The joy of siblings

I get asked a lot how the kids are getting along...

Whenever there is a disagreement as to what happened between two people, they have to sit together until they can come to a coherent story that is agreeable to both parties.

"Mama! Julia hit me!"
"No I not!"
"Yes, she hit me right here really hard!"
"No I not!"
"She hit me! See the red mark on my arm?" (for the record, I could not)
"Tim...Tim..." (Julia looking at her hand trying to find something Tim had done to her)

...pause...

"I hit her first but she hit me HARDER!"

Their punishment was to sit together on the freezer while I made dinner. ;)

We love the dentist

Julia did great at the dentist yesterday. She was really excited about it and seemed to understand exactly what was going to happen (we can tell from her teeth that she's had an extraction before). She told me (in Russian) that she would go to sleep, it would hurt, and she wouldn't cry.** The whole procedure from her going back to coming out to the lobby took 30 minutes. She had some gauze to bite on and they told us to leave it in for five minutes. She didn't seem to have any desire to take it out of her mouth, so I let her keep it in for the ride home. When we got home she wanted to eat, so I told her to go throw the gauze in the trash. As soon as she opened her mouth we had a fountain of blood!

Apparently she had had the gauze held so tightly that the clot adhered, so when she released the pressure the bleeding started all over again. Thankfully she closed her mouth again when I asked her too. ;) We got the bleeding stopped without a problem, then she ate some ice cream and a peanut butter sandwich for lunch.

She had a great afternoon with no pain (or so she kept saying). Walking to pick the other kids up from school, she asked me if she was all done with the dentist.

"No, you have one more."
"One more??"
"Yes."
"YAYYYY!!!!"

Seriously.

They LOVE their dentist!

**I did tell her it was okay to cry, but the "no crying" thing stems from her and Bianca's last doctor visit where Julia got five shots and Bianca got four. Julia didn't cry but Bianca howled and Julia is lording it over her and apparently is never going to cry again. ;)

Still here :)

...and LOVING it. :) :)

Hmmm...what to share from the last few weeks? I really am loving being at home. I go to bed every night thankful I don't have to go to work the next day. I love being able to focus on serving my family.

Bianca and Julia are doing really well. I have been amazed at their adjustment. That's not to say we don't have issues. ;) We have had a couple of common issues--bedwetting and finger/thumb-sucking. The bedwetting is occurring with one girl, but not because she is an actual bedwetter. She doesn't want to get up and go to the bathroom so she pees in bed. This is not at all uncommon for children from orphanages as they are not usually allowed to get up at night. Both girls suck their fingers (Bianca) and thumb (Julia). They are wearing mittens to bed at night on the specific hand. Julia has now asked not to wear it and seems to have stopped sucking her thumb. I'm sure at stressful times we will see that recur. :) The thumb/hand sucking we want to get stopped as quickly as possible as the girls are already 5 and 6 and losing teeth. We want to get this behavior modified so that it doesn't impact their adult teeth.

Julia already has to have plenty of dental work done. She's scheduled for three fillings, two extractions, and a crown. She won't be under full anesthesia like Emily was, but they're giving her nitrous and splitting the work into two sessions.

I promise we do have pictures to share. They're on the camera still and I'm hoping to get them off today!

The new girls

I haven't posted much simply because the girls have really fit in so well that it strikes me as really odd that they haven't been here for longer. About two weeks home I was really frustrated with hearing Russian from them--I wanted them to speak English so I could get to know them better!

But as a side note to how easy our transition was, the first afternoon home Bianca turned to me and said something and I just stared at her blankly. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why she was speaking in Russian and not English. Then I remembered...oh yeah, we got home last night.

Anyway, the girls have really melded well into our family. We're all still finding our spots, of course, and they still have family behaviors to learn and orphanage behaviors to unlearn, but they are doing really well. I love to watch all of the kids (or even small groups of the kids) play together. In the beginning, Julia and Bianca would play together and the other kids would play together, but there wasn't much mixing because B and J play lots of imaginative play, and it was hard for the others to join in with the language barrier. Now some of that barrier has started to go away and they are spending more time intermingling.

