As excited as I am about the start of the Olympics in London, I can't let this day pass without remembering that four years ago today we had just met the future-love-of-our-lives in a city called Nanjing, China.

We don't celebrate this particular anniversary per se, since her adoption is still a bit of a sore subject for Q, who still remembers the visceral loneliness of having no parents. But every year at this time I revisit our photos from China. 

This first photo was taken by the director of Q's social welfare institute, Ms. Tang, who was good enough to document the pre-adoption days for us on film. This kind of care and attention from an SWI is fairly rare, so we are fortunate. This is a photo of Q seeing our photos for the first time, thanks to a care package that we were allowed to send while we were waiting for permission to travel to China.

Another pre-adoption photo that was sent to us by the director during our wait. Q used to hold a hand up in front of her mouth, presumably to prevent people from touching her mouth while her cleft was still open. She continued to do this until after her first surgery. 

 

 The room in which Q spent most of the first year of her life. I can now recognize that that's her in the second bed back.

 Several of the best days of our trip, prior to meeting our daughter, were spent in Beijing with our wonderful tour guide, Leo (both of us, oddly, wearing contrasting orange stipes). We could not have hoped for a better introduction to China than Leo who, despite his youth, was extraordinarily smart, open and informative. He really did China right for us. We had such a blast with him in Beijing!

 The beautiful Ms. Tang herself, with Q on adoption day. We are so grateful for all she did for us, and all of her very open and caring communication before, during and after the adoption.

 

Me about to walk into the adoption office on the day we met Q. 

 Ms. Tang, me, Q, and our Nanjing guide with the adoption certificate moments after the official adoption ceremony.

Mike and Q at the French café in Guangzhou, waiting for the final steps of our adoption journey.

 A vegetable market in the backstreets of Nanjing.

Learning to be a father: Mike feeding Q in the French-colonial streets of Guangzhou.

 

A Chinese magazine stand in Beijing, just hours before the start of the Beijing summer Olympics (and yes, customs was hell-on-wheels that day at the Beijing airport...six HOURS of hell-on-wheels, followed by nearly 30 hours of air travel back to the US)

 And...our girl today. 

How far she has come. 

How far we have all come. 

And, as you can clearly see, what an amazing job our surgeon has done! Major props to Q's genius of a plastic surgeon, Stacy Folk M.D., and also to her speech specialist, Theresa Snelling, MA, our ENT Tyler Lewark M.D., our pediatric dental specialist Scott Smith DDS MS,  and the rest of our brilliant team of cleft specialists.

My daughter is a vivid dreamer. 

One of the great joys of her progress as she becomes more facile with the spoken word (for those of you who are new to our story, she was born with a severe cleft lip and palate, and is about four surgeries deep in the lengthy process of rebuilding her palate and jaw) is her retelling of her nightly dreams.

Q has a preternatural sort of memory. Like a little computer, she can map entire neighborhoods or the internal plans of large buildings in her mind, so that wherever we find ourselves (even if she has not visited the particular location in a year or two) she knows exactly where we are. She's a sort of miniature human GPS system. Naturally this is very comforting to any parent who ever worried about their child getting lost. It is also as alarming in a four-year-old as it was in a two-year-old. We just never quite get used to it. 

In addition, Q is the most disillusioned child I've yet to meet coming out of an institutional setting. 

It seems, both from my friends' experience in the adoption world and from the reading that I've done, that many children develop a sort of fantasy scenario to replace the parts of their early life that are, at this stage of their development, difficult to process. They ask repeatedly whether they grew in their adoptive mommy's tummy, and if not, shy not. Or they conjure images out of a fairytale to replace their birth parents and/or adoption story.

Q, on the other hand, appears not only to have both an unusually clear memory of her year in the Social Welfare Institute (she was only 11 months old when we adopted her, so this clear memory is astonishing in itself) but also a clear idea of what happened to her and how. She is never confused as to why she didn't grow inside me. It never seems to occur to her to fantasize that we are her birth parents, or to make up a "friendlier" story to replace the harsh reality of her early life. She clearly knows that she lost parents once, and that (in her mind) she now has to guard her parents and her own safety very closely so as not to risk losing a second set of parents. To this end, she is constantly on guard against ways that she might be separated from us.

"No one takes me away, right?" is still her mantra. "You fight, fight, fight if they try!" 

She is very clear about the fact that she was lonely and sad in the Social Welfare Institute (orphanage), and that she prefers not to discuss it. Period.

So I guess it shouldn't surprise me that she remembers her dreams, in their entirety, with such perfect clarity of plot and detail. 

One recent dream involved a plague of giant green spiders that chased our family through a mall with machine guns (this is the dream of a four-year-old child, let me remind you).  They shot at us mercilessly until her LaoLao (this is my mother, her maternal adoptive grandmother, who features heavily in her dreams) had the presence of mind to hide us in the Hello Kitty store, thus saving us all. (Of course it is a well-known fact that Sanrio retail outlets are the ultimate haven of all those plagued by heavily-armed mutant arachnids).

Then, yesterday, there was the dream in which a neighbor of ours had a pet frog with which Q immediately bonded (frogs, turtles and snakes have always been her favorite animals). The neighbors allowed her to play with the frog, as long as she was careful. So she put it on its leash, and took it for many walks around the neighborhood. 

This whole happy scenario goes down the tube (as so many dreams do) when Q inexplicably smacks the poor frog on the head. The frog immediately bursts into tears. This scenario plays itself out twice before the frog, understandably miffed, slips its collar and runs away, much to Q's immediate dismay. 

 Once again, in the dream, her revered LaoLao steps in, chastises Q for being unkind to an animal, and puts her in a time-out, foridding her to go in pursuit of the missing frog. 

The strangest thing about Q's clear memory of her dreams is that her dream memory does not seem to slip away. You know how, when you have a vivid dream, you are able to remember it clearly as you first begin to wake, but as the hours pass all but the most salient detail of the dream seems to burn off like a morning fog? Well, that doesn't happen for Q. The details stay with her. 

For instance, in this last case, she and I tried to repeat the details of the dream for her daddy over family breakfast ( a good two and a half hours after she first woke).  I had mis-remembered the part about LaoLao's part in the dream, and was trying to tell my husband that LaoLao had advised her to stay in bed. 

"No," she said, shaking her head decisively.
"No?" I said.

"No," she said. "LaoLao told me I could not leave the house and walk outside looking for the frog."

I don't know whether I should classify Q as having a photographic memory. It seems like the thing to say, when I'm trying to explain how she is able to recall the exact layout of a large building that she has not set foot in for over two years. But I know very little about memory, or about how it is categorized. When the manager of Q's Social Welfare Institution dropped her into our arms on adoption day, she and the nanny made sure to tell us that QiuQiu was a "Clever girl. A very clever girl." And so she has proved to be. But she is no model student. She is pronounced by her teachers to be doing "very well" academically, but she is also easily-distracted, boy-crazy, and a tomboy who generally chooses athletic pursuits over academics.

Honestly, I'm not sure that I feel any great need to categorize her. She is clearly bright, but I love that (unlike me at her age) she is also extremely social, popular, outgoing, funny and irreverent. If her memory is unusually clear, then more power to her. Maybe her pragmatic view of her early life traumas will make it easier for her to swallow the mystery of her past as she grows. Hard to say. 

So, let me ask this of you blog readers who are parents: do your children have exceptional memories? If they are adopted, what is their current view of their early life/adoptive history? Do they remember/relate their dreams? And if so, what sort of dreams do they have?