Eight Months

Winter is heaving-to. It has clearly decided that it’s not going anywhere, and in the meantime, it’s going to have a bit of fun with us. In typical Midwest fashion, we’ve experienced the battle between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico, throwing their separate weather patterns at us and laughing as they wreak havoc on our lives and plans.

After a couple of 55-degree days a couple weeks ago, accompanied by flooding worthy of a live remote on Good Morning America, we are again looking at a blanket of fresh snow and sub-zero wind-chills. God has thumbed his nose at the school system’s allotted number of snow-days, and they have begun tacking time onto the end of the kids’ sentence. The school year has been extended one day…so far. Any more snow-days, and our first summer vacation will be in jeopardy.

Masha takes it all in stride. The Winter Meltdown retreat brought kids from three churches together with the staff from our new “positive” radio station (www.remedy.fm check it out – great mix of rock, hip-hop, and alternative with none of the toxicity that is soaked throughout the mainstream media!!) for a weekend of fun and fellowship in southern Michigan. She had a great time; the highlight seemed to be an afternoon of Extreme Sledding.

She has continued to excel in school. Her teachers are all working hard with her, and she’s catching up to her class more quickly than anyone expected. Her homeroom teacher believes that she’s learning English quicker than normal, and we believe him. She understands most casual conversation now; while we still run into new words, she is more and more able to figure them out through context. She constantly comes home with new phrases…her current favorite word is “seriously.” “Seriously, Dad, the dog is stinky.”

I have never seen a kid work so hard at schoolwork. It’s a challenge to get her started, but once she has some momentum, she can’t stop until she’s all done. Recently, we were looking up vocabulary words in the dictionary. And yes, I am making her use a REAL dictionary. With pages. And a cover. Like…a BOOK NOT typing the word into dictionary.com and seeing what comes up! What a horrible, horrible monster I am! Or so I’ve been told. But I digress…

Recently we were looking up vocabulary words at the kitchen table. We had a few minutes as Mark was finishing up dinner, so I figured we could get about half of them done. She fought me on looking them up, but after the first couple, she got in the groove. We were starting on #5 when Mark announced dinner. He set the table around us; she moved the silverware away. He put her plate of roast chicken ON the open dictionary; she handed it to me. I had to take the dictionary away so she would eat. She was late to Campus Life because we needed to finish. I can honestly say I never cared that much about my homework!!

In school, she is gaining more confidence and grasping more each day. She even volunteered to read out loud with her reading group last week!!

Overall, we could not be more proud of her. Of course we have 13-year-old moments. We have times when her plans clash with ours. She sometimes perceives our home as a democracy rather than a benevolent dictatorship. But Masha is a good girl. Open-hearted, kind, and generous. We watched a movie last night with a teenage girl who, when talking to her mother, called her father “your husband.” Masha was baffled. “Why does she call him this? He’s her father. She should call him Dad. That is not nice.” She deals with anger much more constructively that I do, and I’m learning from her. And she always apologizes. On her own.

God has blessed us indeed!

Happy New Year!!

Snow is an overused metaphor, but as I watch the flakes dance to the ground on the first morning of 2008, I see a clean white palette. A year of possibilities, opportunities—life, just waiting to be written.

As you can imagine, busyness got the better of us this fall. After meeting with the guidance counselor, Masha entered 6th grade on 16 August. Although she is slightly old for 6th grade, we hoped that easier, repeat content might give her the opportunity to focus on developing her English skills and acclimating to the American culture. Looking back, we definitely made the right choice!

At the six-month mark, her conversational English is great. She has opened up, and shares her thoughts with us…in fact, she had trouble sleeping a few nights ago, and woke Dad up for a 2-hour chat, covering every topic imaginable. She can follow most of the dialogue in movies and she’s even noticing different regional accents.

As expected, cognitive language and reading skills are lagging, but she’s learning quickly. She says she still thinks in Russian, but more and more, we are hearing instant reactions in English. She is staying in touch with several Russian speakers, and is maintaining her Russian, but she’s starting to struggle to remember some less-used Russian words. Her grades are right in line with class averages, and her teachers are working very hard to balance challenges with likelihood of success. They started out the year making significant accommodations for her, but she’s now taking many of the same tests and quizzes as her peers!

Social planning is a challenge; in typical 13-year-old fashion, she is loathe to plan ahead, instead opting for last minute sleepover requests. She has a couple of close friends, and is starting to get involved in activities with the church youth group. We’re trying to tread carefully, but so far, she’s falling in with great kids, choosing decent music (for the most part), and making good choices.

