This draft was written by Shannon and posted by her mom, Gretchen.

Peter and Emmie got back a few days ago and we are all readjusting nicely. I missed them *terribly* on Wednesday, so it was wonderful that they came back early Thursday morning. I know Emmie was starting to miss me too because her FaceTime conversations with me went from “Go away Mama” as she was playing with all the new toys at Oma and Opa’s house, to “Emmie come home see Mama?” and “Mama come Oma’s house, see Emmie?” Poor sweet baby. I missed her so much too.

It’s been so fun and amazing to see the changes two weeks wrought. I knew it would be a lot, but it is really A LOT. I feel like she left as kind of still a baby and came back completely a kid. She is speaking in more complete sentences now, with almost totally accurate word order. When she left, use of verbs was just emerging, so most of her sentences were just nouns (“baby bath” for “baby takes a bath”). Now she has pretty consistent SVO (subject-verb-object) sentences and is really starting to use more prepositions and more