Tuesday, June 5, 2007

The weather today was perfect! Thank you everyone who has been praying! We decided to try to get some time in at the internet café before heading over to the orphanage. We only had a few minutes, but it gave us enough time to update our blog. We rushed back to the apartment to grab our bag of Frisbees, racquets, balls, and other fun toys that we play with at the park and headed over to the orphanage. Mark and Christine arrived shortly after us and we decided to go to Amstor again for lunch. Amstor is definitely the favorite lunch spot of the adults. Amina likes it, but Masha and Khrystyna didn’t seem to be too thrilled about going there for lunch. We headed to Amstor for lunch and then went to the park with the crocodile. On the way to the park, we discovered that we weren’t the only creatures riding in our car…there was also a large fly. It was about an inch long. Mark, Christine, and Masha were able to see the fly from their car behind us. It had Amina totally freaked out. We first tried to swat it with a book, but we didn’t think our driver would appreciate bug guts smeared on his seat. We then decided to try smooshing it in a wet wipe. This was Amina’s idea, however, when it came time to implement it, she was too scared to get near it. There was a lot of screaming and jumping onto each other’s laps before I finally got brave and smooshed it. It was disgusting. Unfortunately, Khrystyna’s glasses were a casualty of our fly swatting endeavor. We somehow managed to sit on them and they lost a screw. We searched the car but couldn’t find the missing piece so I decided I would hold on to them and we would either get them repaired or replace them. When we got to the park, the girls immediately started talking about all the rides they wanted to go on. We decided to start working on responsibility today and gave each of the girls 20 grivna to spend for the day. This money was for rides and ice cream. All 3 girls decided together what they wanted to spend their money on and we had a very enjoyable time playing. After they had used up most of their money, they decided to head to the outdoor café tent in the park with the ice cream. Ice cream here is pretty expensive and they were each able to buy ice cream and have a little money left over. They used their left over money for fish treats (salted dehydrated fish…YUCK!) and lollipops. I think they each had 4 or 5. They were very willing to share their fish treats and I had a piece to be polite. It looked like shredded cheese, but it was disgusting. The girls all love them so we let them eat them! Also, in Ukraine there are stray animals everywhere. There was a cat who had taken up residence in the little outdoor café and Amina shared her ice cream and fish snacks with the cat. When the girls were finished eating, we ran through all the homemade flashcards I had made. The girls are really doing a great job of remembering English. They’re also starting to use it more regularly. Amina was pretty tired after all the rides today so after our English lesson, she stayed in the café and held the cat. I think the cat was narcoleptic because it stayed asleep no matter what Amina, Fred, or Mark did. It was the strangest thing. While Amina rested and Fred and Mark tormented the cat, Khrystyna and Masha played outside of the tent. After a while, Masha and Khrystyna decided they wanted to go to the playground. We all headed to the playground and stayed there for an hour. Amina and Khrystyna are getting very good at sharing. Since there is only 2 swings on the playground, Masha gets one and Khrystyna and Amina take turns on the other. When it was almost time for our drivers to pick us up, the girls decided they needed to head to the bathroom. Park restrooms in America are usually not my favorite, but they are nothing like Ukrainian park bathrooms. These bathrooms consist of a long stairway underground that ends in the restrooms…stalls with holes in the ground. I’ll leave it at that…it’s disgusting. I accompanied them to the bathroom, but waited outside. The girls all asked for wet wipes to hold over their noses while they are down in the bathroom. By the time we got back from the bathroom, our drivers had arrived and we headed back to the orphanage. We asked Kseniya if she would be willing to spend a few minutes translating for us. We wanted to explain what would be happening over the next few days. We told the girls that Fred would be heading home on Thursday and that I would be staying in Ukraine with them for another week or so. After we are finished our waiting period, I will take the girls to the capital of the region to get their birth certificates and other important documents, then we will get on a train and head to Kiev. In Kiev, each of the girls will have to get physicals done by the American Medical Center in Kiev and Amina will have to get some vaccinations. Children under 10 are not required to get these shots. When we explained this to the girls, Amina was horrified and Khrystyna breathed a very audible sigh of relief. Her sigh of relief was accompanied by a dramatic eye roll! We explained that we will be in Kiev for a few days and that we will have to go the US embassy to get their passports, but that when we have all of that finished, we will be able to head to America. We explained to the girls that we would work on English everyday at home, but that we will also have an English tutor that they will go to 2 times a week. We tried to explain as much as possible and then we asked if they had any questions or if there was anything they were afraid of. Amina immediately spoke up and let us know that she was fearful that she wouldn’t know enough English by the time school started in the fall. We told her that we thought she would be just fine, but that we would be happy to get additional help for them if they were to need it. Khrystyna didn’t have any fears…she just wanted to know if they would be able to go to camp. We told them that they could go to daycamp for 2 weeks this summer. Khrystyna told us that she wanted to go to camp for 5 weeks. We’ll probably have to work out some kind of compromise. After our talk with the girls, we headed back home. The weather had been cool all day so we weren’t as exhausted as we usually were at that time of day. I had been hoping to buy more of the 5 x 7 card stock I had picked up the other day to use as flashcards. I really wanted to make more flashcards. Fred and I walked over to the store that had the flashcards, but they were already closed. We headed to the mall next to see if we could find any good Russian/English phrasebooks for the girls. We didn’t find any that we really liked. We decided that we should probably grab a bite to eat on the way home since it was already almost 7 pm. We stopped at the pizza place that has American style pizza and split a pizza and got juice and water. All of our food was under $3 USD. We were pretty impressed. When we finished eating, we headed back to the apartment to re-evaluate what we needed to send home with Fred. When we packed his suitcase the other night, I packed all my pants and long sleeve tops, but since we’ve had some cooler days, I thought I should probably hang on to some of that stuff. Also, we called Sasha to see what time we would be meeting to sign documents. He said that since Fred’s flight wasn’t leaving til Friday and since Fred was staying here until Thursday, he decided to come on Thursday morning instead. He also said that a woman would be coming to clean our apartment tomorrow morning at 10. She had to come to clean last week and while she was cleaning we had to be out of our apartment. After talking to Sasha, we did some laundry, started planning for tomorrow, and are now getting ready for bed.