Day 32

I finally got a chance to taste more Ukrainian food. Roma, the translator for John and Christine Reed, was with us and he explained what was what. I love the pancake burrito-like food and the deep fried rolled chicken with cheese sauce... yum. Good stuff. Christine works with families that have adoption interruptions. It's hard to imagine that folks could do that but at least there are people out there like Christine who love children enough to step in and help. Sometimes she can offer respite from parenting, other times the child is re-adopted. Yes, you read that correctly: re-adopted. One child has been adopted 3 times! However hard it is to imagine, I guess it's better than the child staying unloved or abused. We stayed in the sports room with Kaitlyn and Christine, Julie, and Alex (their newly adopted son) joined us. We learned a bit more Russian and had some fun. Kaitlyn did two new things today: she wanted to get in the swing and the pop-up tent. She just needs time to get comfortable with the idea of something new.



Our visit with Sarah started kinda rough. It seemed that she was having a no-so-great day but was happy to see us. One of the challenges of adopting a child at her age is that when we are at the orphanage, we are on her grounds. She knows the rules and knows how to push them but she doesn't see us as the ultimate authority in her life - which logically that is expected. As a parent, that can be difficult to work with. At one point, I told her that she needed to listen or that she may end up going back with the group. That seemed to work because she didn't want us to leave. A while later, her group came out with her favorite care-giver: Natasha. We found out that when Sarah first came to the orphanage, she would not speak or do much at all. The care-giver said that she has been working with Sarah for 3 years; though the math doesn't add up because we were told that Sarah has been there since 2007 - around 2 years or so. It's the care-giver that has been working with Sarah to get her to be as active as she: playing, running, speaking, etc. This bit of information makes other observations of ours make more sense. I gave her my email address so I could get hers and we will send pictures and updates now and then.



As for the group, the boys and Sarah joined in the play and we watched how jealous she was over the boys. She would not allow the others to get to close to the boys and at one point, she drew them back, held on to both of them (she was in the middle) and told the others to go away, that these are "her" brothers. While I normally would have corrected her for doing that; she wouldn't have understood the correction and it conveys attachment. Though it's not quite bonding, it's a beginning. Sarah's orphanage director is going to be out-of-the-office Monday and since we still have to pick up the court documents and birth certificates, it looks like we will pick Sarah up Tuesday. We don't have any nice words to say about this but what can we do? We simply play the game. I can't imagine that we will have any issue getting Kaitlyn on Monday but we wanted get them both on the same day. I suppose this will make it easier to have parties at both orphanages. I wonder how often the kids get cake?