Here are some before, during, and after shots.

Before the big cut.

We needed a few Cheerios for make it through. (Notice how small her head looks next to my hand)

We made it through with just a few tears (mainly when it came to the bangs).

Our pretty girl all finished and off to lunch (don't worry she was in her grandpa's lap in the backseat while we were parked in the parking lot, we weren't doing a Brittany Spears and driving with her out of a car seat.)

Red Coach Picture

We took the red couch pictures last Tuesday. As you can tell, Annika was very excited and couldn't wait for her picture. She fell asleep about 5 minutes before I was going to change her into her dress and then I had to wake her up to put it on. Those dress aren't exactly something you can just slip them into while they sleep. Any thing that requires a side zipper to get it over there head is challenging but even more so when you are trying to get it on a sweaty, screaming, sleepy 8 month old.

Who ever started this tradition must have not been in a very large travel group. We had 14 babies 8 month and younger and than 4 older children (who didn't seem to be too excited about the prospects of sitting with all of the squirming, screaming younger girls. Can't say that I blame them). The picture was scheduled to happen right at nap time, which should have been a tip-off that we were headed straight for disaster. Several girls showed up already crying. By the picture you can see that those who weren't crying were not paying a bit of attention to the hoard of paparazzi who was desperately trying to get the perfect picture (Wish I could have taken a picture of all the photographers, they were pretty funny too). The guide tried to give us some direction at first and then ended up just sitting back and laughing as it became chaos.

After what seemed like 30 minutes of attempting the picture, everyone finally gave up and moved to take one giant group photo of everyone in our group. (David and I are the two giants in the middle of the photo. Maybe we would have been less noticeable if we would have sat on the front row or at least not have stood next to two of the shorter families.) We drew quite a crowd when we would go out together places. I can only imagine how strange it would have to be to walk out of a building into a group of 20 American families each with a Chinese child(some with two). One woman even snuck in behind out guides as they were taking this picture and took some with her own camera.

We Made It

We got home late last night. We had some weather issues in Minneapolis and that set us back a few hours. Annika was a trooper, she slept most of the way home and only got fussy while we were sitting in the plane in Minneapolis for two hours waiting to take off.

We weren't sure how Annika would react to everyone once we got home, but we shouldn't have worried. It was love at first site when she saw her brother. He got giggles and she couldn't stop kissing him. She would go for his cheek every time he got within kissing distance. She was still very happy to see him this morning. She also really likes her Grandma and Grandpa. She is still trying to figure out the dog but thinks she may like him and hasn't really seen much of the cat yet.

Since I didn't do as much posting as I had planned from China, I am planning on posting more pictures and things here over the next few days to catch everyone up.