The world's classiest tantrum.

Well, I think the dam has broken and this little one is starting to shine right out with her personality. She is even more awesome than we had thought. The Chinese say that Wuhan girls are spicy, and that we can see from our travel group.

This morning saw our first typical one-year-old tantrum. It was verrrry quiet and slowwwwly executed, but it was a tantrum. I had been feeding her congee (basically soupy rice) and wanted to have J do it for a while so I could eat breakfast before heading out for the morning's tour. As you can see, she was not pleased with this idea.

We proceeded on to East Lake and Jonathan got all the good pictures so you'll have to wait until later for them to appear here. I was busy following our super walker all over the place, trying to keep my fluorescent orange touristy parasol positioned so she was shaded most of the time. She was walking along, chatting up a storm the whole time. Anson (our guide) says she is mostly babbling and that few of the sounds are Mandarin. I find that reassuring because (as you may have guessed) I hate to miss out on a good conversation.

In front of beautiful HUGE bells in the Hubei Museum.
Highly recommend that place, if you're ever in the neighborhood.

At the East Lake park, there was section of the lake with huge (like 5 foot long) Koi in it. She absolutely LOVED these, running back and forth and pointing at the Da-yu (big-fish). She almost threw another fit when we left until I pointed out that all the Jie-jie (sisters) had already gone ahead and we better catch up. With that, she was off on her pint-sized legs, never complaining about all the walking and mumbling happy sounds under her breath.

Double-fisting drinking yogurt. 'Cause that's the way we roll.

At lunch she had very strong opinions about what to eat, demanding half of my hard-boiled egg from the ramen bowl. I offered some corn and she said BU! with quite a bit of enthusiasm, rather than just turning quietly away like in the past. She again finished by pouring soup into other parts of her plate and using the spoon to sip those up.

She's napping now, no tears in the hotel room and none getting to sleep either. It's almost hard to wait for her to wake up so we can see what she'll think of us tonight. We're hoping to see more of the chatting and funny face-making girl emerge, but are okay if the grief is closer to the top, too. There is so much light at the end of our tunnel I have hope that she's going to be just fine.