Although this is only needed for the first report, I do have some further comments. She has recently been sick and we know from her monthly Mothers Love medical reports that every couple of months she has been given antibiotics for a cough. For 2 weeks she had a runny nose and the rattly chest we’ve become familiar with, the same sound that her chest made when she got her cold in China. We went to the doctors and they gave her antibiotics but that evening she threw up and her temperature soared. She had a very high temperature for 4 days, coughing, noisy chest, vomiting and had diarrhoea. WE changed the antibiotic but it didn’t seem to help much. Panadol would bring the temperature down for a few hours but when the effects wore off, the temperature would soar again. She would not drink enough so she became dehydrated. We took her to hospital on the fourth night when we realised her nappy had been dry all day and she had been very listless, just sitting in front of the TV watching her Pooh video over and over again. They gave her an intravenous drip to rehydrate her. This helped but the cough got worse over the next week so she couldn't sleep and would vomit with the coughing. She sleeps in our bed so we would have to change her clothes and the bedding and start again trying to get her to sleep.

Then after two weeks of this she started wheezing so we went to the hospital again and they said it was asthma. She was put on a nebuliser and given steroids. This helped a lot and we now have Ventolin and a spacer at home. However the drugs made her too alert and she could not sleep. After a week we stopped the drugs because she was so “wired” and now the cough has gone and she is sleeping well and is happy again. But this was a five week illness so we have now been referred to a pediatrician and hope that next time she gets this illness we can manage it better and that it won't last as long because we will recognise the signs earlier and give her the drugs earlier. It appears that the coughing is actually asthma but at this stage she may grow out of it. It is thought to be the type of asthma that is provoked by a cold rather than an allergic reaction.

We are in continuing email contact with the foster parents. They have shed some light on her recurring episodes of coughing saying that she used to vomit with the coughing so it sounds very much like the bronchitis and asthma she has just had.

Now a month later, just as I was finalising this report, Lin has been in hospital all weekend on a drip and antibiotics. Her temperature on the Friday soared to over 39 degrees and I couldn't get it down all day with Panadol and she seemed to be concerned about her nappy so I thought it was a urinary tract infection. We went to the hospital about 10pm on Friday night and after many hours of tests and a lot of mucking around they finally admitted her at 6am in the morning. Her blood tests showed she was definitely fighting a bacterial infection hence the antibiotics but they couldn't prove it was urinary tract. I slept with her at the hospital Saturday. They finally let us out on Sunday afternoon but we are continuing the antibiotics orally. Lin was so excited to see her house and toys. A follow up visit to the pediatrician who saw us at the hospital was made on the Wednesday and he proclaimed her to be the picture of good health, despite a runny nose which she probably got from me as I picked up a cold in the hospital. She has so many antibiotics in her that I doubt the cold will turn into bronchitis or asthma like last time.

Comment on child’s physical development to date:

Height: measured by pediatrician on June 25th as 79cm laid out rather than standing which apparently is the more accurate way to do it - a gain of 6cm in the 6 months since we got her – measured by pediatrician on July 16th as 80.5cm.

Weight: measured by pediatrician in June as 8.65 kilos so no gain since the Westmead visit in May which is not surprising due to her 5 week illness – measured by pediatrician in July as 8.7 kilos.

Teeth: 15 teeth, we visited a dentist to ask why there is not a matching tooth for the one that has come through on the other side – dentist said not to worry but keep an eye on it – she may never get it as a baby but she might get it with her adult teeth or she might never get it at all.

She can now walk up and down all the stairs in our house without the help of holding our hand – loves standing on the trampoline at the YMCA and has great balance but still does not yet jump by herself. She is surprisingly strong in the arms and can use the flying fox at YMCA unaided (except of course for catching her as she drops after the flight).

She can now use plastic scissors to cut play dough, using two hands.

She is just now starting to indicate when she wants to go to the toilet. She has for the past few months been good at sitting on the toilet when she is put there and she won’t let you take her off if she is waiting for something to happen or she’ll ask to be taken off if she thinks it’s a waste of time and she is usually correct. But now she is starting to point to her nappy and point to the toilet and when I take her something does happen.

She is very attached to her mother and father and will not yet let Mama leave her at daycare. We now go to occasional daycare on Friday mornings at a local Anglican church to practice but so far I have had to stay with her. If I leave the room to go to the toilet for example she starts to cry. But we will keep trying as she becomes more and more familiar with the staff and children at this daycare centre.

