One Year in the books

Tomorrow, March 4th is the 1 year anniversary of our meeting Mariana and taking the reigns as parents. Overall I find it an agreeable situation. I hope she does as well. Outwardly she's doing very well but now that she understands so much we have to start introducing the idea of adoption the her. It would be easier to just roll along and act like everything is as it seems; ie we're her parents. Of course that's true but there's more to the story and it should be a part of her earliest memories.
We've now interviewed 5 babysitters and hired 2. Bianca we let go after a week and a half because we found Marcela. I felt a little sleazy about it but Marcela just seemed like the better fit. First of all she's from Bolivia and speaks Spanish. Plus she's familiar with the neighborhood and knows the playgrounds and library play groups . She's also a mother herself and said she'd closely follow whatever routines we have for Mariana. Besides, Mariana seemed to like her more than the others right off the bat. We called one babysitters reference and the woman said she was surprised to hear that she'd been given as a reference because she had fired the woman the week before. Apparently they came home to find her asleep on the floor and it took three times calling to her to rouse her. Yikes.
We're starting to look at pre schools which really makes me feel like an adult. Believe it or not, almost a year into this adventure, I still feel like a kid acting like a grown up. In New Providence there was 1 public school option and that's where you went. In Brooklyn there are tons of options, public and private but the best options often have waiting lists and lottery systems to get in- and we're talking about pre schools here, forget about K-12 for now.

Mariana has recently been trying to sing along to her three favorite songs: "Rock a bye baby", "Twinkle twinkle little star", and "Take me out to the ball game". She's starting to string words together and sing them at the appropriate times. It's pretty cool. Hmmm, what else? She's starting to draw so her mother and I are being careful not to encourage the art curse too much. "It's only nice as a hobby dear". She's makes requests and always asks us to draw cats. She is picking up our expressions like "here you go" even if they're a little jumbled still. "Here you go Mommy" becomes "See go Mommy, see go Daddy". She's also started shortening Mommy and Daddy to Mom and Dad. Where the hoot did that come from?! (By the way, our curse curbing is starting to work, making us sound like nincompoops)