Halloween is Coming!

With Halloween just a month away, I have noticed something in Lin... This year, she totally gets it!

Dave and I really love Halloween. To say Dave loves horror movies would be the understatement of the century, and I just love all the childish stuff about Halloween -- the candy, costumes, Trick-or-Treating, carving the pumpkins... It's just my absolute favorite time of year.

So last year, we were so excited to share Halloween with Lin. She had been home just over 4 months at that point, so our communication was still tricky. We hoped she would be excited about picking a costume but, while she looked around quite a bit, she ended up just dabbing a little goofy make-up on her face. She was less-than-thrilled to go to the pumpkin farm we always go to, but she seemed to enjoy carving her pumpkin. And the trick-or-treating was... well, disappointing. (If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you'll remember that I have written about this before.) After struggling to make her excited about trick-or-treating, she finally said to me, in her very broken English, "What if you were 13 and you went to China. And everyone in China was telling you that you have to do this and it's so much fun. But you didn't understand it. How would you feel?" And I understood her point and I backed off.

Well, that was a year ago. Lin is a different girl now. She's more comfortable, more confident. Her understanding of conversational English is nearly fluent and her spoken English, while still "broken" and heavily-accented, is coming along wonderfully. And, by gosh, she's excited for Halloween! If we see a display of Halloween stuff in a store she wants to go look at it. She is excited to get a costume this year and has been circling her favorites in the costume catalogue we got a couple weeks ago. She's excited about doing Halloween crafts and has been getting ideas from books and magazines. She just seems to get what we were trying to explain last year.

I didn't think about it back on the 4th of July, that she was starting her second year of American holidays. It didn't occur to me until talk of Halloween started a few weeks ago. She's got one full year under her belt, and now she gets to start connecting the dots and making memories. For the first time, she will be remembering our family traditions. When we open our box of Halloween decorations she will remember the things we pull out. She will be able to say "Hey, I remember that!" or "Oh, I forgot about that one!"

Lin's first year in America, in our family, had so many wonderful moments, sharing with her all these new experiences. But maybe this second year will be even better...

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And speaking of making family memories, we're off to Disney World on Sunday!!!! We can't wait!! I'm still debating whether to take the laptop and blog while we're there. I think it would be kind of fun to blog about each day just like we did on our trips to China. But do I have enough interested readers who would really want to know how our vacation is going? Leave me a comment and let me know... or if I don't have enough interested readers, I'll try not to let my feelings get hurt...  : )