In November of 2003 Bill and I got our first look at our newest granddaughter, Audrey Lynn Berry.  She was thirteen months old at the time.  She had arrived in our family and in our country only a few days earlier having begun her life’s journey at a orphanage in China.

We were enthralled.  She was tiny, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and beautiful.

For dinner that night we went to a nearby Olive Garden restaurant where here parents ordered “Mac and Cheese” for the little one.  It came in one of those oval side dishes that restaurants use for serving . . . well . . .side dishes.  You know the ones I’m talking about–the shape of a platter but much smaller.  (In the morning, when I haven’t completed the copy-editing on a 400+page manuscript, with workers coming and going and a sick husband coughing like crazy, I may be able to remember the real word.  Tonight it’s so not happening!)

At any rate, do you remember that commercial where someone says, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing?”

That was the situation with Audrey and the mac and cheese, because she mowed her way through that whole serving like she was one of the people my mother always referred to as “those poor starving kids in China.”  Of course, it turns out that’s exactly what Audrey was–a poor starving kid from China.

As I watched her stow away that adult size serving of food, the thought in my head was this:  She’s going to turn into a butterball.”

What I didn’t understand, is those kids who come here from China really are starving.  They are hungry to the bone.  One mother who adopted her baby very early in the China adoption process told me that the first thing she had to teach her daughter was not to eat bugs.  In a survival of the fittest world, eating bugs was how she had survived.  (And she’s now a college graduate, too.)

But back to Audrey.  She didn’t turn into a butterball.  She’s a smart, engaging girl who loves to read.  She’s had some hearing difficulties.  Because she had untreated ear infections as an infant, she had skin cells growing in one ear.  That meant she had to have two separate surgeries during which the workings of her inner ear were dismantled and the skin cells scraped away.  For more than a year she was without any hearing in that ear, and I can’t imagine it was good for her balancing skills, either.

That’s fixed now, however.  She can hear again.  And now she is in gymnastics.  When I went to her first gymnastics demonstration, what I liked best was watching her off by herself, totally in her own world in the far corner of the gym, doing her warmup exercises with the kind of fluid grace that I can only imagine.

A few months later, on a family vacation in California, they were at some kind of event where some Marines were challenging little kids to do pull-ups.  They were utterly astonished when slender little Audrey stepped up to the bar and showed them HER set of pull-ups.

She’s been in gymnastics for three years now.  It’s a serious gym and it’s only a few blocks (unwalkable blocks) from their house.  That means the parents get both Audrey, and now her younger sister Celeste (also from China) to the gym for practice at least three nights a week and usually on Saturdays, too.  Let’s hear a round of applause for Good Parents!!!!

Last Sunday there was a gymnastics tournament at the Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center.  Gymnastic tournaments are like going to see a five-ring circus where nobody has good seats.   The music for the floor performances is always the same.  It’s played over and over for EVERY participant.  If I were able to wave a magic wand at the organizers, I would say, “New music PLEASE!!!”

But this was Audrey’s day. In her 10 year old age group, she placed first in balance beam, floor, and vault.  She placed second on bars.  She walked away with the first place medal.

And then, because her gym did so well, they took the tournament’s first place trophy as well.

Our grandson Colt was there.  He knows a lot more about NFL football than he does about gymnastics, and Celeste finally told him that she wouldn’t answer any more of his questions.  His biggest concern for the evening was “Who gets to keep the trophy?”

My mother used to refer to people like me as “SIGWPIPs”  That’s “Silly Old Grandmas With Pictures in Purse.”  You’ll notice there are no pictures with this post.  I was too busy clapping and jumping up and down to get out my iPhone!!

Gymnastics has given Audrey a kind of confidence and fluid grace that I find both wonderful and astonishing.  I’m incredibly proud of her.

And I’m happy to tell you that my initial mac and cheese butterball worries have proven to be completely unfounded.

As for her birth mother in China?  I have no doubt that the woman’s heart still aches for her lost little one.  I only wish she could have seen her, standing on that podium, lifting the team trophy triumphantly in the air, and grinning from ear to ear.

I’m sure it’s something she would find hard to believe.  Ten years ago, so did we.