It’s interesting to see the difference between her relationship with both of us. She’s still pretty reluctant to share personal thoughts and feelings with Dad; she’s a perfectionist with him, and won’t share any work-in-progress… With Mom, she’s more open to talk about “girl-stuff.” But she also is a ferocious wrestler, and loves to roughhouse with Dad. Christmas break has seen the emergence of amateur martial arts, combining a couple of moves taught by Uncle Rob, more learned from watching movie fight scenes, and a few crazy, made-up actions successful only by brute force. The kid has no idea how strong or tough she is!

Overall, Masha is settling in better than we ever could have hoped. Of course, there are challenging moments for all of us. Unrealistic expectations, disappointments, homesickness, memories….but they are balanced with joy, accomplishments, surprises, and belonging. She is truly our daughter in every sense, and none of us can imagine life any other way.

So today, I reflect on the year that’s passed and the year to come, and I watch just enough snow to hide the sleeping grass and spilled birdseed, not enough to shut the city down. God knows how to kick off a year!!

Two Months

It's days like this that make life worth living. This morning, as we ate breakfast and bid my father and step-mother goodbye, Maria announced that she would like to go to Extreme Park. We told her that it might be a little expensive to fly all the way to Ukraine to go to Extreme Park in her hometown, but that we could maybe go to Fun Spot in Angola if she wanted...

School starts next week, so we were thinking about a last hurrah already. When she offered to pay for her own ticket out of her allowance, we realized she was serious!

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind. We are finally wrapping up the Twelve Days of Birthday. Thursday marked the final day of YMCA Day Camp, Friday brought shopping day with Nana. Maria will have three well-deserved days at home before starting sixth grade on Thursday.

She is facing this newest challenge with an appropriate mixture of anticipation and terror. She has taken the first tour of school, picked up her books, walked through her schedule, and learned her locker combination.

We will take her back to school on Tuesday to walk through the building one more time and meet with her guidance counselor to ask any questions that might be bugging her. She will have another girl in her grade who also speaks Russian, so she can help explain the subtleties of middle school culture. Further, all the kids in her sixth grade class are new to this school, so they will all be getting lost in the halls for the first week!

We expect the first few months to be challenging, but Maria is well equipped to meet that challenge head-on, and to beat it with a little time and patience!

Overall, things are going well. Maria is learning English very quickly...she is spontaneously using "cool" and "awesome" appropriately. She eats nearly everything in sight. She loves Hannah Montana and High School Musical. A pretty typical kid.

Of course, we have our teenage moments, but the battles we are having hardly differ from the ones you veteran parents have always been fighting. Occasionally, she shares a word or comment that reminds us of the trials she has faced in her short life; this is a gentle reminder to balance discipline and structure with love and fun. And I guess that's what being a parent is all about.

One Month

So much for "Update the Blog once a week" on my task list! Despite every effort to keep our schedule manageable and to avoid over-stimulation, I'm finding that there are no moments to spare. I thought we were busy before…

All of you parenting veterans will laugh your tails off at me, but I'm still holding onto the shred of hope that as Maria settles in and learns more English, she will become a little more independent, and I won't feel as obligated to be there ALL the time. I also suspect that as that happens, I'll get scared of her slipping away too fast and then really want to be there ALL the time. Laugh all you want, but you all have had the luxury of easing into this!!

All in all, I can't complain. We arrived home exactly one month ago, and Maria is settling in much better than we ever could have hoped. She is learning English very quickly, and has a good attitude about it most of the time. We are learning what works and what doesn't. We are not photographing every moment of our lives. We're settling into a routine, culminating last week with both of us returning to work and Maria beginning to attend Day Camp.

Today, I'm taking my first business trip since our return (and using the uninterrupted "quiet time" on the flight to write this). It's only a 2-day trip, but the tempest of emotion kept me up half the night. I thought perhaps this would be my equivalent to other mothers' "first day of kindergarten" stories…sobbing as I walked away from my little girl for the first time. Instead, it was the responsibility of the new routine that chewed my guts up and spit them back out. The worry of the things I should have done and didn't. We're out of milk. I didn't freeze a water bottle to keep her lunch cool. Is there a forgotten load of laundry molding in the washer?

I trust Mark. I am confident in his ability to keep things running in my absence. In fact, I suspect that Dad and his Little Girl will have a blast in my short absence (not literally, I pray). I just feel like I'm forgetting more than one something. I just have to remember that as long as he knows how to toast an Eggo (and he is capable of much, much more), the child will not go hungry!

So, aside from today's angst, things are great! Over the past month, we have been keeping very busy. We've visited Fun Spot amusement park (the bigger-than-Ukraine-but-small-for-America "Extreme Park"). We've made the 3-hour drive to visit cousins Morgan, Dylan, and Gavin and spend a day at The Beach waterpark in Cincinnati. We've seen fireworks for Independence Day. And we've been swimming. Oh, man, have we been swimming. Hardly a day goes by that we don't swim…the YMCA membership has been well worth the expense!!!

