The Entertainer

Greetings and Happy Thanksgiving!

I am sure that any parent will agree that they can sit and watch their baby or young toddler for hours upon hours, marveling at their superior intellect (Certainly a genius!), their surgically precise manual dexterity (Oh my, we have a surgeon on our hands!), and their ability to intuitively create masterpieces of space and form out of dust bunnies (RISD here we come!). However, it is rare that others share your enthusiasm and obsessiveness about your prodigy.

But I will go out on a limb here and say that when you have adopted a toddler, the fascination extends a bit beyond your immediate family. The enthrallment is not nearly as all-consuming for the extended family member as it is for the parents of the kid, but it is there - and it is amazing to watch.

This Thanksgiving the Cychowski family (and even Grandma and Grandpa J) all gathered at Grandmom and Papa C's place for the usual festivities. As predicted, the pre-college crowd gathered in the front bedroom to watch TV and play video games and pester each other. Everyone else, college age to old age, watched Lucy. It was the Lucy Show, and it went on forever, and no-one got the least bit bored, or at least they were suffering through the spectacle quietly (apologies to any rellies who fall into that category).

Lucy was passed around to everyone at the Thanksgiving table (well, the men anyway), inspecting their plates to see what morsels were there for her to try (OK, we need to work on that one). When the party moved to the den, Lucy revolved around the coffee table, calling her Aunt Catherine on a toy rotary phone (Aunt Catherine, you ARE the trooper!), gave everyone (well, the men anyway) a turn to read her a book or have her sit in her lap, involved anyone interested in her game of "which hand is the ping-pong ball in?", among other antics. And what did all of us do? We SAT THERE AND WATCHED.

So this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for so much. I am thankful for my amazing husband and children. I am thankful that our family and our Lucy have finally found each other. I am thankful that this wonderful family that I am blessed to be a part of has so completely accepted our little girl into their fold, and wholeheartedly embraced her and her story as part of their own life story. I am thankful that God has given us the gift of seeing a first Thanksgiving through the eyes of a child, surrounded at last by her forever family, who only a year go was in a place (geographically, physically, socially, and emotionally) so far from what we consider commonplace. And lastly (but not conclusively), I am thankful that a room full of adults would find our daughter so completely amusing (or at least pretend to) that they could watch her for hours without the slighest complaint, and make her feel so much a part of a family.