Home One Year

Ivelina came home from Bulgaria on June 15, 2014. It will be an easy date to remember because it was also my sister's birthday. My sister spent her birthday last year grocery shopping with my mom to fill our pantry and fridge. Then, she and my mom got our house cooled down and waited patiently for us to drive Ivie home from the Charlotte, NC airport.

We celebrated her one year anniversary by doing some family photos in the back yard.  Ivelina's dress is a bit special because it was Jeremy's sister's dress when she was a little girl. We had fun! Enjoy!

Ivelina's (1st) 9th Birthday Party!

I had a blast planning Ivelina's 9th birthday party. It dawned on us that even though she turned nine, this was probably her first birthday party. SO many friends and family came to join us. I told Ivelina that this party was full of people who loved her and cared for her. 

I originally wanted to have the party at a picnic shelter at our local park, but the Saturdays in May were all booked up. I was disappointed at first, but it turned out to be way more fun and less stressful to have her party at home. It was sweet day!

I have to admit that I was a little worried over how she would handle the whole experience. To prepare her we did several things. We have pretended birthday party before with her stuffed animals to learn about all the things that typically happen at a party. Ya know...opening gifts, eating cake, singing "Happy Birthday." It also helped that we brought her home right after her birthday last year, and she experienced a whole year of family members' birthdays this past year. She has also attended one of her friend's (kids) party as well. A few days before her birthday, I did some modeling practicing with her about how to open gifts and receive them graciously. I tried to teach her to go slowly, and take everything out of the box to examine it.  Don't rush! I taught her the phrase "I like it" and "I love it." Additionally, I emphasized to her that she should pay attention to who gave her the gift and go thank them for it immediately after opening. 

Once the gift opening began, she got a little excited and tried to rush through the packages, but with a little guidance, she did okay. I am very proud of her. 

Ivelina loves all things ocean lately, so her party had an ocean theme.

 We had a beautiful scuba diver ocean cake made by my friend's mom. 

I was very proud of my shark fruit bowl creation. That sculpting class from college came in handy!

 My hubby handled most of the outdoor decorations by hanging streamers, curling ribbon, and balloons all over our house. He really did a great job!

 Ivelina is not really interested in games with parameters and rules, so I steered clear of those. The only game I really had planned was a pinata. This clown fish pinata was one of the priciest items I purchased for the party and, ironically, this was the only let-down of the party. Go figure!  With the second blow, the little hook detached from the fish's back. So, we quickly made a new hole for it in the tail fin, and with another blow, it broke again. I finally just ripped the thing open and slung candy and treats all around the yard. The kids got candy. They were happy. I learned that next time, I will make my own instead of wasting twenty bucks. 

For activities, we stuck to simple, open-ended games like

 a sand box dig for buried treasure. I hid some dollar store finds in there.

Balloons and beach balls on the trampoline. Don't underestimate the fun of balloons. I blew up around 35 balloons for this party, and almost all of them got played with and popped by the end of the night.

The swing set provided some fun as well!

Her birthday was so much fun. I can't wait to do it all again next year.

Happy Birthday Ivelina!!

Happy 9th Birthday to our sweet and spunky Ivelina! This morning she enjoyed her favorite breakfast treat: doughnuts.

And she woke up to a decorated bedroom door.

Then, Jeremy and I gave her our present, a new big girl bike!  She has already wrecked one time, but she loves it!

We also had visits from family and friends this afternoon. Saturday is Ivie's birthday party!  I have had a lot of fun planning the big day.

I love you, Ivie. Hope your birthday is great!

Amazing Language Development

Ivelina's language development has been the most amazing thing to witness. I imagine her whole world has been transformed by this language acquisition that has taken place so rapidly over the past 10 months. I am so proud of her and so happy to finally be speaking all English around here. If you have or are getting ready to bring home a child from another country, here's a little timeline of how some of this development took place + a few pics just for fun.

