Maia, growing up

Maia has been through such changes. And she's taken us with her. She's changed so much that we have had to change, too. We can't be with her the way she was when she was 2 or 3--the time even since the beginning of this year when she was 3 1/2 seems like a quantum level of development behind where she is now.

Today, we stopped to get noodles after a short trip to the park. Seattle is having a record-breaking rainy season, and it was just too soggy and wet to stay.



She and I were sitting opposite each other, and she began to mimic me, mirroring everything that I did, and finding this a great source of amusement.



The mischievous that showed in her smile and laughter has always been there. It was one of the things that pulled so strongly at us from the very beginning, the other being her vulnerability. I remember the look on her face when they brought her into the Director's office to meet us. She was so apprehensive and fearful. When they left us alone with her, she promptly fell asleep in my arms. When they took her back, she cried and reached out to me. Even though I recognized that it was just a reflex, I knew then that something would die in me if we left her behind.

That's still there, too--the vulnerability, the tentativeness we see with her sometimes.

But everything is so much deeper now--the play with mimicking me. She'll tease me, too, with pretending to cry or be angry, and then laugh when I puncture the act. The other day, when I praised her for stopping whining and carrying on about something she wanted, she said, "I was faking it."



This is earlier in the day--we were out shopping, and she made a great show while crossing the street with Kristina and her Auntie Linda of being tossed about by the wind...



and then playing with Auntie Linda...



and Kristina inside the store.

I remember feeling so proud of myself in school for having thought to pose the question, "Well, then, why birth control?", to Plato's thesis that sex is about seeking immortality.

All of that intellectualizing things seems so irrelevant.

At the end of the day, yesterday, Maia sat in my lap and we looked at photos from her first summer with us. She smiled and laughed at some of them. She knows herself, in some way that doesn't change.









John, Wednesday, November 22, 2006.