Somedays and Mondays...: Ahh, memories

So, RP and I have settled into a pretty consistent routine and things are going well. Mondays and Fridays she goes to daycare (aka "school") and Tuesday-Thursday she spends the day with Grandma and Papa. All in all RP is a very lucky little girl - both with her grandparents and at school she is snuggled, loved, and pretty much the center of attention (to this end I think her tiny size helps in that everyone at daycare just wants to hold and snuggle her like a baby, and not necessarily like the fiercely independent toddler she has truly become). The highlight of my day, every single day, is when I walk into the room after a long day at work and her face lights up and she runs into my arms to give me the biggest "squeeze" (our family's name for hugs thanks to my brother and sister-in-law - and I love it!!!) ever. Of course, after that, she tests me to no end - pulls off socks and shoes in the car, tests to see how loud she can truly get before Mommy gets mad, and constantly replies, "NO!" to everything I ask her to do, until she gets home and falls asleep, to repeat the entire process again.

At work today one of my reps was very excited to tell me that she is going to be an aunt, and I naively assumed that her sister-in-law was pregnant. Come to find out her brother and sister-in-law are adopting from Columbia and they received their referral information yesterday - a beautiful little boy! She showed me his picture today and I immediately got all misty-eyed because I immediately had a flashback to the day I received RP's referral information - the happiest, yet hardest, day of my life up until that point. Happy for obvious reasons but hard because I couldn't immediately go and get her, scoop her up, bring her home, and make her part of my family. I hadn't looked at RP's referral pictures for a while but thought I would post them, along with a more recent photo, as I'm still amazed at the difference in a relatively short period of time:

Referral photos (received August 11, 2009)