June 2014 -

• Ivelina knew zero English. In fact, her Bulgarian communication was not really that strong either. We didn't know any better, but our translators said she spoke a very garbled Bulgarian.  Tone was very sharp and loud.
• After being home one week, I counted ten English words she was already using. She was only using one English word at a time. "Snack," "Bye-bye," "pool," "block," and "chicken" were among some of her first words.
• She watched and still watches the old show "Emergency," which helped teach her about emergency workers and helped her learn some new words too.

July 2014 -

•  She began putting together small 2-3 word phrases. "Clean up," "Little bit," and " five minutes" were some of her first 2-word phrases. "Close your eyes" was the first 3 word phrase she used.
• She began to sing along with just a few letters of the alphabet song. "Q, R, S" was the first series of letters she would say during the song. 
• We began library visits and while she mostly checked out board books featuring babies, that was okay. The library has proved to be one of the best things we have done for Ivie's language development. 

August 2014 -

• I wrote in my journal that she was saying too many words and phrases to count. Around this time, she began sleeping more. 10+ hours at night plus sleeping during afternoon nap time. This lasted for a few weeks before easing off. This coincided with a language explosion!  I'm sure her little brain was worn out and needed more rest during this time. Literally everything she had heard, smelled, seen, and tasted was new, and I'm sure that amazing brain of hers was on complete overload.

 September 2014 -

• Ivelina began home school.  Everything was struggle. It took about two months to just get her in the routine of doing school each day. It was like teaching a toddler in an 8 year old body. SO demanding and tiring for us all. However, her vocabulary continued to grow and develop nicely. She was using all sorts of medical terminology and started to learn parts of the body as well. 
• Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood became the only kids show she would really watch. Boy has that show been great for vocabulary, life lessons, songs. I still reference some lesson or some jingle from that show every day

October  2014 -

• Ivelina gained an interest in the human body. She picked up all sorts of new anatomy terms like patella, skull, vein, artery, brain, ribs, skeleton, etc. She was also learning all about different kinds of animals and retaining tons of new vocabulary from non-fiction animal books like predator, prey, hunt, tusks, claws, stripes, fur coat, etc. She loved and still loves songs, but she could only really chime in on the last word of a phrase. She was listening and enjoying the beats though.
• Ivie knew 7 letter sounds! She could form 3 letters (H, T, E) without help. She could recognize 12 lower case and 18 upper case letters!
• Ivelina learned a little prayer she could say before meals.
• By this time, I would say she genuinely loved read aloud time before bed each night. We started this habit very early on even while we were still in Bulgaria with her, but it took her quite a while to gain interest.
• Probably speaking about 50/50 Bulgarian and English at home. Reverts back to using more Bulgarian when around new people or places though. 

November 2014 -

• She seemed to go through another one of those tired phases again as we moved from October to November. I'm sure her brain was going through another swell of language learning. 
• Vocabulary continued to swell at an amazing rate as Ivelina became more interested in space. She was learning all sorts of new information from non-fiction space books. She was saying the names of planets and knew all about Neil Armstrong, Tim Collins, and Buzz Aldrin. She also learned a new set of vocabulary words like orbit, planet, moon, gravity, gas, satellite, etc. 
• We also started working with her on phrases like "May I have a ____?" and "Thank you for ___" and "Please help me ____"  She was already stringing together long phrases by this point, but her requests tended to be bossy and her speaking manners were lacking. She picked up on these pretty quickly.
• She also started asking us randomly what letter different objects started with. At meals she would just name thing after thing wanting us to tell her what it started with.  

 

December 2014 -

• We started reading Bible stories during Advent season which sparked a whole new vocabulary set as she learned about the birth of Jesus. She also began watching a few more movies, and it seemed like she could actually follow along with the plot. Many movies lost her interest, but Dolphin Tale was a winner! That was the first movie she would sit all the way through without moving. This sparked a huge interest in dolphins and marine life. Right before Christmas, she became really interested in scuba divers, probably because the suit is irresistible to her. Of course, for every new interest, we check out every book from the library that we can find on the topic. She knows all the parts of a scuba diver's suit as well as all the parts of a dolphin.  
• She began using some practical phrases when we were out and about like "Hi, how are you today?" and she learned to answer simple questions about herself like the answer to "What's your name" and "How old are you?"
• For LOTS of words, she would say the word consecutively in Bulgarian and English like this phrase looking for her shoes: "Kade shoe obuvki?"  Also this phrase stating that she is thirsty: "As jhadna thirsty."

