Tuesday with "Tanya"

We woke up this morning feeling somewhat rested, thanks to a good 'ol Unisom! (Man, this jetlag thing is not easy to shake! We are exhausted!) Our driver, Boris (a member of our church who lives in St. Pete) picked us up 9:45, then we picked up Elena, our coordinator, then went to the orphanage.

When we got there we went into the orphanage doctor’s office so she could go over all of Anna’s medical info with us. Luckily, there were no major surprises. For a child with Ds, she has been quite healthy. She has never had heart issues. Yeah! She rarely even gets colds. There are three things we'll have to get checked out when she comes home. The first thing is her eyes. She does have glasses but they only have her wear them a couple hours a day for some reason. When we were playing with her I noticed that she has a hard time focusing in on things and her eyes twitch a little when she's trying to focus. I imagine a good eyeglass perscription will take care of that. She also has some weak muscles in one of her eyes and it gets goopy a lot they said. So we will probably need to do some patching. Lastly, she is short for her age, but a bit overweight, even living in an orphanage where she doesn't have a chance to overeat. There's probably some thyroid issues that need resolved there. Lastly, we'll have to get her tested for allergies. She gets rashes easily and they haven't pinpointed what she's allergic to. The doctor said the rashes are less frequent the older she gets. So maybe she'll grow out of that. Our daughter Sadie had this problem big-time when she was little but has mostly grown out of it.

OK...on to the good stuff! Pictures! For our first visit today, we got to go upstairs to Anna's groupa area. This is where she spends almost all of her time. The kids are divided into "families" with 12 kids and 4 caregivers on shift at all times. Not a bad ratio, thankfully.  This area includes a playroom, a little kitchen, a bathroom, an eating area and sleeping room. When we first came in, all the kids were gone except one, who was sick. He (I think he was a boy in pink jammies. :)) had to stay in the bedroom and was clearly bored. He kept sneaking out to play with us. The caregiver kept shooing him back into the room.  Poor little guy.

We had a tea party with Anna.  Even Papa had fun with this. Every time we pretended to sip the tea out of the cup, it made her laugh.  She thought it was so funny.  I'm smiling as I sit here and think about her laugh.  It seriously makes us melt.

We showed her the book we made her about her family.  She LOVED looking carefully at each picture and pointing to each one.  She would point and say, "what's that?" in Russian and we would tell her the name of each of her siblings. She doesn't have a clue who they are or how she will fit into this picture.  But we're hoping that letting her memorize their faces will help when she meets them in a couple months.

Sadie, you'll love this one. :)

 

I love this one the most. It makes me tear up just thinking about what it implies.  

The people in this picture are going to completely change her world.  (**Post-edit:  Actually, she will change our world for the better, much more than we change hers.  Thanks, Ken. :) )

Soon, Anna.  Soon.

After this short visit we went back to the hotel and took a nap, then woke up just in time for our driver to take us back to the orphanage for our afternoon visit.  This time they let us go in the therapy room where there were lots of puzzles and things to do.  We spent two hours completely focused on our pumpkin.

We did puzzles.

She colored every page of the coloring book we brought for her.  We were impressed with how long she would focus on one thing.  And she didn't want us helping her one bit.  She'd say "nyet!" (no) every time we tried to help.

 

I love this one.  We have this app on my iPhone called "foggy window" where you blow on it and it fogs up, then you write on it with your finger and it clears away where you write, just like on a foggy window.  Jeremy showed her one time how you blow on it, and she figured it right out.  She took it out of his hands, wrote on it, then blew on it to fog it up again.  We laughed so hard.

Something we learned about Anna today was that she is a very determined little girl.  She knows what she wants.  Cute as a button, but stubborn!  Both the orphanage director and the doctor told us this about her.  As they would talk away in Russion, we noticed they were smiling, like "just you wait."  Then Elena would translate and tell us that "Tanya" is sweet, funny, warm, happy and stubborn!  It made us laugh when they told us this because Sadie was exactly like this at this age, and still is.  But we are told that people with DS are even more stubborn than the rest of us, so watch out!  We now know why Sadie was sent to us first...to prepare us. Hee hee.

We are happy, exhausted, and freezing our tails off!  We  walked down to the corner market last night and that was quite the experience.  This city is everything we pictured...cold, dark, and super fast-paced.  There is no way we would survive driving here.  Talk about scary! And pedestrians have to be as aggressive as the drivers if they want to get across the street.We decided we are just going to stay in our comfy, Americanized Marriott hotel room and call it good.
Спокойной ночи (Spokoinoi nochi) or in English...Good Night!