1st full day ALONE... God is amazing!

  Today was the day we gained full custody of our daughter. I was so nervous going into the day. I kept praying and finally about 30 minutes before they gave her to us God just gave me peace. There was nothing I could do about the fact that she is going to grieve and have a really hard time so God just told me to stop worrying and deal with things as they come. It truly is amazing how much God has prepared us and really her for this journey. She made amazing progress today! She is so smart and so friendly.
  She started out crying, of course, this was what we expected. After about 45 minutes she fell asleep out of nowhere. We were offering food because it was lunch time and she just fell asleep. So we decided it must be nap time. I held her on the couch and she napped for about an hour and a half. She woke up crying and we decided to head to the park. She was fine as soon as we left the hotel. Once we go to the park she warmed right up. She let us play with her and was laughing and smiling. She even "asked" me to help her up some stairs. She also met a little girl while we were at the park and she had a lot of fun playing with her. One thing I took as a really good sign was when we were playing at the park I sat down for a minute and the other little girl came and sat next to me. Kannika immediately came over and sat in between us. I took that as a good sign. :) 

  She was all smiles at the park. We had so much fun and will definitely be going back there to play. After that we went to the mall for dinner and to find shoes now that we knew what sizes her two feet are. We had no luck finding shoes. It's just to hard so we will stick with the cute little shoes the social worker here made her. They had flip flops on her but those weren't really working so well. For dinner we went to this little pizza place and it was excellent. Kannika ate chicken strips and most of my grilled shrimp. She loves shrimp. Actually we haven't found anything she doesn't like. 

  After all that we knew it was time to come back to the hotel. I was kind of dreading that since I know she hates being in our room. She started crying as soon as she saw our door. We let her work through some of it on her own for about an hour. She would come to us sometimes then want to be put down sometimes. We just let her decide how she wanted to cry. After about an hour though it was getting to be bed time. So I took to her our room and laid her down in the mattress we had for her. It was a good 30 minutes of all out crying and trying to get up but she did fall asleep. So far it's been an hour and she has woken up twice. Both times she just needed about 2 minutes of soothing and she was back asleep. Hopefully she will get some rest tonight. 
  Tomorrow is the board meeting. This is where the Thai government officially relinquishes custody of Kannika to us. They will ask a few questions about how we are going to care for her and then give their official approval. It's kinda of a big day. :) We will have that first thing in the morning then the rest of the day to ourselves.