I don't speak no English.

I've been getting calls and emails with requests for updates, so here you go! Thanks for keeping us in high demand! :)

Nothing new with the process, really. Just waiting. But we did find a few out interesting things in the last couple days. The Estonian adoption Yahoo group has been on fire lately with people posting questions and answers on all types of subjects. Before our trip, the board was sooooo dead. I would post a question and get only one answer or no answers. Now I'm one of the answerers, so that makes it more fun.

Through the message board we've made contact with a few other families. One (Charlotte) who is currently going through the process and hopes to preview a girl in August. Another (Patti) is a single lady whose daughter was in the same group as our kids, and she was adopted in December. A third (Jenn) lives about an hour from us, and they also finished their adoption in December, a 12 year old boy (now 13) and a 5 year old girl.

As it turns out, Jenn and Patti were both in Estonia for their court dates at the time the previous family was there meeting our kids. We found out from them that that family was very very strict, even having the kids sign a contract about what they would and wouldn't do once they get to their home in America. Patti and her daughter (who knows Katya & Roman) said that the kids look so happy with us in the pictures, happier than they did with the other family. In the conversations that followed with both Patti and Jenn, it seems like the other family was not the type to run and play, go down water slides, give piggy-back rides, and goof off with the kids. They even said that the kids were very misbehaving out in public- and one thing we had already mentioned about the kids is that they were so good in public! They never gave us trouble acting obnoxious in restaurants or anything like that. Sounds like they wanted calm, quiet kids, and maybe that's why they were considering kids their age. But Katya and Roman are fun, active, resilient kids. Not zombies. They are not well suited for parents who want to sit around. So they apparently said that "A lot of things will change when we get them home!"

Patti asked me if Roman tried to run away on us. I said (with shock) NO! And asked why. She said on about the third day with the other family, he said he was going to run away and the parents said basically OK Fine, go. So he took his coat and sat on the stairs in the hotel for awhile. There was nothing even close to behavior like that from him while we were there. Not even during the pouting. They were so overall happy and seemed to want to please most of the time.

All of this leads us to think that they probably did notice quite a difference between us and the other parents that came to see them. We wondered if they appreciated the activities we like to do with them, or if they were disappointed at first that the previous family was not adopting them after all. That gave us a little indication of what they were probably thinking.

The next interesting thing I can tell you all is that Jason was watching the video from the trip more carefully. A lot of it is video of the ground and stuff like that because the kids would forget to turn the camera off when they were done. So he was watching it, started laughing and called Katya a little stinker. I asked what was going on, and he had me watch it. Roman was holding the camera while she talked to it. She said something in Russian, then looked at the camera and said in PERFECT ENGLISH, "Is that recording?"

So....... we have even more reason to think that they know much more English than they let on. Little stinker, indeed. I know she wasn't just repeating something we had just said. At most she might have heard us say that one time, and not right beforehand. That's not the only time they used English phrases that were more uncommon. They knew "massage" and "stand up", for instance.

That's about it for now, I think. Of course I'll keep you all posted if anything substantial happens.

Love,
Molly