Easier

It's gotten easier to watch my video. I actually just watched it again without crying a single tear. It is definitely healing, because I'm watching it and remembering just how wonderful it was. Not easy, but wonderful.

So I decided to share some of the stories of those pictures. Like the first one, the Cabbage Patch. The doll was on her bed. When she came into the room she saw it and her eyes just lit up, she looked at me and then at her foster mom, and I told her it was her doll and she should go hold it. First thing she did - check the diaper!

And the fruit. Do you see the one where her mouth is WIDE open? She couldn't shovel that stuff in fast enough. She loved fruit! Except for the time she ordered it instead of fries with dinner and told me she wanted to put ketchup on the fruit. I said that was gross but she said it was good. I don't have a picture of it, but you can imagine how she looked trying to pretend she actually liked the ketchup on her canteloupe.

The zoo, there's one picture where she's with her foster mom and foster sister and they're looking at some animal you can't see. The animal was Zaboomafoo, from the Kroft brothers show. I was so happy she liked that show also (in Spanish, "¿Dónde? Aquí, en Discovery Kids,") because it was one of Jenna's absolute favorite shows.

The pigeon pictures. There's one where she has her hands up, she had just fed them some bird seed. The other one she's trying to catch a pigeon (una paloma), and there's another little girl also in the picture. That was supposed to be her Bat Mitzvah picture. Just the juxtaposition of the two girls, similar ages, but Ingrid in her American clothes and the other girl in Mayan fabric, and then imagining a 13-year old NY Jewish-American princess compared to the same little girl at age 4 chasing pigeons...

The pictures with the sippy cup. She called that her pacha (bottle). She didn't really need a sippy cup, but I had them just in case. I brought them more to have cups in our room, but she loved her cup. Every time we'd leave the room she'd check that I had a pacha for her (and she also had her handbag - you can even see the little red handbag in the zoo pictures).

The last two of me and Ingrid together, Angel took those. You can see why they're so special to me.

And the pictures in the baby room, where she's laying on the baby mat thing with a teddy bear. She saw the other babies doing it, she wanted to do it also. A little regression. No problem, I thought that was completely normal.

And for the record, she did her own hair every day. I didn't touch her hair, even though I totally wanted to see what it would be like to style such great thick straight hair. I did braid it once when she didn't realize, when she was watching TV and didn't realize I did it (old trick I learned from dealing with my sister who absolutely refused to have anyone ever touch her hair). So the extra barrettes or the "wind-blown look," those are the true marks of an independent preschooler.

Thanks for convincing me to do a video. It's helping.