The Cluttered Pantry

Howdy! Boy, you all are a pushy bunch! Emails and calls letting us know we better stop hogging all the time with the girls and better start posting pics and whatnot. . Tee-hee, we get it…following along for ten months warrants the follow through.

So, where do we start?! I’ll go with the most often asked questions you have been sending:

Have we slept yet?
Well, yes we got off to a good start on Sunday night when even though both girls slept for most of the ten hour flight home from Moscow, they still let us put them down to sleep for the night. We were feeling pretty great about our little schedule until Tuesday. After we got back from the pediatricians office, we put the girls down for their mid day nap and set up the baby monitor and grabbed some zzzz’s for ourselves. (the jet lag and first week of parenting from a stalinesq hotel had caught up to us) we started naps at 2pm-woke up at 7pm and found the girls still hard asleep. We debated about waking them and tried, but they were having none of it. So, at 10pm when they woke up we realized that we had just set ourselves up for flipping night for day. We’re easing our way back into the real world but it requires the adults to go with less sleep than planned.

Dogs and kids?!
Right, many of you asked about this, the children in the orphanage are taught that dogs are scary and bad and will bite you (we actually saw wild dogs sneak onto the playground during our first trip to meet the girls.) our first night home the girls screamed with real terror when we let the dogs inside. They held their hands up high and even when we carried them it made them shake when the puppies got too close. Within a couple of hours we were at the point where they would walk around with the dogs in the room and by Monday they were patting heads and saying “Be nice” (our first English words!) so, kids and dogs? Da!
I’m sure Napoleon and Rosie are a bit shell shocked by the girls, but they have already figured our that the high chairs mean food will magically rain down from above.

Are the kids eating or hating all the new food?
Both girls weigh less than 22 pounds, but I kid you not when I report that they are eating our cubboards bare. Major favorite include malt-o-meal, mac n cheese, peas (but only if they can smash them a bit) yogurt and really anything that we put on a plate. I think today we may have finnally filled them up. For the first time Zhanna didn’t insist on eating every last crumb on her plate. Maybe they are starting to understand that there will always be more if they want it. One of the things that breaks our hearts is that even though she is only 3 years old Zhanna has been making sure Elena gets enough to eat or drink (to the point of actually giving up her own food to her little sister). It is great to see her relaxing this responsibility a bit and trusting us to take care of them both. Mark has been playing the piano with the girls after we eat- they both love music so it is our way of transitioning dinner time from an assembly line thing to a family time thing

How are you all doing?
We’re all doing great. Tired but great. The girls favorite thing right now is playing dress up and walking around the playroom carrying my old hand bags filled with blocks and other toys. There seems to be a little story being told through interpretive dance at the same time. It is like watching a strange fashion show mixed with a Martha Graham dance routine. We are also getting to spend some nice time each morning while Zhanna brushes my hair or let’s me do hers. It is just so sweet. She hides the brush when we are done to make sure she will still have it when we need it again.

Any trouble with attachment or bonding?
Well it is early to have a clean answer, but both girls call for us when they wake up, spend a fair amount of time attached to one parent or the others leg and our most often repeated game is bringing a sheet of stickers over to a parent and then spending close to 30 minutes taking a sticker one at a time from mommy or daddy’s chin or nose or cheek and gently peeling it off then bringing it to the other parent. it may sound strange, but the whole time they are making close eye contact with us, touching our faces and giving hugs. . Mark and I couldn’t feel more attached them, and we see both girls getting stronger and closer to us every day.

We’ll post more soon. But first I’ve got to go dig out some more options for fashion night from the back of my closet. You know, and wash the peas and stickers out of my hair.

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