Maia and I fooling around.  This was from May of this year.

John, Monday, December 10, 2012.

This was Maia and I playing "nostril flare war" on April 1st of this year.  I had forgotten about this and found it while doing computer archaeology.

John, Monday, December 10, 2012

I take a chance

On the way to the Bark Park tonight, Maia pulled back her lips and looked at her incisors in the mirror in the visor.

"Do I look weird?" she wanted to know.  Her incisors are growing over her baby teeth.

"A lot of kids have that," I said.  "We'll take you to an orthodontist."

"Mom already did," she said.

"Well, we'll take you back when they all grow out."

She studied herself somemore.

"That's why they got rid of you," I said.  "You're a vampire!" And I tickled her.

"If I'm a vampire, they're vampires, too!" she said.

"They want to take over the world!" I said.  And tickled her somemore.

She laughed a lot.

I joked with her once before about things that cause her paid.  It was this year.  She had come out of a doctor's appointment, and I asked, "Did they find anything else missing?"

She had laughed.

The pic is of Maia and Cocoa at the Bark Park tonight.

Maia asks a question

"Did my biological mother know that I was missing an ear?" "Yes." "Then why did she leave me?" "We don't know, Maia." "I have an idea. What if she left me because I'm missing an ear?" "Well, we don't know for sure. But that is possible." Maia asked me these questions while we were out at dinner tonight. The pic is of her grooming Cocoa as I wrote this. (Well, it looks like I'll have to add the pic later on.) John, Monday, Dec. 2, 2012

Maia plays a game with Lana

We took Alana with us to the Bark Park, today. She's a little girl who lives down the street, also adopted, and also from Kazakhstan. At the bark Park, Maia and Lana were playing on a tree. I had tried to get them to come down from it and stay down from it because Lana had an injured foot. But towards the end of the hour--we always stay at the Bark Park for about an hour--Maia and Lana were up the tree again, Maia ahead of Lana. I insisted that they come down. Lana initiated a gave of tag with Maia, probably because Maia was higher up the tree than she could hope to get with her hurt foot, and she wanted to put Maia one down to her. But Maia tagged her back and that either caused or happened at the time that Lana slid down the tree. Lana ended up on her belly on the ground, which was a little muddy. Lana was crying and angry at Maia, and dirty from the fall. I helped her to clean off, but she stayed angry at Maia. On the way back in the case, Maia kept trying to get Lana to talk to her, but she wouldn't. Lana is 9 but acts like she's 5. Finally, in response to a protest from Lana that she stop, Maia said, "But I'm not Maia." "Who are you?" Lana wanted to know. "Cocoa," Maia said. Although it didn't last, Lana talked to her for a time then. Funny, how such a pretense had the power to break the ice between them. Creative, for Maia to come up with that. John, Sunday, December 2, 2012.