 

January 2015-

• Ivie knew 12 letter sounds. She could form 15 letters independently, some upper and some lower case. She recognized 23 upper case letters and 16 lower case letters. 
• We started reading a family Bible story in the morning and asking her comprehension questions. She also started a short independent reading time each day.  She began memorizing parts of books that she liked, and had become quite comfortable with our library visits. By this time, our Saturday morning library visits had become a tradition and she had become very comfortable with where all her favorite sections were. I used to have to drag her away from the stuffed animals to help me choose books, but by this time, she was mostly just sitting on the floor with a pile of books around her flipping through the pages the entire time. 

 

February/March 2015-

• Using about 80% English by this point. She would still tend to use a bit more Bulgarian when around new people or places. Using very long phrases. Can sing along with some songs now and parts of songs. Knows the whole abc song. Can watch 30 minute cartoons and understand the plot. Has many favorite books and topics to read about. 

 

April 2015-

• I would say Ivelina is using about 95% English at home. She still has some phrases and words she is holding onto from her first language like "Iska" for I want, "tuk" for here, and "chi-cho" for man. Occasionally I hear her say an old Bulgarian word or phrase, and I can tell she has almost forgotten how to say it. Her English pronunciation needs lots of improvement, but it is better than her Bulgarian pronunciation at this point. She can speak in long sentences now. Her vocabulary is out of this world in my opinion, and she has such a readiness to read!  That'll be our big project next year in school-- get this girl reading!  
• She knows 25 letter sounds and can write 29 letters independently. She knows 100% of her upper case letters and can recognize all the lower case letters accept p, b, d, and q.  Boy, those 4 are tricky!
• She can sing some songs all the way through, and she has memorized 3 Bible verses that she can recite verbally.
• She also has some English words that really tickle her funny bone for some reason. Beautiful, bushel, bully, and old woman are among some of the words that are silly to her.  lol
• Ivelina just had another evaluation for speech services today in our home. Even though we plan to home school again next year, we hope to use speech services this summer and during the year at our local public school. She continues to need help with articulation.

The progress she has gone through language-wise never ceases to amaze me! What a resilient and powerful thing this child's brain must be to be able to complete such a huge transition in such a short period of time. The speech teacher today had not seen her since October and seconded the amazing progress she has made in her language.  Language is just one of many facets of Ivelina that has transformed over the past 10 months. We are so proud of Ivelina for how brave, quirky, unique, and smart she is!

Thanks for reading,

-Shelly

We chose her two years ago

I was reading through all the different parts of our blog, remembering Sudan and laughing at the good times we had there. I read back through several old posts on adoption, and then I remembered our adoption timeline. I glanced over it marveling at how God brought us through that process.

It has been over three years since Jeremy and I sat down on a New Year's Eve and decided together that we were going to adopt. I remember the two years leading up to that moment were agonizing at times for me because I really wanted to add a child to our family. We had not been able to get pregnant, and I just knew adoption was for us, but I had to wait a long time for Jeremy to join in this decision. I was so happy and relieved that New Year's Eve 2011.

Then, Mother's Day 2012, we announced to our moms and families that we were going to adopt. I was so excited about the way we revealed this to our moms. I made a handmade card for each of them. Inside I wrote a cute little adoption poem...I think it said something about how they were going to be grandmas, and I pasted images of our adoption agency's logo, the country flags of the countries we were considering, etc. They were excited and emotional to receive this good news.

Then, summer of 2012, as soon as we returned from our mission trip to Africa, we mailed off our official application to AGCI. I remember we were nervously excited because now we were starting to put money with our decision to adopt. It was becoming much more real.

Little did I know that there was more nervous excitement to come. It seemed like every step of this adoption was met with anxious, tempered excitement. Later on in the fall of 2012 we held a couple of fundraisers and sent in our first big set of agency fees. We were officially contracted with AGCI, we had officially chosen to pursue Bulgaria, and we "met" our case worker over the phone. She was with us every step of the way!

