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I get to hear this EVERY day. My girl loves to sing!

Welcome to the Lulu Chronicles!!!

Well hello all! “Lulu” is my amazing cleft lip and palate kiddo who came home from China early November 2005 at almost 35 months old with a repaired lip and unrepaired grade III palate.

She’s so unbelievably mature for just 3. If It weren’t for the occasional toddler meltdown over minutia - like wiping a drippy nose, I’d swear she was 10. She’s got that cock her head back, roll her eyes, heavy sigh and the long, whiny “Mo------M” of a precocious preteen down to a T.

She’s also got the manual dexterity of a kid so much older. She can unwrap a DVD in record time. Half the time, I can’t even do it myself! I put an old imac computer in her room, and once she figured out how to turn it on, I couldn’t stop her. She can start it up, log into the program by clicking her name and maneuver that mouse like a pro. She seems to be a lefty, but right hands the mouse with ease. I won’t go into all the the stuff she can do there, just suffice it to say that I can remember doing the same things in the first grade. (Of course that’s just kids these days, my nephew is in kindergarten and he has to do more than I did in fourth grade.)

Lulu announced last week that she’s too big for a bath and now wants to shower like me. We showered together for a few days, but since then she’s been on her own. I just sit nearby and watch as she picks out her panties and pajamas, gets undressed, hops on the potty, gets in the shower (at least she lets me turn on the water), brushes her teeth, washes her hair, rinses, cleans up. She still lets me dry her up, but then she dresses herself and scampers off for story time. And here we are 5 months post adoption and yet to have an accident of any kind, day or night - not eve a close call. I swear the foster mother who trained her could make a fortune selling her potty training secrets.


She’s in preschool five days a week, 7:30-4:30 and doing really well. She got a really good report card (can’t believe they do that for three year olds!) In fact, they move her up to the four year old class several days a week when too many kids in the 2-3 class show up on the same day. She’s done really well in that class too according to the teachers.


I’ve been LUCKY in the attachment area. Lulu tolerated me in China about 20% of the time and despised me the other 80%, but she was grieving. Since getting off the plane here, I’ve become THE mama for sure. If anyone talks to me for too long, Lulu will interrupt and say forcefully, “MY Mama!” So there... I did have one of those magical moments last week that are just simply priceless. We were watching video of our visit to the Guilin SWI where Lulu got to see her foster parents. She loves to watch it. I’ve asked her many times how she felt then, and she’ll answer, “Lulu was sad. Miss Mama and Baba.” It has seemed that watching gives her some sort of comfort, rather than making her sad, so, we watch it often. Anyway, we were watching last week and as it finishes she points to me and says, “I like this Mama, the pretty one. Lulu stay here. No China.” I told her that of course she was going to stay here, but we could go visit Mama and Baba in China someday and then she just smiled and bounded off to play.



One day, she’d been particularly good and I told her she could pick out a small toy at the store. She picks this 30 piece puzzle and I just think, oh great, she never does the puzzles we have at home and she wants yet another one (for ages 4-6 to boot). So we come home and she just is enthralled with the thing. She has incredible spacial sense - she picks up a piece and sticks it in the right space. She looks at it and says, hey, that’s her glasses, or it’s his toe, and boom, to the right place it goes. Me, the idiot mom, thought she didn’t like puzzles because there were about 5 unused ones just stacked in the toy bins - and it turns out the chunky wooden stick the chicken piece in the chicken hole were just too easy. Bad mama... I’m really starting to think she might have something close to a photographic memory. Just a few weeks ago I was looking a a video on the blog of a friend of mine - just a 10 second snippet of her baby toddling down the White Swan hallway and Lulu, from across the room shouts, “Hey, China!” I ask her what she’s talking about , she makes me rewind and she points to the carpet and the wall points off into the distance and says, “China, member Mama?” (like, you imbecile) and then points at the carpet in the video again. “See?” Well, yep, I do. And here’s another one about her memory. On gotcha day in China, we were back in the hotel and I was in the bathroom with my guide doing paperwork and Lulu was with my traveling companion, screaming in the bedroom. Finally, my friend started singing “Hush little baby...” and we discovered she would stop crying if we were singing. I sang the same song later in the evening, but I could never remember much beyond “If that diamond ring turns brass/don’t shine” so I switched to other lullaby songs and never sang it again until a couple of weeks ago. Lulu was sick and cranky and resisting sleep and I had gone through all the goodnight songs we normally sing. Then I resorted to Hush Little baby and Lulu’s eyes opened wide and she smiled, “Mama! Pretty song, from China!!” I didn’t even remember at first.


