Saturday update. On the way home!
After getting up so early I’m exhausted and can’t write. I skipped dinner (since we ate lunch of soup and pizza3 hours ago!). I was dizzy at the children’s home. Too hot and not enough water I think. Plus I had a 2 hour nap just before we went there. It’s no fun feeling off kilter. I’m really ready to be home in my bed. 3 days home out of the last 21 is really tough! It has been OK, but now that I see the finish line I’m really ready. Going to pray now and hopefully fall deeply asleep…
-Dan
We’ve officially had about 5 hours with the girls so far. Way more time than I expected to have. Today we had 2 visits. One was from
The girls are becoming much more comfortable with us..and us with them. It just seems natural to spend time with them now. It’s much more laid back. Today we blew some bubbles for them that I had brought from home. R really loved that. She clapped them all to pop ‘em. L enjoyed watching. L had on a hat this morning. I guess they thought the hallway was too breezy. The Russians crack me up with the bundling of the children. They go way overboard. L got the hang of the Cheerios today. She really enjoyed them. She was able to grab them from my finger. Her fine motor skills are improving just in the time we’ve been here. Amazing. She loved walking with me today too. I held her fingers and we walked in circles. I can not believe the progress just since Wednesday. It’s fun to see. She is one cute baby I tell ya. I can’t get enough of her. I think we’re gonna need to get a crib for her. I just can’t imagine her sleeping in a bed yet.
R colored many pictures for us again today. I gave her the magnadoodle. It only took one try for me to show her and she understood exactly what to do. She is great with the crayons. L tried to eat them. J But we showed her how to draw pictures too. R is going to be an absolutely great sister to L. She was feeding her cheerios and offering her toys a lot today. It melts my heart to see such compassion like that. We took lots of video today if anyone ever wants to see it. We hope to show the movies to our IA doctor so he can help us do some more evaluating to prepare for coming home.
R is so fun to watch because she is a neat freak. Seriously! I think we’re gonna get along well. ;) When she is done playing with a toy she immediately picks it up and puts it away. If there is a piece of trash on the ground, she has to pick it up. If a toy drops, she has to run to get it in the correct place. She really is quite the little helper. She didn’t want to sing any songs for us today although I bet she will someday. I sang lots of songs to her today. One of our visits was in the hallway so many people were passing by. It was kind of fun to see the happenings of the place a little more that time. L figured out that if she drops a toy it will fall and we will get it for her. She likes to play this game over and over. I like to see her figure out the cause and effect. I can tell this is new for her.
One of the best things about the visits has been the comments from several of the caregivers. Whenever I’m holding one of the girls, they comment that the kids look so much like me. That is fun to hear! (translated of course) They stand and smile at me. I wear a smile much of the time I’m there. I can’t help it.
We have been waving at all the kids while we’re there and saying hi. We offer our snacks to others if they are nearby. We just want to reach out to those children too. Our morning visit was in the closed door room where we’ve been meeting all week. At one point, several of the younger children were standing outside the door loudly saying, “Mama and Papa!!” If I thought about it too much I was going to start bawling. They know something big is happening in there and they want in on it too. We are the stars here right now. I hope they all have mamas and papas coming to get them too. Two of the girls we’ve met are Deb’s (from my phone call several weeks ago). She and her husband met their girls last month. We spoke on the phone after she came here. She had met
R’s teeth situation is making me sad and mad. I can’t believe they would let her teeth get that rotten. It must be painful at some level. I think she may have to have lots of teeth pulled. I am glad they are just baby teeth but she probably has some gum disease too. It is one obvious sign of her neglect. Most children we saw did not have a problem this bad, but a couple did. We have many trips ahead to the dentist. We better get working on that insurance coverage. L’s teeth look okay, thank goodness.
