At 9:00, so we would have time alone with Andry while Olya was still asleep in our room, Ron and I went to his room to tickle and sing him awake as usual. He laughed and seemed himself again. Then the three of us went into the living room to talk. First we asked him if he still wanted to be adopted by our family; we were afraid he had changed his mind and that was the reason for his drastic behavior change. He said that he did want us to adopt him. Then we told him that our family was loving and always nice to each other. We liked to laugh and have fun together. We explained that the way he acted last night was bad and he couldn't behave like that. Every sentence or two we would stop and ask if he understood. Each time he quickly nodded yes. We explained that in our family, if someone was upset about something we talked about it. He nodded that he understood.
Andry really seemed to absorb what Ron and I had said. When the short talk was over he and I went to pester Olya awake. The night before, after a failed attempt to cheer Andry up, she hadn't felt comfortable disturbing him to get her pajamas which were in his room. She slept in her fathers shorts and shirt. I think she was relieved to awake and see her brother himself again and she broke into a silly and long improvisational dance.
I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for him (or anyone) to suddenly have to figure out how to fit into a new family. This has to be even harder as teenager who is also beginning to wrestle with their identity, independence and the craziness hormonal changes cause.
After breakfast and a couple of rounds of Crazy-8 and a hockey final (Ron is an ace at table hockey but "somehow" the children won) Vasilly and Yelana came to pick us up. We went directly to Hidro Park, only a few minutes drive from our apartment.
Hidro Park is on the banks of the Dnipro River and has an area of somewhat seedy carnival booths, carnival rides and food booths including several that sell whole dried fish.
It also has a lot of activities based around the river: boat and jet ski rental, beaches, volleyball on the sand, etc. However only a fool would swim in the river. The bottom is reputed to have contaminated silt from Chernobyl which is only 30 to 40 miles away. And many manufacturing plants along the river bank still dump their wastes into the river. But there were some foolish people in the water.
We only stayed a few minutes to let the children play the shooting game; the rides didn’t open until 2pm, three hours later. So, we went downtown to have lunch and take in a movie.
Lunch was really interesting. We went to a cafeteria with delicious typical Ukrainian working man’s food, just off Kreschatyk Street, which is Kiev’s equivalent of Times Square. After lunch, I (Ron) had Vassily take me back to the apartment, while Pippa, Olya, Andry and Yelena took in a movie, “Ratatouille” in Russian.
They told me later that they went to a great internet café while waiting on the movie start time. The kids played all kinds of computer games and it’s high on their list of to go-back-to places.
We had a pleasant meal at the apartment. The kids watched the videos they bought earlier in the day. We’re trying to build up a good library of Russian videos for Andry to help keep his language from being forgotten back in the USA.
No sullen episodes. Just the opposite. Many, many times Andry initiated teasing with all three of us. Just a normal, happy day and night. Thanks, we needed that!
No comments:
Post a Comment