Maria has begun a short series of private swimming lessons, intended to catch her up so that she will be prepared for the Youth Conditioning team in the fall--a precursor to swim team season, which I've been told start in December. Her first lesson was last Friday, and we have been blessed with an instructor who has been an ESL tutor in a former life…so in addition to learning proper technique and strokes, we're learning the English words that Maria will hear from coaches and team members (well, the appropriate, sport-related ones anyway!) She is soaking it all in, and practicing her streamline glides to perfection.

We have a school tour scheduled for Wednesday so she can meet her guidance counselor, start learning her way around, and get mentally prepared for school to start in mid-August. We are still discussing grade placement with the school, and have not discussed school plans in-depth with Maria yet. We are pleased to see that her anxiety about school seems to be waning a bit, and at times she even seems excited about school starting. We'll see how long *that* lasts!

So I'll say it again (knock on wood), all is well. We are happy, she is healthy. Before we know it, summer will be over and school will have started. Pray for us!!!!

Re-entry

Wow....a lot has happened in the last week. First, let me again thank all of you for your encouragement, support, love, and prayers. We never could have gotten through this phase of the adventure without each and every one of our family and friends!

We left for the airport on Friday morning, and arrived with plenty of time to spare. Igor, our driver, delivered us to the checkin area at the airport and wished us well. We met another couple heading back with their newly adopted son, and had a nice chat while we waited. Our luggage came in just under the weight limit, and we thought we were off for a great day. Then we went to passport control.

We stood in line there for quite a while, and when we stepped up to the counter, we handed over the package of adoption documents that our facilitator gave us. Well, apparently, the passport control guy didn't think that was good enough. We did not have an original of the court judgement, and he really thought we needed that.

We were pulled out of line and passed to a supervisor. We had about an hour before our flight, but we were a little concerned. Mark tried to call Sasha, but we only had 2 grivna left on our pay-as-you-go phone...it was just enough to send a text message, so Mark sent a concise "CALL ME" to Sasha.

A couple of minutes later, our phone rang, and Mark explained the situation to him. We got him on the phone with the supervisor, who had passed our little problem on to HIS supervisor and was awaiting a decision. After several very tense minutes of heavy prayer, they allowed us through, just in time to hop on our plane.

We had an uneventful 3-hour flight from Kiev to Amsterdam, and boarded the fight to Detroit on time. Shortly after take-off, we discovered that the on-demand video system on the plane was not working properly, and Masha was pretty frustrated when she clicked to get Dora the Explorer and ended up watching Freedom Writers. Not exactly the same. We popped a movie into the laptop, and she watched that until they got the system fixed about 3 1/2 hours later. She watched the Nickelodeon shorts channel while Mark and I both watched Breach, and we were all happy.

We landed on US soil right on time, and passed through immigration faster than you could say "Brand New Citizen." The guys that processed Masha's immigrant visa were really friendly and welcoming, and Masha got to sign her name as a US Citizen for the first time.

Once we cleared through customs and rechecked our luggage, we found a spot at the food court just below the World Club and hijacked the free WiFi connection for a couple of calls home. We had some french fries and ice cream, and then wandered over to our gate.

During our stops in both Amsterdam and Detroit, Masha discovered the joy of moving sidewalks. Every time she hopped onto one, she had a gleeful grin on her face. She experimented with standing, walking backward, and letting her elephant ride along the handrail. I will never ride another one without remembering that smile and the joy that filled me to watch her.

Anyway, we made the short hop from Detroit to Fort Wayne with no problems, and arrived to see a whole bunch of familiar faces greeting us at the airport! After being awake and on the go for nearly 24 hours, we were pretty bleary, but thrilled to be home.

Since then, we've done about 24 loads of laundry, unpacked a million souvenirs, and generally settled back into American life. We've gone to Wal-Mart, we have updated the Y membership, dropped clothes off at the cleaners, and applied for Masha's new library card.

On Tuesday, as we wandered around Wal-Mart for the third time in three days, Masha looked at me with pleading eyes, and said "Home?" We stayed home all day yesterday!

Overall, we are settling in well. Masha is doing great with her English...we haven't gotten the phrasebook out yet. She is settling in really well, and we couldn't be happier. We know that it's still the honeymoon, and it won't always be perfect, but for now, we're just enjoying each day as it comes.

As I write this, Masha is lying on the floor wrapped up in a blanket, watching The Incredibles with Shead on her lap. That's what it's all about!