3 Months

It is hard to believe it but we are coming up on three months home with Zoe. I was gathering pictures to give to our Social Worker for our three months visit and thought I should probably update here as well. Quite obviously I am not very good at updating but I am going to use the "homeschooling-mom-of-four" excuse (yes, I am aware there are homeschooling moms who have many more children then I do who blog quite regularly but I am just going to ignore that). If you want more frequent updates we should probably become Facebook friends but you need to know that that is more frequent in relation to here and that, truth be told, I am only slightly better at updating there.

Our daughter turns 1!

Dutifully eating her cake...at that point she wasn't a fan of sweets.

The Birthday Girl!

Zoe is doing great. She is growing like crazy and has gained over four pounds in the 2 1/2 months she has been home. We are super excited about that as she was in the zero percentile on the (American) weight charts when she came home (I'm not certain but I think that may have put her on the charts!). She has also been hitting milestones like crazy. She was just barely sitting up when I picked her up and we have watched her learn to get to a sitting potion on her own, army crawl, regular crawl, pull herself on to her knees and now she can pull herself up to a standing position. I think she will be cruising along the furniture pretty soon here and I imagine shortly after that we'll have a walker!

Because her smile is super cute...

But so is her pout!

Not a fan of the cold

Attachment has been going very well. We are now done cocooning but I really think that was a huge part of it. She is now giving us unsolicited kisses and will crawl up into our laps whenever we sit down on the floor next to her. She is letting us cuddle her for longer and longer periods of time and I can now feel her sink into me when I hold her. I don't if that makes sense but that is the best way I think to describe it. She has definitely decided that we are who she wants holding her and won't let anyone else hold her...much to the dismay of my mother-in-law...but she understands how huge that is.

She is still the sweet, happy, joyful, easygoing little girl we began to see shortly after she came home but we are also starting to see she knows what she wants and has a definite opinion on things. She is super playful and her favorite games are peek-a-boo and the "This is the way the ladies ride..." game. She also loves books and being read too. A daughter after my own heart!

"How big is Zoe??? So big! (or Zo big as the boys like to say)"

 She has learned quite a few words already. She has Mama, Dada, Jaden, Ethan, and Landon (all three sound a lot like dada), no, ya, and more (which has recently evolved to more-more...because apparently a single more just wasn't more enough). We have worked on" all done" but as she never feels the need to use that one we don't know if she has it or not. She also has a lot of "phrases" that aren't so much words as they are a noise using the same inflection in her voice as we use in ours when saying it i.e. "There she is!" in peek-a-boo. She can't say the words but will uh-uh-uh in the same tone and using the same inflection we use when saying it.

All clean and sweet...

and ready for bed.

Zoe loves music and will clap and sing and do this little shoulder shrug whenever there is music playing. It is crazy similar to the way the Oromo people (of which she is one) in ET do in one of their traditional dances. She already loves shoes and will kiss the pages in her little words board book whenever we get to the page with the shoes on it. That coupled with the fact that she seems to have an affinity for sparky things (as in jewelry) already has Eric a little scared since she already has him wrapped around her little finger and he's pretty sure he can't say no to her...ever. ;) She is definitely a daddy's girl.



She also LOVES food. That girl can put food away! Her first love, though, is and has been since first coming home, her bottle. I'm pretty sure the longest 30 seconds in her life are the 30 seconds it takes to heat her bottle up in the microwave. We try and hide it when we are making her bottle because, based on her reaction to the 30 second wait, you would think we were dangling it in front of her, just out of her reach, purely to taunt her. She. Freaks. Out.

The boys have been LOVING having a little sister, Everything she does is beyond cute to them. I knew my boys would be great big brothers after watching them with their cousins but they have blown me away. They are so sweet with her and it just melts my heart. There is this side of them that I just didn't get to see a whole lot of when they were just the rough-and-tumble, crazy, loud, lets-wrestle-again, Mom-we-figured-out-how-to-literally-climb-up-the-walls, Nurmi Boys. They are still all that but there are a lot more sweet and tender moments in our house than there were before. They are constantly telling her how cute she is and looks, giving her kisses and cuddles, and playing with her. About a week ago I caught Landon (our youngest boy and the one who had a little breakdown right before I got home with Zoe) singing a song to Zoe that he had made up. I didn't catch all of it but I did hear a couple of off-key lines that went "You are the winner, You are the cutest girl in the world, You are my sweet angel and I love you". My heart melted right then and there. How much we would have missed and our family would have been lacking had we not followed God's call to adopt!




 All and all we are doing really well. We are definitely looking forward to spring (have I mentioned I am a homeschooling mom of four? Oh, I have? Okay.) and being able to be outside more. The older two boys both joined club soccer teams this year and so with two practices a week (luckily they are both on the same nights) plus a game a week with a few tournaments thrown in there we are looking to have a pretty busy spring just with that. But, they are having a great time and burning off some energy and that really is all that matters-I'll let you guess which one of the two I am referring to. ;)