Tickle Tickle Tickle

Another great day of visiting with Cici. She was very excited to see us and greeted us with big hugs and kisses. Her foster parents once again hosted us for both sessions today, and their hospitality has been wonderful. We started out the visit this morning by pulling out crayons and construction paper and doing a little bit of drawing. Carolyn cut out a few snowflakes, and her foster mom, Yordanka, cut out some doll chains. Cici was appropriately amazed with them, but it proved to be a connection point between the two adults as much as it did with Cici. I spent a lot of the morning playing tickle games with her. We have made up several different ones, and they have rapidly progresses in intensity and in the trust she has to have in me. By the time we left for lunch, the game had progressed to where she was standing on my lap, holding my thumbs (while I gripped her wrists) and falling straight back, counting on me to stop her before she hit the ground. When we had to leave for lunch, I had to just hold her and stand up to get the game started. Everybody was in the process of saying goodbye, and since she was in my arms, she started waving to her foster parents and saying ciao. She was ready to go! I finally got her handed off to her foster father, Daren, but I think she'd have gone with me at that point if I'd tried.

Partly because of where I end up sitting during the visits, and partly because I apparently make a good play toy, it seems like I end up entertaining Cici while the adults talk about her. Yordanka had expressed a wish as we were leaving last night to have us show her today where we lived and to learn something about our home environment. We decided that taking the photo album we had prepared and going through it with them would be a good way to facilitate that conversation. So, while Cici and I played, Carolyn and Maggie explained to the rest of the group what Cici's life will be like when she comes to live with us. They explained the concept of home schooling and the wonderful opportunity it provides for a first class education. They talked about living arrangements, interaction with immediate and extended family, and a host of other things I missed out on because I was busy playing. But, Cici and I both preferred it that way. Our goal was to demonstrate to both the foster parents and the social worker, without appearing in any way boastful, that Cici will enjoy all of the opportunities and advantages we can possibly provide in raising her. The goal of the foster care system here is to nurture the children in an environment that helps make them more adoptable and thus opens up doors of opportunity these children might not otherwise have access to. They have poured their hearts into this child for the past year, and we wanted them to understand how their efforts will pay off in Cici's life. They were very excited, and they kept returning to the book over and over again. Cici was very interested in it as well, and would sit and look through it for as long as a 3-year-old's attention span would allow before starting up a new game.

In return, Daren and Yordanka provided a wealth of detail on Cici's background, her life both in the orphanage and in their home, her daily routines and sleep patterns, and a whole host of other information. She pulled out her computer and showed us pictures of Cici over the past year. It was wonderful to see the transformation story told in those pictures. You could read the story in Cici's eyes as you moved chronologically through the pictures. They have done a wonderful work in that child's life, and we will be forever grateful.

During our lunch break, we worked on filling in the few holes still left that we would need to tell Cici her life story some day. Yordanka has an excellent collection of photos and documents of the last year and has offered to share them with us, but we needed something to cover the first two years. So, we hopped in the car and drove first across town to the orphanage where Cici spent her first two years and then drove about 25 minutes out of town to Novi Pazar, the town where Cici was born, to take some pictures. We were even able to find the hospital on Novi Pazar, so we can someday show Cici where she was born. Emily was actually born between here and Sofia, rather than in Lom, in an area that is famous for its vineyards. We plan to stop by there on our next trip when we pick the girls up, since the mountain roads will be easy to navigate and the grapes will be approaching harvest when we are here in the summer.

Our afternoon visit with Cici was very much like the morning one. Carolyn brought along some of the beads we had and made a pair of bracelets for Cici. She loved them and wore them the rest of the day. Yordanka started up some of Cici's favorite songs on her computer, and she danced for quite a while. At one point she organized a group dance with Carolyn, Yordanka, and me, and then she and Carolyn danced a bit later on. She closed out the evening with more tickling and tumbling with me. She got started bouncing up and down on my knees and outlasted my stamina by a long way. She is very energetic and delightfully playful. She is going to absolutely love having big brothers to play with!