First Day of School in America!

NOPE!! No stinkin' pictures!  Never crossed my mind!!!  Charles is out of town on this important and busy week.  That leaves me holding the bag for every possible thing.  Between returning to work this week myself full time, getting Mia ready to return to school and Kennedy ready to begin...figuring out things Kennedy might actually eat so I could pack her lunch, juggling gymnastics and doctor appointments and 2 spoiled-rotten dogs...I dropped the ball!  Charles is well known to be the family historian.  He is great at it.  Me...not so much!  So...I apologize for the lack of pics in this post.  I failed.

However, she had a really good first day!  I will paste an email I received from her awesome teacher half way through the day:

"You have one smart daughter on your hands! She is whizzing through complicated addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems with ease! And the strange part is that she solves the problems without showing any work (like carrying the 1, etc.). I don't know how she does that because I can't, but I'm not going to mess with her system because it seems to work. ****** has been in here for math, which has been a great help. She worked with Kennedy using her math folder for about 30 minutes. As soon as Kennedy finished a page, ****** would check it and put a sticker on top if all the problems were right. Kennedy seemed to really like that. (We even got some smiles!) She also went through an entire deck of 3rd grade fraction flash cards perfectly, so we moved on to 4th grade fraction cards (mixed and improper) and she seems to be getting those too. It will be fun to see how far we can take her in math! I may need to practice to keep up with her skill level. :)"



As you can see, it went really well. She is a fluent reader and writer in Chinese, but obviously she will struggle with those for a while in English. Her teacher is allowing her to journal in Chinese. She will have her summarize her entries in a few English sentences and build from there.  That is great, because she feels successful writing in her native language.  This will allow her to transfer that skill slowly to English.

I mentioned when we decided to put her at my school for one semester that our wonderful PTO president agreed to volunteer to tutor Kennedy.  She speaks fluent Mandarin.  She will come twice a week, but told me this week she will come every day since it is Kennedy's first week.  HOW AWESOME!  What a blessing!

I even had her speak to Kennedy about something non-school related today for me.  China has something called QQ, which is similar to our Facebook.  Kennedy was on it, unsupervised, quite regularly in China.  She got to do it a few times with us in the hotel in China too.  She told us she wanted to use "QQ" regularly to communicate with her friends once she got to America.  Uhhh...well...no. 

I had her to explain to Kennedy today that it is our job as her parents to monitor her computer usage for appropriate content.  We love her, and it is our responsibility to protect her and keep her safe.  On any social networking site, there can be predators.  Also, inappropriate advertisements occasionally pop up, etc.  Since it is all in Chinese, we can not be sure about appropriate content and conversations.  Therefore, it will not be allowed.  Period.  She explained that we are not trying to block her from contacting her friends, and that she can safely email them anytime.  I had her eplain that we knew she had stored many personal photos from her past on her QQ account, so we will download all of them to our computer so she will always have access to them.  She seemed relieved about that, and seemed to understand why QQ is out and email is in.  Not saying she jumped for joy...but she agreed and understood.

Quite honestly, I have also done some research and received some advice from a few other families that have adopted teens.  Something that "stuck with me" was not to let your teen call or contact the orphanage too much because they can get caught up in what is going on "back there", rather than keeping their focus on adjusting to life here.  That made LOTS of sense to me.  Kennedy has had plenty of contact with her best friend from China who was adopted over a year ago by the Kennedy family.  She is happy and well adjusted.  She loves her family and America.  I feel she is a very good influence on Kennedy and her positive adjustment so far.  I also think her ability to talk on the phone regularly to that friend has curbed her need to worry too much about contacting friends still in China.  I am sure there will be some people who disagree with this, but we are doing what we think is best for Kennedy.

After school, Kennedy used the translator to say, "My teacher says I had a great day, especially in mathematics." "My classmates help me very much."  Let's hope this trend continues!  She was in a very happy mood this evening.  She did a little "homework", took a shower and was in bed by 7:45!  I am sure she is wiped out!!

Well, signing off for now.  I am sure there are typos, but I have laundry to finish, a dishwasher to unload, lunches to pack, dogs to take out, breakfast prep to make things faster in the morning, my own shower to take...and the list goes on! 

Thanks for your continued support and prayers for Kennedy's fast, smooth transition and adjustment.  She is doing quite well so far, and prayer is the reason!