She will let me leave her at the next door neighbours for half an hour as she loves them very much and we visit them almost every day. The neighbours are a retired elderly couple and since Geoff’s parents are dead, they are her substitute paternal grandparents. She will also leave the house in my car with her maternal grandparents without a fuss. They come to stay for a few days about once a month and take Lin to her various morning activities instead of me. So if she knows the people very well and feels safe with them she can do without Mama and Baba. Therefore daycare should eventually work. We have been visiting many local daycare centres to check them out and registering at them hoping that space will become available by the time I return to work. We have registered for family daycare as well which I think would suit her better as long as the carer provides enough activities to keep her amused. I hope to have her doing a couple of days per week before I return to work full-time in February 2004 as I would like to do more work on my PhD before then.

I currently have two Early Childhood students from UWS who come to play with her for two hours at a time a couple of times a week depending on what other activities we are doing. I am in the house whilst they are here, usually working on my computer. However just this week Lin successfully went for a walk in the pram to the swings with one of the girls, without me!

She still does not sit for very long and most food is eaten whilst she is moving around doing other things. She is a very slow eater. Sitting with the other children for lunch at the occasional daycare on Friday mornings is good for her as they are very strict that all the children have to sit for lunch. She learns a lot from watching other children so perhaps I should soon stop spoiling her by running after her with food. I’ve said to myself that if she makes it to 9 kilos then I’ll stop running after her.

Since seeing the pediatrician we have now transitioned her onto cows milk for her bottle rather than formula (still only 120 mil three times a day). She is now better at eating meat, not just fish. Recently she picked up a veal shank from my plate at a restaurant and sucked the marrow and ate pieces of the meat on it. She also loves butter and licks the butter off her toast rather than eating the toast. In restaurants she will grab pats of butter and eat it straight. She eats one brand of cheese only but eats it almost every day. She eats yoghurt most days too so although her milk intake is small, the pediatrician says her calcium intake is adequate for growth.

No change since last report. When she was sick and could not sleep because of the Ventolin we had to resort to driving around the block in the car with the heater turned up high to send her off to sleep. We of course don’t want to get into this habit as there are 70 steps between the car and the bedroom and carrying her back upstairs after one of these episodes is hard work and risks waking her again anyway.

New words come out every day and she understands instructions such as “pick up the red block and put it over on the table”. Her biggest new word is ‘NO”! Others include: fan, umbrella, snow, jacket, hat, banana, spoon, fork, juice, sky, toast, tea, butter, turtle, cow, snail, butterfly, teddy, Tigger, Eyore, PPPPig, owl, oink, quack, meow, moo, buzz buzz (as in bee), down, cold, hot, teeth, broom, box, sit, more, floor, door, wet, face, baby, scissors, tea, bike, bottle, sock, shirt, backpack, stuck. She is also now able to put a couple of words together such as “over there”, “here y’a” and “Mama, bottle”.

She has always been very expressive with her hands when communicating with us, particularly with games like “Where has it gone? Is it here? Is it up there? Is it down there?” and with pretend chats on her various toy phones. She has recently begun to say a few words when talking to her father or grandmother on the real phone. She has always listened well when they are on the phone and smiled but not replied but now she is replying and nodding a bit. Her current hand gesture fad is to mimic her Baba in an exaggerated “I just don’t know, I really don’t know…” followed by a long animated discussion of the state of the world, all in baby talk but ever-so expressive.

The big hit currently is her toy tea set – endless cups of tea are served to us, to visitors and to her dolls and bears! She is very good at imaginative play now. She can stack 5 blocks high. She is excellent at miming the actions to all the nursery rhyme CDs, many times predicting the actions ahead of the sung words. She still loves riding toy cars and of course the rides and merry-go-rounds that you put money into at shopping centres are an obsession. With the winter sun being low in the sky, she has recently discovered her shadow and loves chasing it and trying to hide from it.

No change since last report. We have flown to Melbourne again for a long weekend and stayed again with the friends who will be Lin’s guardians if anything should happen to us. They have 2 boys, one close to her age. Again she learns much from living with other children, including this time her name. The boys were shouting her Chinese name all weekend. The day after we returned home I thought to ask her “What’s your name?” and she replied very clearly “Xiao Qiu”. We have been practising this ever since. She does not say “Lin”.

Thanks to Aileen from NSW Batch 6 we have tracked down the newspaper in which her abandonment is advertised along with 25 other children, including some other girls from Batch 6 and 7.

We are currently applying for her Australian passport.