Girly Girls and Silly Putty

Today started out with Yanka very much where yesterday left off. She was very definitely Daddy's girl right off the bat. I was the one she hugged when we arrived to get her. She wanted me to help her with her boots, and was petting me a bit as I zipped them up. She grabbed my hand and led me to the car, and as we started the morning activities, she was perched on my lap. It was really nice, but we really needed today to be a day for her to connect with Carolyn.

There were some big breakthroughs on that score today thanks to the intelligence and insight of our wonderful interpreter, Maggie. We have been very much in the mode of trying to make things fun and interesting for Yanka, and I think she has seen us more as playmates than authorities and caregivers. She has been interested in me as a novelty since she has had limited exposure to men. Maggie picked up on this and suggested that Carolyn pull back a little and assert more authority. It worked beautifully. Carolyn went into "mommy mode" and started directing Yanka to do things and correcting her if she didn't respond. It was amazing to see Yanka fall right in line. She had her moments, but for the most part was extremely obedient. In the few cases where she needed correcting, she responded to it immediately and positively, no stubbornness, crying, or tantrums at all. She also began paying most of her attention to Carolyn, and it was interesting to watch them carry on a two-way conversation in two different languages with essentially no interpretation help from Maggie, and yet Yanka was following instructions, responding to both praise and correction, and showing genuine interest in Carolyn and what she was doing. Maggie did a great job of knowing when to step in with a quick interpretation and when to stay back and let them work through something on their own. We are going to try, weather permitting, to take it a step further tomorrow and do more "real life" activities rather than just babysitting games. We are both looking forward to the change.

The morning activity was supposed to be cutting and pasting with construction paper. The scissors broke a few minutes into the activity, so Carolyn resorted to tearing out shapes like hearts and butterflies and snowflakes, while I had the daddy duty of making several paper airplanes. At some point, Yanka started playing with Carolyn's hair, then asked for a comb. I dug out a brush, and she had the best time brushing Carolyn's hair. She even worked on my hair a bit. Then she wanted Carolyn's blush. She had seen Carolyn put some on the night before, and had even gotten a little put on her own face just for fun. We gave her the blush, and she proceeded to apply some to her own cheeks and then to Carolyn. By the time she was through, she had completely covered Carolyn's face in blush. Then, a few minutes later as we were standing by the window watching a boat on the river, she remarked on how red Carolyn's face and asked "very innocently" who had made her face so red. Before lunch, Carolyn took Yanka into the bathroom to wash their faces, clean up the glue after the cut and paste activity, and put on some lotion. Yanka ate it up. She had lunch with us today and was very well behaved and showed excellent table manners.

After Yanka's nap, we brought her back for our afternoon visit. All we really had ready to do was play with silly putty, and we figured it wouldn't go very far. We got some old newspaper from the front desk and started by playing with picture copying and stretching. She lost interest pretty quickly and didn't really find the distorted pictures particularly amusing. I showed her how to make a ball with it, and the first time she saw it bounce, we had our afternoon activity. She and I played ball, bouncing and rolling it across the coffee table in the hotel room and chasing it all over the place. She showed some potential athletic aptitude, which was a bit of a surprise. She could catch a small ball pretty well off the first bounce. Meanwhile, Carolyn cut out a few construction paper snowflakes using scissors the desk clerk had loaned us, and Yanka helped glue them to a piece of background paper. Then Carolyn showed her how to clean the glue off the table and then rinse the cloth out and hang it up to dry. We then made a couple more videos of her singing some songs. When she returned to the orphanage, she was armed with two boxes of sweet tarts for the rest of the kids. It has been snowing all day and the forecast is for snow tonight and tomorrow as well. I'm just hoping the roads will be passable enough to got up the hill to the orphanage in the morning.

Thanks so much to all who have responded on the blog or by email to these posts. We can't reply to each one individually because of limited data on the international roaming plan, but please know that we do see all of the comments and we very sincerely appreciate your words of support and encouragement.