Not even in her teens and already sporting the punk rock haircut- we could be in for trouble.

Santa brought Mia a new rocker this year. She still needs to grow into it a bit and we've had to put some books down so her feet can reach the bottom, but she loves playing in it. We're quickly losing the last remnants of what used to be an apartment and instead acquiring 3 rooms of storage for large bulky plastic baby toys, swings, stroller, playmats, and the list goes on... :)

Mia turned 6 months today. She seems to grow everyday. Here's some pics from her last few weeks as a 5 month old...

Our offices have now had two surprise showers for baby Mia. (The first put on by the Hong Kong office, the second with gifts sent over from our US colleagues.) Totally unexpected and we had a wonderful time. The decorations were awesome, welcoming her in English, Spanish, and Chinese. I'm pretty sure we're set now on clothes and blankets for at least the first year!

I thought I'd give you a preview of what a good father I make ;)

Last night Caro went to Mandarin class for a few hours while I watched baby Mia and then I was supposed to meet up with them a few hours later. So after she woke from a short nap I was rushing around trying to dress her, comb her hair, feed her, and get her all ready to go. Now before I begin, in my own defense, my primary role thus far has been relegated much more to the support tasks like dish washing, cleaning the house, etc while mommy focuses more on the baby needs. Anyhow, it was time to change her diaper (not a messy one thank goodness) and she doesn't like the process so I was trying to rush through the whole thing of unsnapping her jumper, carefully removing the wet diaper, cleaning, changing, and snapping her all back up (by the way, I think they purposely make those snaps sooo small just to tease us men so we look like idiots when fumbling around trying to dress the baby). Well she was very well behaved during the whole ordeal and I was finally finished and picked her up. Then I went to throw away the wet diaper and suddenly realized, to my utter dismay, that I had somehow managed to put back on the dirty diaper! Yes, the same one I just took off. The clean one was lying on the bed right next to me. Needless to say, Mia was not so happy the second time around when I had to change her all over again. :)

Think I would have failed out of homemaking class?

So you see, you hit this thingamajig here and then that thingamabob lights up there and then you hit there and that light pops up here and...

We brought Mia home for good today! Mom and baby seem quite content...

We were able to bring Mia home for a few hours in the afternoons to help her adjust to her new home before permanently moving in.

A little background on her name.

Our original thought was to choose an English first name and a Chinese middle name. But we couldn't decide between two English names that we really liked so we eventually gave her both and then (with a little help from several people) picked a lovely Chinese name that at least when pronounced in Mandarin resembles the middle name a bit. Mia's Chinese name in Chinese means admire beauty. The pinyin Romanization is Mù Yán, which in English is pronounced Mu-Yen.

As I'm sure most parents desire, we wanted it to be just right, reflect her personality, ambitions of success, and to some degree her heritage, etc, etc. This meant lots of lists and paring down of said lists. It even went as far as checking out the names from the Freakonomics book. (For those of you who haven't read it, there is an interesting chapter where the authors analyze compiled data relating the education level and socioeconomic status of mothers to a child's name.) Ridiculous that I found multiple blogs and postings where parents-to-be analyzed this list? Absolutely. But a fun glance nevertheless. In the end we chose two names that we had discussed early on and became more and more convinced of over time. Here's a few other fun baby name sites we stumbled upon:

Most popular names of 2015?
Name Voyager - Fun tool to see the popularity of your name over time
Nymbler - Name generating tool
Babynamesgarden - Lots of lists, including name popularity by decade
And just for fun...All about Wayne

So with all the plethora of given names what is she called? Well in Chinese we just reduplicate the last character as a common, cute way of addressing babies, so it's pronounced "yen-yen". We gave little direction on the English names to everyone, but it appears Mia is winning out from friends and family at the moment.

She was clearly telling us "Pacifier or hand...your choice Mom". Here is our first day out on the town with baby Yán-yán.

We finally met our baby girl this week. We visited her at her foster home and grabbed these snapshots.

It has been well worth the wait. Here is our announcement shared with family and friends.

(click image to enlarge)