You are a fat duck.

Hey all!
Still no news from Diana. I will call or email her tomorrow to say "WHAT IS GOING ON?!" I'll keep ya posted. SOOOO frustrating!!!!!!

Q&A time... Sasha is 10 years old. She will be 11 in May. The program is called New Horizons for Children. It's based out of Atlanta, and it is a strictly host-only program, even though all the children who come are orphans who live in orphanages (and sometimes foster homes). They have a coordinator here in PA for northeast families. The kids fly into JFK and then continue to ATL or Washington DC for other families in those areas. Since it is a host-only program, it is allowed by these countries who do not allow pre-selection of children available for adoption. Because of that, to protect the program, the kids are NOT told that they may find an adoptive family in the process of their visit. They might, and they might not. In fact no one is even allowed to mention the word "adoption" in front of her, just to prevent misunderstandings and possible false hopes. The children may or may not even be officially available for adoption. In Sasha's case, she tells us she has 2 brothers and a sister. We don't know their ages, if they are available for adoption, or if they have to be adopted together. No idea! A lot of times, though, people do host with the hope of continuing on to adopt the child they host, and the host program people know that and don't discourage it. On an official front, though, it is JUST for a visit. But it's great for families looking to choose a child to adopt, because the family can really get to know the children in their own home for several weeks. And then during the adoption process can re-host them in the summer and again the following winter while the process takes a thousand years. The program also interviews the kids individually and tries to rule out RAD and other behavioral disorders.

Today Sasha really got comfortable with us I think. We went shopping for some dress clothes and shoes, and she seemed to have fun trying on dresses. She's not extremely girly, but seemed to have a lot of fun. She doesn't always give definitive answers about whether she likes something or not. I have to ask "Yes, no, or ehhhhh?" She will shrug and go "I don't know" and then go "OK" if it's fine, or she'll shrug and go "I don't know" and then shake her head if she doesn't like it. She quietly giggles in between the shrug and the giggle.

Then later I started tickling her (kind of out of nowhere), and she turned into this crazy hyper playful laughing silly thing! She started tickling both of us, running away to escape all over the house, screaming if we suddenly got too close and almost caught her, and laughing till she couldn't breathe. So for about an hour we played tag, pillow fight, tickling like crazy games around the house. Then Jason went outside to play more tag, kick the soccer ball and throw the football. So you know Jason loved all that activity!

Oh yeah, and she made us breakfast this morning, after getting up and making her bed and taking a shower. She put a bunch of olive oil in a pan, cracked 4 eggs into it, cooked it for several minutes, sprinkled cut up ham on top, cut it into 3 parts, put it on plates, squirted ketchup on it... Then got out forks for each bowl, set them on the table with napkins, got out the bread, put butter on 3 pieces along with a slice of American cheese on each, and got me to microwave it until it was melted. Then she sat us on each side of her at the table and we all ate. You have to remember in your imagination, though, that does not behave arrogantly or over confidently at all, isn't extremely outgoing and sure of herself, and asked every step of the way "OK?" to make sure we wouldn't get mad. We just let her do what she was going to do, under supervision, to see what she'd do.

The food wasn't bad, by the way, even though I thought some of it was going to be gross.

She also is already using quite a bit of English for less than 24 hours here. She already knew 1-12 in English and recognizes other numbers in spoken English, as well as "My name is Sasha", "Hello", "Yes", "No", "Dog", "Cat", and other words like that. Now she uses sentences including "What is this" and "This is a"... And says "I'm sleepy". When she was playing today, she said "Ya ne Rooski, Ya American!", which means "I'm not Russian, I'm American!"

At Letty's house today she entertained the kids with oragami boats and teaching them lots of Russian words. They taught her a lot of English too I think. At one point she ran up to me, laughing histarically into my arm because Julia repeated a Russian phrase incorrectly and it sounded really funny. The kids all are so comfortable trying out the words, so it was just laughs all the time. Josephine, the 6 year old, kept talking to Sasha like she didn't understand the language barrier. She asked her once "Can't you hear???" LOL She also would say things like "Do you know how to say blowdryer?" Or say long strands of sentences to her that Sasha obviously wouldn't understand. Sasha would smile and say softly with a giggle, in Russian, "Not understand."

There were several other language related entertaining things that happened today, like her calling everyone a fat animal of one kind or another, and didn't know that Jason knew what the Russian word for "fat" was, so it became this big joke afterwards where she kept saying "Talsty Cat, Talsty Dog, Talsty Duck!". I think it all came about because Joanie said "It's a tad toasty in here," and Sasha thought she said "It's a cat talsty (obese) in here" and Sasha laughed. So then someone became an obese cat, and so on it went.

OK time to turn off Spongebob and go to sleepy!

Love,
Molly