Day 4 - Playing on the swings, and other stuff...

Day 4

Wow. Day 4. I feel like we've been here forever, and it's only just begun. I've been writing in my personal journal about I'm beginning to have the occasional mild wave of panic about being able to do this for another 40 days or so. I tell myself to take it one day at a time, and enjoy it. We've settled into our routine. For Linda, the actual travel was the worst part at first, but at this point both she and Tucker have learned to sleep through most of the trip, despite the road conditions (oh man -- stay tuned for movies on the way). I've never had trouble dozing off.

The best part of each day, of course, is our visit with Mia. Today's visit consisted mostly of playing outside with the rest of the kids. We already recognize a lot of the kids from our last visit, and are starting to recognize others. We have pet names for a lot of them.

Mia loves to swing, and Tucker felt very protective and possessive of her today. He followed her everywhere, sat with her on the swing whenever he could, and started talking about not wanting to leave her about halfway through the visit. There were tears at the end again, but Linda limited that with a clever distraction ("hey Tucker, let's watch the movies Papa took!").

Another new development is that Mia is a screamer. She's VERY vocal, and when somebody takes something of hers, or when she wants something and isn't getting it, she screams and jumps up and down stamping her feet like you wouldn't believe. I guess she has to assert herself somehow -- she is one of the smaller kids. She's very assertive. Usually gets her way, too. Should be interesting.

Also, we have not met with the director of the baby house yet. This is where we are able to ask questions about Mia, and about what we can possibly do for the baby house in terms of donations. We won't really have any questions for her, since we've already spoken to the pediatrician, and gotten several versions of her story from various people. We know more about her history than we did of Tucker's. We also hear that the Director will be very excited to see Tucker -- have we mentioned that he's quite a celebrity around the baby house?

The most stressful part of the trip for me is shopping. When you can't read almost anything, and can't speak or understand the language hardly at all, it's very difficult to buy the simplest of things. You'd be surprised how much horse sandwich meat looks like ham or roast beef. To make things worse, the markets that are available to us regularly all have all the things behind the counter, so you have to ask for them. So basically, when we've had to do real shopping (more than just "point and grunt", Sveta comes with us to interpret. She's awesome.

Anyway, I'm entertaining myself in the evenings with trying to learn as much Russian as I can. I don't really know how to go about it except to write down a word at a time and then use it. Mostly, I want to understand what Mia is saying, and for that I need Sveta again. Mostly today we heard "Minya Gadai!" (or something like that), which means "Push me too!" Heard that from ALL the kids while on the swings.

I should mention that I'm dealing with a slight cold right now. Just a sniffle that goes beyond what I recognize as allergy symptoms. And I was a little more tired today than I should have been. Should be no real problem, though I will be sleeping in the living room tonight in an attempt to keep from passing this on to Tucker or Linda.

Speaking of illness, it turns out the baby house has several massage areas set up. For the children. Massage is a regular part of their lives. They have special massages for certain illnesses, too. For instance, we hear that part of the massage routine for congestion involves hanging them upside down. Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that -- though it's already a regular part of Tucker's playtime (with me). We want to make time to observe one of the massages. I'd especially like to find out about that congestion routine, since chest colds can be particularly uncomfortable for him.

Don't know if we've mentioned the other American couple that's here right now. We've been traveling to Tchuchinsk with them, though their trip is almost over (at least the first part (they're doing their trip in two parts). Their court date is tomorrow (Jerry and Anne Tall, adopting Nina and Nikola). Woo Hoo!

I'll be posting movies to our personal web site, I think. Can't do it too much, because we use a dialup connection and it takes a long time to upload. So, sorry, but the movies will be as small as I can make them.

That's it for now. Da Zaftra! ('till tomorrow).