As far as attachment goes, Maggie was a baby ready for a mom. She laid comfortably in my arms for the first few hours without a whole lot of emotion either way. At one point I set her on the hotel bed so I could fix her a bottle, and she made the most pathetic squawk of a cry. I hurried over and picked her up and offered her a bottle, and she gave me this look like, "Holy cow, that worked??" I could tell that orphanage life had taught her that there was little use to crying, because it was not going to get her picked up or get her the meal she was looking for any faster.

I set out to teach her otherwise.

She experimented with her squawky cry quite a bit and quickly realized that this new mom person would come running when she made that sound. She liked that. She liked that a lot.

We were in Vietnam for almost two weeks, and by the end of day three, Maggie completely rejected anyone Vietnamese. While the other babies with adoptive families at our hotel would coo and smile at the women speaking Vietnamese to them, Maggie would arch her back and cry and turn away. Interestingly, when an American friend visited us at our hotel in Vietnam, she went to him without any problem, and he was the only person in Vietnam she "allowed" to hold her besides myself.

She was excellent on the long trip home. She was a very easy baby. As long as she had somewhere to sleep, regular bottles and me to hold her, she was content. I did not sleep much on the plane, even though we had a bassinet and she was content to sleep in it. Her cry was so quiet that I couldn't hear her over the engine noise! I was too afraid to fall asleep because I worried I would not wake up and hear her crying.


I worried that she would want me and me only upon coming home, but she took to Josh right away. She loved her crib from the first minute too. I had planned on having her sleep with us, but when I put her down that first evening for what I thought would be a nap and she happily slept through the entire night, I decided not to mess with a good thing. She has always been an excellent sleeper.

She was always very cuddly, always made good eye contact, always leery of strangers and never exhibited any of the warning signs of attachment problems.

She was a doll baby, and we could not have been happier.