Then from October 2012 until May 2013 we were in the home study phase. I know we were nervous about "passing" the home study...haha.  But, it really wasn't all that bad and we enjoyed meeting our local home study social worker. All that time, we still has no idea what type of child we would adopt. I was constantly wondering if it would be a boy or girl, toddler or older child or baby, special needs or not. We struggled with how wide to set our parameters and we ended up keeping them pretty wide open so that we would qualify to adopt many types of children. The open-ness of our parameters made it really difficult to imagine what kind of child would eventually become part of our family.

While we were still completing our home study, we saw an email profile of a little girl. I remember forwarding the email to Jeremy while he was at work with a simple message that said, "I want her." After some conversations and prayer, that simple email led to us inquiring about this little girl. Amazingly, no one else had expressed interest in her yet. She was meant for us!  It was this time TWO YEARS AGO that she was put "on hold" for our family. We could finally imagine our family with a little girl added in the mix. That little girl was who we now know as Miss Ivelina Anne.

I can't believe two years has already passed since that day we committed to her. I still remember where I was sitting when I saw that email and her photo. Now she is a thriving part of our family. It's starting to feel like the days of re-doing home studies, getting fingerprinted what seemed like every month, and frantically changing flight plans due to Jeremy's emergency kidney stone surgery are far behind. Sometimes, I have a hard time remembering what things were like before Ivelina was skipping down our hallway and riding her trike out in the driveway. It is good for me to have this blog so that I will always have memory of our adoption, all the ups, all the downs, all the stress, and all the joy of finally bringing our little girl home.

It was also sweet to see at the end of our adoption timeline the words I had typed:  "Finished. HOME with Ivelina."  Made me smile.

Home Schooling in March

Recently, Ivelina has learned letters U, K, and R from the Letter of the Week curriculum. It is hard to believe that she only has 4 letters left!  In April, we are taking a small break from our normal curriculum to study farms and farm animals. Ivelina loves farm animals, so I'm looking forward to that unit.

Here is a recap of what we have learned in recent weeks.

Letter K - The theme was "kite," and Ivie had a lot of fun making these color matching kites. They are still decorating our pantry doors.

One day we took a trip to the park to fly Ivie's new kite. It was a beautiful, windy Spring day!

This is Ivelina and Jeremy watching her shark kite as it soared in the air.

Our little cheap dollar store kite tore after a few flights, but it was still fun chasing it around.

Flying kites is fun, but Ivelina's favorite park activity is swinging!

Letter R - The theme for letter R was rainbow, and we had a fun week of letter R activities. Pinterest is full of rainbow ideas. I pinned like 20 and only tried a few though.

I found a site a few weeks ago where I can print little printable letter books, and we have been doing one every week. They give Ivelina practice cutting, coloring, tracing the letter, and copying words. Because there is only one picture and one word on each page, she can actually "read" the book by herself. 

I used to do this little craft with tissue paper all the time when I was little. Ya know....wrapping small squares of tissue around a pencil head and sticking it in glue. I remember months ago when we first tried this out, she really struggled with the required fine motor skills and needed lots of help. Now, however, Ivie can do this craft independently! It always turns out so pretty!

One Pinterest idea we tried--- Every day we looked through magazines and cut out pictures of things that are each color of the rainbow. Then she glued the photos to matching rainbow colored paper. By the end of the week, she had completed a rainbow of colors. We also read the book A Rainbow All Around Me by Sandra L. Pinkney to jump start this project.

This was our favorite activity of the week (another Pinterest find). We made a 3D rainbow on our kitchen floor with items we found throughout our house. It was totally fun!  I actually did not think she would be able to find enough yellow things, but surprisingly we found plenty of items to fill every stripe. She thought it was hilarious to include her bath toys and the leftover pizza from the fridge.

We do this letter matching activity every other week. I keep a set of sticky notes with the capital letters she has learned. I write the lower case letters on our white board, and Ivelina matches them up. She does really well with this activity.

Next week is Spring Break for the Moorhouse Home School, and boy are we all looking forward to that!


Thanks for reading,
Shelly