21 days!

We will meet our daughter in 21 days. As long as it has taken us to get to this point, I feel like we are on a high speed train to China right now. Prior to Christmas, it seemed so far away, but now it seems like the entire process just flew by.

Because she is not a baby and can probably speak  quite well, we are going to try to learn some Mandarin Chinese as well as encourage her to continue to speak Chinese.  The plan is for her to become bilingual and for the rest of the family to continue practicing Chinese for many years to come. One thing I plan on doing to encourage this is to play Mandarin videos for the children to watch often. Obviously with no native Chinese speaker in the house, this is going to be the best option for daily exposure to her native language and as the other children pick up some phrases and practice what they have learned.

Hopefully in China we will find dvds that can be played here in the US but for the time being, I am creating a playlist of Chinese Children's Shows on Youtube. We can just connect the laptop to the tv using the HDMI cord and watch  on a bigger screen. Just in case any of my friends in the adoption community would like to see the playlist, I am linking it here.

 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtBYSiGj3cDUExp7dS9HO246tyBP7YVJm

Many of the videos are Chow Hu, a really cute children's show. If you'd like to search for these on your own, the Chinese characters are below. Just copy and past it into the youtube search box and you'll find lots of videos.

 巧虎