Some explanations

I think there might be a little confusion out there about the current state of our family, plus there may be a few of you who are just joining in from this last adoption so I thought a detailed explanation of "us" might be in order.

Mark--sole breadwinner and highly esteemed physical therapist, house rehabber (rebuilder!), and worm digger

Courtney--highly educated (not the same thing as qualified, FYI) stay-at-home mom as of this past Monday, former maker of medicines, now dispenser of more band-aids than can be counted

Alex--8 years old and going on 40, loves history, has issues with anxiety especially with schedule changes

Tim--7 years old, loves to tell jokes and do "magic" tricks, keeps me laughing when he's not driving me crazy with his antics

Danielle--7 years old, thinks she's a princess, prefers not to do any work (princesses don't have to do work, do they?) and is definitely going to want the largest share of the mirror as she gets older

Bianca--6 years old, new to the family in March 2011, loves language and almost knows the alphabet song (there are lots of C's in her version)

Emily--5 years old, thinks she's cute (and will tell you!), never ever EVER stops talking

Julia--5 years old, new to the family in March 2011, has an infectious giggle and a monster pout

Those of you who've seen us out and about during the week have probably also seen another little girl with us. That's R. She's 18 months old and the daughter of one of Mark's co-workers. We babysit her during the day. We did not adopt another child right after Bianca and Julia. :)

As you can imagine, things at our house are a little chaotic. Right now during the day it's usually just Bianca, Julia and R, but on days like today and tomorrow when the other kids are out of school I have all 7 at home. I've found divide-and-conquer to be an effective strategy. As in, send two to play in one room, two upstairs, etc. ;)

In the stay-at-home realm, I am still LOVING IT. I am so much more relaxed than when I was working (that should say something since I have 7 kids at home!). I love that I can do all of our meal preps during the day. I am slowly tackling various projects around the house to try to better organize and streamline our lives.

We have it!

We have the visa in hand and are all set for our flights out tomorrow.

We've spent the day playing and hanging out. Julia has finally decided that Papa is really a lot of fun. :) She was a little unsure the first few days, but now she really likes having a papa...except of course when she's getting in trouble, and then she's not so fond of mama either. ;)

Someone had asked in the comments: our first trip was exactly two weeks door-to-door, and this second trip for me is 13 days door-to-door (Mark was here for the second week). Our first trip was a little shorter than normal (I'd say 2.5 weeks is about average since you have to wait for your court date), and the second trip was a little long due to various difficulties, including a holiday in the middle of our trip which caused delays. So our total adoption time counting the 10-day wait was right at 5 weeks (most people run 5-7 weeks).

A glitch

We're not coming home.

At least, not yet.

The US Embassy wasn't able to issue one of the girls' visas today, so we can't leave tomorrow. We should be able to get the visa tomorrow (really hoping, since we just paid to change our flights and I don't want to change them again!). There were a lot of potential factors that played into not getting the visa today, but in the end it doesn't matter. All that matters is that we didn't get it and we're hoping for tomorrow.

Other than that things are good here. I can really only say that now because I've had a lot of chocolate. ;) The girls are doing really well. Today in the car Bianca was talking to our driver and was talking about her "sister, Julia". So sweet.

We did a family tradition this morning at a specific playground here in Kyiv. All 6 of our kids have now played on the same playground while waiting to go home. :)

Sleeping

We're a boring crew around here. Everyone's sleeping but me. :)

The girls have been napping every day from about 12:30-1:30, but they sleep longer if we've done a lot in the morning. We walked a lot this morning so they're pretty tired, and Mark's tired from all of the traveling (and waiting in the airport!).

