Three years ago...

We saw SS's beautiful face for the first time. Although I love my children equally, and I reacted with equal joy upon seeing their faces, there is something to be said in favor of a fully cooked child. No gooey mess, no swollen face, no cone head. Looking at her referral pictures is something we do daily. SS never fails to note that she WAS a baby in those pictures and now she IS a big girl.

True, in some ways SS is so far removed from those pictures. Her facial features have changed significantly. Then there's the hair, the hair her grandpa gushed about when he met her one month after we arrived home. Grandpa requested that we keep her hair long, because it was "beautiful and lustrous." As I have said many times, I asked if he was willing to move nearby and take over hair duties. Although her physical growth has not been what we hoped for, she has grown, she is no longer that tiny little baby. She has lost the baby chub she acquired when she came home, her elongated face tells her age to the careful observer.

In many other ways SS is still the little girl in those pictures. We often see the deer caught between headlights look of her mug shot (middle picture). And in a weird way we can't explain, it has become our favorite. Maybe because other than her blurry finding ad, it is the earliest picture we have of our daughter. We have also been blessed by many smiles and laughs, like the picture on the left. SS has a contagious laughter that is also melodic. OK, she also has a maniacal laughter that is plain creepy, but we are going for sappy here. Then there are the moments that have left no doubt that SS was teed off in the picture on the right. Although we had never met our daughter we were dead on when we proudly posted her referral pictures. SS, we are so lucky to have you.