Doing great!

We've been home all of 36 hours now, and Alex is settling in like he has always been here.

He actually went to bed in his own room the first night, popped up and down a few times as usual, then went to sleep. I knew that was too good to be true, though, and sure enough he was knocking on my bedroom door all night. He didn't want to come in because the dogs were in there, so I would go out, spend a few minutes with him and tuck him back into bed. After a few rounds of this I gave up and just got in bed with him (a double bed, thank goodness!). He still woke up often, but at least I could stay lying down and just repeat to him, Night Night!

He slept until 9 a.m., then was wide awake and ready for the day. We had breakfast, then spent some time trying to introduce him to the dogs. The first night he had finally reached the point where he would pet Sophie's back (Sophie is a fairly laid-back collie). Now we had a chance to work on the much scarier Roxy (a big active German shepherd). He is understandably pretty scared of both of the dogs, but we got him to toss a ball for Roxy for a while, and he thought that was fun as long as I took the ball out of her mouth. Progress! He went along on the dogs' walk, although he made Caroline stay a few prudent steps behind the dogs at all times.

I did battle with Alex's car seat for a while, and finally figured out how to install it. It's been a while! It has a five-point harness and I expected him to fight us on it, but he has finally accepted that he has to stay buckled in.

Then it was off to the grocery store. First we hit Assi, the huge Asian supermarket, where he pointed to absolutely everything including things we knew he did not like. We did pick up some snacks including rice cakes, but the brand is different from what he LOVED in China so we will have to see if these are as popular. We also went to the American grocery to get essentials like ice cream for Caroline and chicken nuggets for Alex ( those and french fries were very big hits when we ate at non-Chinese spots in China).

Next we went to the school district to re-enroll the girls so they can start back to school Monday. They had been disenrolled after missing 10 days, which didn't happen until Friday since Hurricane Sandy closed school for three days. Monday I'll take Alex in to register him for school, and he will start Tuesday.

After lunch Caroline decided it would be fun to rake leaves, so she and Alex started in on our small front lawn. They had a good time, but of course Mom had to bag up everything.

Soon the neighborhood kids started walking home from school, and the real fun began. Alex was running around with all of them, happy as could be.

We did have a strange moment when my neighbor's 16-year-old son stopped to say hello. For some reason Alex decided Kevin should understand Chinese and tried to have a conversation with him, even though he has not tried to speak Chinese with anyone else since we left China. Poor Kevin just stood there, unsure what to do! Later Alex met our friend's Chinese exchange student who tried to talk to him, and Alex just walked away. But it's good to know the young man is there if we hit a real impasse in communicating with Alex.

In China Alex was taking a nap every day; it's been part of his routine. But yesterday when we ate lunch, he said, "Mama. No night-night. Okay?" So we said okay, and he indeed got through the day without one. That was a relief since he won't be able to nap once school starts next week. I had hoped that with his sleep schedule disrupted coming here we could make the transition. Fingers crossed that his new schedule sticks!

He is already understanding so much English; it's amazing. He was helping to clear the table after the kids had a snack yesterday and started to put something in the closet. I just said, kind of absently, no, that doesn't go in the closet, it goes in the refrigerator. He immediately closed the closet door, walked to the refrigerator and put it inside, with no other prompting.

Last night he asked to go to bed around 8, but wanted me to go to bed with him. I was helping Caroline with a project and said no, Mama is not ready to go to bed. He asked if I would be coming up to sleep soon with the dogs. I said yes, and he said "Wait," and indicated he wanted to sleep in my room even though the scary dogs would be in there. And he did indeed wait. Leah was in my room watching TV, so after getting up several times he just went in to lie down on my bed with her. He didn't wake up when I came upstairs, and slept through most of the night. I'm not surprised, since he has never slept in a room alone. We'll worry about getting him to sleep in his room sometime in the future; for now this is fine.

Today we are heading out to the farmer's market in Phoenixville for an event that our dog rescue group is doing; Caroline is in puppy withdrawal! She made a poster last night for the event to ask for donations for two abused and neglected dogs that our rescue is taking in. As we wrote the message for the poster about these poor dogs, she said, "This is why we do what we do." She has a big heart!