Has it really been a YEAR?

Visiting Lucas after Court - 5/18/09
Visiting Lucas after Court - 5/18/09
and today....
NE Aquarium - 3/10
Being silly...
Being sweet...

Is it really possible that it's been over 2 months since I've posted to the blog? Yikes. But more astounding is that one year ago today, in a Moscow courtroom, after a short and painless Q&A, we were declared to be the parents of one Lucas Dmitry Knight (also known at the time as "Dima the Mouse"). I can't believe we've been his parents for a YEAR. Although he didn't come home until June 6, he was legally our son and it felt like abandonment to leave him as we returned to the US. We really wish we could have stayed in Russia for the 10-day wait, but Alexander was waiting for us at home, we wouldn't have been able to get custody of Lucas until the wait was over anyway and we wanted to save our vacation time for when he did come home. Regardless of these reasons, it was still very difficult to leave.

So what is Lucas up to these days? Well, for sure, he's no longer a mouse. More like a lion. The kid who wasn't on the growth charts upon coming home is now 40% height and 50% weight. His vocabulary is amazing...he's been speaking in full sentences for months. He repeats anything and everything and with the best inflection and imitation. He yelled up the stairs to me this morning as I got out of the shower: "Mama, are you OK?" in my exact tone of voice as I must frequently yell this up the stairs upon hearing unidentified thuds and yelps. And my little mouse has found his lionly roar. His favorite word these days is 'no'. At first though he wasn't sure about how to say 'no'. His previous favorite words were 'I want' and thus his first utterance of dislike resulted in 'I want no'. But he quickly realized he could cut right to the chase and this is where we are. It is so beloved a word that it is the de facto answer for everything...regardless of whether he really means no. 'Lucas, would you like some blueberries?' 'No. I mean yes'.

His lionly roar at times is a scream. He seems to have only one volume these days: loud. He gets so excited playing certain games or telling you about some aspect of his day that I think he feels he needs to match his excitement with sound. We've been holding our hands over our ears a lot lately. Lucas has also learned to make the most amazing facial expressions. It all started with 'Good Night Gorilla' and the page where the zookeeper's wife realizes she's not alone in her room and turns on her light. Her face on that page is basically Lucas' face these days for any new or surprising situation. It is beyond fabulous. He has a few others too but that's my fav.

He continues to be very vocal and clear about his fears. After MONTHS he finally went down into the basement again and seemed OK but then something spooked him again. Today he came down 3 steps with me and then said "No, the basement is too scary". We've had the city tearing up our street to put in new water lines using all sorts of cool diggers and trucks. We got a little too close to one the other day and he tensed up and said it was too scary for him.

He is fearless with his body...leaping off any stool, chair, or lego table that he can find. We took the gates off the stairs this weekend when we realized we were using them more for crowd control than for safety as Lucas hasn't tripped or fallen yet on the stairs. What else? Oh yes, the nap. Lucas is in that oh-so-pleasant stage of maybe, kinda not needing a nap. On the days he does take a nap (aka in school), he takes forever to go to sleep at night. If we weren't tied to schedules and him needing to get up at a regular time for school a few days a week, this would be fine. So it sets up a bad cycle. He goes to bed later, has a harder time getting up, is cranky, etc. However on the days he doesn't go to school and w/e, we let him sleep in, he won't usually nap, is somewhat Mr. Cranky pants after 5p and then crashes around 7p.

And one last Lucas tidbit for now (maybe if I didn't wait so long between posts I wouldn't have to write so much at once eh?). Now that the weather has warmed up, he LOVES being outside. I think this is his 2nd favorite word after 'no'. We had a problem for a while when he learned how to open the lock on the screen door and get out. But I think we (I) sufficiently freaked out enough that he learned quickly to wait for one of us. His current fascinations 'outside' are the water table where he proceeds to get completely soaked each and every time, puddles, or the drains in the park where he drops mulch, sticks or other misc items into the water to see what happens. Picking up on the theme here? I guess those astrological signs might actually have some merit to them.

All these little glimpses are just pieces of his amazing little personality. The most important ones to me are his sweet and happy laugh, his determination, his exhuberance for life, and the fact that he now seems to trust and love us heart and soul. He feels like he has always been here and I'm so thankful that those initial months of figuring each other out are over. We are just a family now and I love it.