I'm hanging out, waiting for everyone to wake up. We're going to meet up with the Bowdens (another RR family) this afternoon before they leave for home tomorrow. We're still hoping to get the girls down to Independence Square, but it's been cold and windy and it's a bit of a walk from our apartment for them. We're staying in an apartment basically at the other end of Kreschatik. But there's lots to do right around us and we've found several playgrounds. The girls LOVE to swing and even better, they love to push each other. ;)

If we can remember to take the camera, I'll try to get some pictures of us out and about in Kyiv. I couldn't manage it with the girls by myself, but now there are extra hands!

Picture post

My luggage. Contained within were the following: four pairs pants, 5 pairs socks and underwear, four shirts, two sweaters, two winter coats, two hats, two pairs mittens, two pairs shoes, two pairs pajamas, two stuffed animals, two notebooks, 24-pack crayons, one puzzle pairs set, one book, one photo album (all of the previous for the girls); dossier documents, netbook, sudoku book, camera, charger and adapters, two cell phones (one US, one UA), notebook, money belt, travel kleenex, 5 granola bars, sleep mask, one sweater, one pair thermal tights, one long underwear top, 5 pairs underwear, 5 pairs socks, slippers, pajamas, toiletries, pocket Russian dictionary/phrase books, comb. Now you have a packing list. ;)

An Amstor in Mariupol.

An Amstor in Donetsk.

I've tried to explain to people that Ukrainians have a love affair with mayonnaise. Why do you think I like it here so much? This is a billboard for lemon mayonnaise. :) They have whole aisles in the supermarket just for mayonnaise, and that's not an exaggeration!

Leaving the orphanage and driving to Donetsk for passports, with Sasha (our regional facilitator--she's awesome!)

Mad at me because I wouldn't take her seatbelt off. I know she looks worried here, but she spent most of the drive scowling at me. :)

Their first bubble bath. They were enthralled with the bubbles!

Three Reece's Rainbow angels who are orphans no more! "Darla", "Sophie", and "Candace"

Change in plans

I don't think we've yet had an adoption that didn't have one of those days...where everything you thought you knew turned out to be totally and completely wrong (in this case, our plan for the next couple of weeks).

Remember these two?

They're here. With me.

In Kyiv.

Big change of plans. :)

Wednesday started off as planned, with driving to Enakiev (I'm SURE it has other spellings, that's just the one I've seen most often here, but it's actually pronounced Yenakiev) to get Julia's birth certificate and tax ID. Then we went to Makiivka to close out the girls' bank accounts there. All of that went more or less easier than the previous day, but we still didn't get done with those until noon. At 12:45, the sky started falling. ;)

Sasha called the orphanage director so that we could take the girls out to have digital scans made in Donetsk for their passports. This meant we would be driving the girls from Mariupol to Donetsk (about 2 hours) and back. But the orphanage director refused to let us take them unless we signed them out permanently. The other option was she would have the girls taken to Donetsk in one of the orphanage cars with an orphanage worker, hopefully today. But this completely threw off the timeline we're still hoping to make for this second trip, and it wasn't clear that the girls would definitely go to Donetsk today, so the best option was to go ahead and take them out.

We drove back to Mariupol, I ran into Amstor to grab tights (the only thing I hadn't brought for the girls, intentionally) and then we went to the baby house to pick them up. Then they wouldn't let us go until we closed out their Mariupol bank accounts. We made it back to Donetsk right before 6pm for the passport scans. Sasha had called ahead and the woman was waiting for us. After that was a quick run to the train to try to head to Kyiv, since there was no reason to hang out in either Donetsk or Mariupol with the girls, and Mark will be coming into Kyiv on Sunday.

So...now we're here, waiting for our passports to arrive. :)

By the way, the train from Donetsk to Kyiv was REALLY nice! Way nicer than the trains in the US that I've been on. The girls did great on the train although it took Bianca a long time to fall asleep. But then, I couldn't sleep either so I can't blame her. It was a pretty exciting day!

Our new little girls

We are the proud parents of Bianca Anastasia and Julia Svetlana!