Second day of our Waiting Period ~ Day 17

Today we had another adventurous day at the orphanage. It really is quite overwhelming to know that we are going into a large group of children who all want us to give them complete attention. The kids that are around us are all the younger kids. I haven’t really thought about that until today, but we really aren’t around the older kids that are more Vika’s age. These kids are more like 10 and younger. There are some that literally just hang on me!

Vika and her friend, Masha, seemed very excited when we got there today. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she was funny about it and said, “Like usual.”

We took a more age appropriate puzzle to work on with her today and she seemed excited about that. She thought the puzzle we took before was more of an ‘adult’ puzzle. It’s a hard one. We’ve been working on it in our apartment. I was a bit sad that she was so adamant about staying up in the common room to do the puzzle with all that chaos and on the floor, but I suppose that’s what she is used to. I had a hard time with it. There is one boy that likes my complete attention, but he is not very nice to me. I don’t like that. I kept leaving to play with other kids. There were plenty of them there.

Vika’s brother came back to visit today. He and Spencer had a great and long visit. He is such a good person. We really like him. They talked about each other’s work. He was very interested in how the higher education system worked. He couldn’t understand that there were different levels of prestige when it came to college. He seemed very excited when Spencer told him we would like to leave our modem with him so he could have internet to try and call us. Next visit Spen will have to make sure he knows what ‘skype’ is. Our visit today seemed to go by much faster than yesterday.

At one point the girls were combing Yana’s hair and decided that they wanted to make her hair ‘wavy’ with the comb. That only meant that they were going to tie her hair up in knots around the comb. I worked for about an hour to get that thing out. We were seconds away from having to cut her hair out of the comb when Spen suggested breaking the comb. Brilliant! It thankfully worked and we learned that when the little girls want to play beauty parlor with our hair, keep the combs away!

The kids were pretty disappointed that I wouldn’t flip them around and jump around as much today. I am so old! My back didn’t really respond well to the fun of yesterday so I had to say no. I did play a lot of duck duck goose though. They were surprised when naturally I was the goose every time, but I would actually chase them and tag them before they could sit around. I don’t think a lot of grown-ups do that around here!

I was nervous when we pulled out the cookies and gum, but luckily we survived it! The best was when I pulled out the big bag of wint-o-green life savers and gave them to Taylor (Nikita) to pass out to all of his friends. He did a great job. It is apparently a flavor that they don’t get around here. Vika could not keep it in her mouth. All of the kids couldn’t handle how strong the flavor was! It wasn’t even peppermint! It was pretty funny. I asked Vika if she wanted more and she politely said, “no” but she was determined to finish the one we gave her! Funny. Spen was wishing we had a big bag of atomic fire balls or something to hand out!

We came home and worked it out to meet the other families for dinner. Dinner was great and we had such a fun time visiting. There are a lot of advantages to us being here together. Tonight was a great example of one of the big ones.

We are hoping to see Artoym again tomorrow and he is hoping that the other brother will come too. What in the world are we going to take to do tomorrow?!