I traced both of the girls’ feet today and measured their height with an 11” piece of paper. One of the couples suggested we do this. They have been so helpful with ideas for this trip and next. I am so glad I met them all. We hugged our goodbyes tonight. The last family finally got their child today. They have had a heck of a time of it. The orphanage wouldn’t let their daughter out—for really dumb reasons—like the snowsuit wasn’t good enough so they had to buy a different one. They all just want the heck out of here ASAP. I guess I’d have had enough after 5 weeks too! Anyway, I hope to have luck finding shoes for the girls with the traced feet. I am going to have to guess on clothing sizes. I would guess L is 12 months size and R is 3-4T size. She is so short but really hefty in poundage. She weighs basically the same as Holden does. It hurts my lap if she sits on there too long. And she was not shy about my backpack snacks today! (fruit snacks and cheerios) She was taking them out of the baggies herself in large handfuls. It was the first day she peered in my bag on her own. I’m really going to have to work on nutritious food choices for her. I don’t think they offer the best choices at the children’s hospital. It will be fun to see what they do eat though. Most of the kids there love veggies and fruits and eat most anything. After a few months at home with us, I think both girls will sprout several inches. It’s amazing what love and one-on-one attention can do.
The interesting part about today’s visits at the hospital was the fact that they made us wear these really dumb white capes over our shoulders after we checked our coats. They wouldn’t let us upstairs w/o them. We never had to wear them the other times. I don’t know what exactly they think is going to help keep germs off if you wear a little red riding hood cape, but they think it does something. Dan felt like Batman. ;)
After our first visit with the children, we went to the dept of education office. We had to be interviewed by the big wig there. She was quite nice but looked very prestigious. I was nervous as heck. She asked questions like, “Do you have biological children? Why do you want to adopt? What do your boys think of this? What does your family think? What is your salary? Tell me about your house.”, etc…. She was quite surprised we wanted 4 children and said age 35 was too young for that! She wanted to know why we’d want to spend our money on more children and not trips and things. She was chuckling during most of that conversation so that was a good sign. She wanted to see our photo album that we had brought for each girl. We passed I guess and got her blessing.
After that we headed to a notary office to sign the official forms to accept L and R’s referral. We had to show our passports and sit in a room with the notary. It took quite awhile. I noticed one of the girl’s birthdays was different than on our medical info so I questioned it. She said she had the right one (the translator gal in the office). I just took her word for it and will have to double check that on the birth certificate when we get it on trip 2. I mostly want to know what day to celebrate her birthday…and it’s important info for her passport. They had it written down as 10 days earlier that we thought it was. Strange.
I just finished collecting some items for the families that we’re taking back with us. One mom bought a bunch of Russian chocolates for her boys. She left 4 behind with her mother while she waits to come home with her little girl. She’ll be home on Dec 27th so she’ll miss xmas. She also missed T-gvg since she was here then too. She lives in
I went to dinner alone tonight. Dan wanted to go to bed. He was dizzy and felt really sick today at visit #2. It wasn’t very enjoyable for him. I think he’s just super tired and sick of traveling. Our days are so busy and we need some downtime. We hardly ever have any (except at
I need to go to bed. It’s
Off to pack my suitcase and get back to life in
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It’s Saturday! One big day home. It’s
I feel much better today after 13 hours of sleep and drinking a bunch of water every time I woke up. We spent an hour talking about things and saying goodbye. I’m sure if I think about it I would be sad, but I’m so ready to see the boys I’m not too worried about L & R while we are gone. The best moment was when we came yesterday and R started running down the hall when she saw us. A very cool moment. I’m sure after 3 weeks together on the next trip we’ll be bonded well if she recognizes us after on 3 visits!
Off to pack and upload all this text to the blog. I can’t believe we’ve written 15 pages of single spaced text on this trip!! I’m not really looking forward to catching up on the 300 work emails I have…. It is a really weird feeling flipping between two totally different lives, 2 families, 2 different jobs, 2 different homes. It has really felt like a vacation, not in the relaxing way, but in the get out of the old routine way.
Good bye from
-Dan
posted by Dan @ 2:53 PM
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