GetWat

Chae Wrote:

The first thing we did today was go shopping for Joshua’s shoes before he got too tired. We had a hard time finding shoes for him. Bangkok has many places to shop from several malls to street venders but very few sold children’s shoes and then the selection was extremely limited. The shoes in the picture were the best we could find but Joshua didn’t seem to care much. He said “yes” to any new shoes we showed him. He has been working with the Rosetta Stone English software this week and he was able to tell us the color of his shoes in English-- “Gray”, “Orange”, and “Black.”

We are fascinated by how smart he is and how fast he learns. The Rosetta Stone Software has a word selection game with photos and he will play it for hours. Throughout the day he repeats the words he learns. Today he learned country names. He walked around saying “Germany” “Finland” “England” “Italy”. He started saying “come on mommy” “Excuse me”, “Thank you very much”, “no hungry”, and “full” on the 2nd day.

Unlike many other older child adoptions, our Joshua trusted us from the beginning. He doesn’t care where he goes as long as he is with us. He likes to play ball and swim with us. But he also likes to play alone. He spent at least 2-3 hours at different times playing with his cars and army toys. His caregivers mentioned to us that he liked to do it at the facility but never was able to because of so many little ones. He played for hours with his new Lego Pirates set his friend he has known for a long time who now lives in the US sent to me to give him. He said “Wasin” when we showed him the photo that was taped on the box.

Today, mommy scored big time by surprising Joshua with swimming goggles. He is so determined to learn how to swim. He seemed very frustrated the first day at the pool. I think he believed he would be able to swim automatically once he got in the water. Today he started to put his face in the water and had fun repeating that. He started out covering his whole face with his hands when he went underwater but after a while he did it without covering his face. He doesn’t want us to help him. He just wants us to stand back and watch what he can do. So we just stood around and cheered as he tried to learn.

PS:
Joshua let me help him get ready for bed tonight. At first he didn’t want me to but gave in later. I think we are making progress.

Todd Wrote:

Joshua is very curious about any type of electronics. He loves the computer and will play the language game for hours. We also had a little incident with the electronic safe in the room. We keep our wallets, laptop, video camera, etc in there and just make sure it is locked whenever we leave the room. Today I went to get something from the safe and when I entered the code I had set it wouldn’t unlock. Turns out, at some point, Joshua figured out how to punch in the key sequence to lock it but couldn’t tell us what the code was to unlock it. We had to get hotel security to come up and unlock it for us. Will have to remember his curiosity toward electronics when we get home or who knows what could happen—I’m picturing microwave and fork for starters.