Friday, April 10, 2009

This is Arnold......

Friday, April 10, 2009
Yesterday marked our 3rd week of being away from home. It seems like a lot longer!
It is 20:47 (8:47 pm) and we just spoke with our translator Natasha. She called from Kiev to check in on us. She wanted to know how we were doing and to make sure we were eating. She tells it is important for us to “eat well” so we will have enough strength for this process and also enough strength to lift our 35 pound son! As for our paperwork, she only said it had been “examined without any concerns.” She then said she was waiting for them to be signed and made no mention of when she would be coming back to our region. We will just keep to our schedule until we hear different…
Now let’s talk about Arnold.
Arnold is a GIANT dog that lives at the Children’s Home….by the way, did we mention the name of the home is “The Sun” ??? Outside the Director’s office is a giant collage of photo‘s of children who have been adopted. On the top, in Ukraine, it says “My mother and father found me in The Sun.”
Anyway……back to Arnold.
We think he is a Great Dane….he is ten years old and is having trouble with his back legs. He has a very loud bark you can hear inside or outside of the main building. We have seen him out with his caretaker twice now. The children can go near Arnold, but are not allowed to pet him…
Today toward the end of our 15:30 to 17:00 visit we saw Arnold and his caretaker. We were trying to get Nicholas to say, “DOG” but were unsuccessful. He did manage to say, “Woo-Woo,” which is always fun to hear. The caretaker then began speaking to Nicholas, but he would not answer. Then he began speaking to us in English! It was very basic and a little shaky but it was definitely English. He told us he was asking Nicholas what his name was, but he would not say. We told him it was Nicholi. Once he began using his name, Nicholas did begin to speak with the gentleman. He then asked us where we lived. As soon as I told him Dallas, TX he immediately asked me a question. “Is that where he was killed?” I assumed he meant JFK. As I said, “President Kennedy?” he said, “Martin Luther King.” Since he was holding a giant dog three feet away from our son, I decided not to correct him. We just politely said we had to bring Nicholas back inside…..another International Incident avoided!
During our morning playtime with Nicholas we discovered he knows how to play “Keep Away From Daddy.” While he was playing with two small toy cars we brought for him, he began to hand me one of them. When I went to take it from him he pulled has hand back away from my reach and laughed. He did this several times in a row and just laughed and laughed. Soon after that he allowed me to play with one of his cars. As I pushed the car along I began to make some “car noises.” When we gave him the cars again in the afternoon he began making his own “car noises.” He then went over to an abandoned 1959 Fiat and removed the carburetor using the straw from one his juice boxes and banana peel……not really….
During our lunch break I decided to take walk across the street to a small super market. I wanted to see what they had since it is a lot closer than the other market our driver has been taking us to when needed. I found everything we would need to continue to eat at the apartment instead of going out for meals, which saves us money so we can buy more souvenirs!

Lisa - Nicholas has also discovered that Mommy wears glasses, and it is HILARIOUS to pull them off of her face, try to put them on his face, then bend the living daylights out of them. Good thing I brought a spare pair, and also that they are really cheap glasses!!! He also knows that as soon as we take him outside, that it is snack time for him. He heads straight to his favorite big metal truck, and promptly sits down and starts to dig through the "magic bag" looking for food. The bag is one we got free in Kiev for buying quite a few souvineres (pardon the spelling mistakes) from a vendor who is a friend of our translators. It is the bag that we carry his snacks, juice boxes, stuffed cow, various toys and wipes in. You still can't give him total control of the food, because he wants to put it all in his mouth at once. Sometimes, if a piece of fruit is too big he will bite it in half, but then proceedes to put both halves in his mouth at once.

When we are driving through the city, we see lots of white Birch trees, very pretty, and I keep thinking of Mom and her prized decorative fireplace logs from when we were kids. These moved with us numerous times and you didn't touch them......EVER......they were for decoration only!!!

Our apartment is nice, but cold. The central heating has been turned off, and because of the way we face, we don't get any sunlight in. It is kind of like sleeping in Grandmas basement in Minneapolis, dark and cold. There is a heater up on the wall, but trying to combat the cold is a loosing battle, so I am glad I brought a sweater and thick socks. It is actually warmer outside some days.

Nicholas also has mastered the art of "If I don't sit still and laugh while they are taking off my outside clothes, maybe they will stay longer" Every day now when we drop him off in his room, he just thinks it is so funny to fight the process of getting from outside slothes to inside clothes. This involves taking off hat, scarf, coat, shoes, overalls and a shirt and then putting on inside shoes. The nannies now let us get his things in and out of his locker and dress and undress him. We still have over a diaper to them when we arrive so we have not done this yet (woo hoo!!!). Under all that list of outside clothes, he is wearing an undershirt, and overshirt and tights ....... yes thights. All the kids wear them and they come in various colors and patterns. When we were making a list of clothes we have to buy for him, our translator laughed and asked if we wanted to buy any tights to put on him for the trip home........we obviously said no!