Most people say we look alike, I can see it a bit, but in many ways we are so much alike, stubborn (boy will there be head butting in the teen years!) and creative (she’s got an amazing capacity for imaginative play - today we were invaded by flying, toothless, blue and white furry monsters with only one eye and one leg. We had to stay under the covers for safety and if we needed to venture out, we had to wear socks on our hands for protection. I had nothing to do with this, it was all Lulu creation.) She’s also incredibly sweet and compassionate - a friend of mine had a serious cut on his finger and was all bandaged up - so Lulu was the nurse, face stroking, offering food, asking over and over, “you want____?” Okay, Lulu get it.”

People who I tell of the adoption (still no one has asked me) say she’s a lucky girl. I’m the one that is so very lucky to have her in my life (I did, however, save her from a life of 8 layers of clothing - I’ve never seen a child who likes to be naked and cold as much as possible. Yes, I live in California, but I was always a “sleep with the heat off and the window open” kinda gal, even when the temperatures dropped down to the 30’s. That was one of the things about adopting a child that I knew I’d have to give up. But this kiddo puts me to shame; I can be freezing and she’s running around shirtless in panties and flip flops saying “Mama, I tooooo hot!”)

On the medical front, we finally did get the UCSF cranio-facial appointment in a few weeks ago, and Lulu was scheduled for palate surgery on the 30th. The dentists says she’s got horrible tooth decay (‘course what can you expect from three years of not brushing and not the best of nutrition?) and the audiologist says she’s currently suffering from mild to moderate hearing loss from the fluid in her ears (should be cleared up with the tubes), but all in all, she’s healthy and should do well with surgery. Of course one of her decayed teeth has absessed this week and the surgeron has decided it would be better to complete the dental work first and then repair the palate with no risk of infection in the rotted teeth. Joy of joys, more delays. Of course given my journey to Lulu, I guess I should expect everything to at a snail’s pace.



On the downside, I still can’t get her to sleep in her own bed, hopefully after surgery we will work on that, I can only take so many more foot-jabs to the nose and abdomen before I have to take myself to the ER. She’s also a total backseat driver and is always telling me to be careful, watch out for that car, go that way, etc.! And she has an unnatural obsessive fascination with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I have seen that movie every day since Christmas. I would kill the person who purchased that DVD for her if it wouldn’t make Lulu an orphan all over again. If I find myself singing “The old bamboo” in the shower again, I think I will have to kill myself. She can be so defiant and persistent when she wants her own way. She’s so good about using “please” but can’t quite grasp why 100 PulhLEEEEZEs wont work when she wants candy for breakfast. She’ll usually lecture me with one hand on her hip and one finger waving in admonishment, “Mama, listen Lulu! Lulu LIKE candy. Lulu WANT candy. Candy NOW, not later! Humph!” Like I said, the teen years are going to be some kind of fun!

But I’m so thankful to everyone who supported me on the crazy journey to this remarkable little girl. I also owe Love Without Boundaries, Grace & Hope foster care and Half the Sky foundation a huge debt of gratitude for all they did for my girl the first 34 months of her life. I recently received the translations of her HTS reports and it is nothing short of amazing how far she has come. She entered the program at 11 months at which they wrote “ her eyes were dull looking and she was physically weak... She could not yet sit up alone... Neither could she crawl to a toy... She doesn’t yet speak...” So there. That’s what these programs do - from a very delayed, sad little babe to the spunky, little wonder I’ve got here. If you can afford it, please sponsor a child in one of these programs. It makes ALL the difference in the world.



So I love my Lulu to pieces. She’s just the most perfect match for me. I still have the occasional frazzled moment where I think, what in the world have I done here? But they are more and more outnumbered by those precious moments of sticky fingers stroking my face, uncontrollable giggles and I love you, Mamas. Oh, this is just the best thing ever.