the girls seem to be doing ok so far. the days consist of going to the pool a dozen times (it seems), meal times, and the girls singing Russian karoke with the little karoke machine we got from Target.
My parents left on Tuesday morning, and the girls didnt want them to leave. I assured the girls that we'd go visit their Babushka and Deyadushka in a few weeks over the labor day weekend. My parents seemed to like the girls too. I knew that once they met the girls they'd like them - they were more scared of the adoption itself than the girls.
Marina got to talk to her friends Dasha and Yulia who are visiting a friend of mine in Wisconsin, so that was nice for the girls to be able to chat a bit while they are all in the US. Dasha and Yulia go back to Ukraine soon, but hopefully not for long as my friends should have their dossiers submitted for these girls soon.
Clothing and eating seem to be the big issues right now. The girls don't understand why they can't dress like prostitutes here. And they are very upset about the school dress codes. Katya doesn't have as many clothes as Marina, partly because I totally misjudged her size and bought clothes that were too small, and partly because Marina had clothes from Germany. Food-wise Marina doesn't want to try anything new and seems very particular about how things are prepared. They love watermelon, cantelope, ramen noodles (they ate this at our hotel in ukraine alot), and french fries. Thankfully there is a Ukrainian deli and market a few blocks from our house, so I brought the girls there yesterday for them to pick out some food they like. We also used the picture dictionary to discuss what they liked to eat and how they preferred it to be prepared. We've been to a few resteraunts since being home, and they seemed to like what we ordered them- I usually translate a few things from the menus and ask them which they would like - having control over their food and making them own choices seems to help.
Some of the unexpected things that have come up include the girls gluing things to the walls of their bedroom and putting stickers on everything, including the walls....this I put a stop to the first night home. They also didn't like the rugs in their room, and didnt understand why there was a rug on top of the carpet (its white carpet since we are in an apartment until our house is built).
Also Katya has no clue how to ride a bike. I don't think they make training wheels for an adult sized bike, so we are going to take the girls to our central park tomorrow so we can teach Katya on the grass where its softer and there are no cars. They also don't like the whole helmets and seatbelts thing, but they are doing it none the less with little argument. They just usually give me that high pitched "Maaaa" sounding frustrating, and then ask me "Pochimoo?" which is "Why" in Ukrainian. Another favorite question is "Shto eta?" which means "What is this?"- thankfully I know quite a bit of Ukrainian and Russian, so we've been able to communicate pretty well.
They definately don't like that Atlanta has so many black people. I'm constantly hearing "Mnoga chornee" from the back seat of the car. Katya was defaintely not happy that there were black people at her school. I'm going to have to ask one of my local Russian friends to explain this one to them.
After battling with the international center, I finally got the girls registered for school here and they start on Monday. For some reason the international center wanted to ignore the state policy about the 30 day waiver period for the vaccination forms. We have the vaccination forms from the embassy visa medical visit, but it needs to be transcribed onto the GA state form by either our doctor or the health department. I'm not bringing my girls to the health department, especially not when its a 3-4 hour wait for them to transcribe one sheet of paper. We have their ped appointments with the Russian speaking doctor next week - surely they should be allowed to go to school for 2-3 days until I can get our private doctor to fill out this form?!?! So, after my badgering and emails with web link to this policy, they relented and gave me the registration packets to bring to the girls home base schools. So the girls will go to the international center for the majority of the school day for about 3 months, and only attend one or two classes at their home school. I was hoping that the 1-2 classes would be something like P.E. or art, but the schools here are wacky and put the girls in academic classes, even though they will fail as they don't know any english yet. I'm going to argue this one as well. :) We did get the girls placed in the grades we wanted after yet another battle. They tried placing the girls based soley on biological age. I even showed them the girls school records from Ukraine, showing that they had only completed a few years of school each and could in no way be put in 5th and 9th grades. So they will be in 4th and 7th grades thankfully.
Tonight we were invited to go visit with our friend Dee and her children who are 10 and 16, from Kazakhstan and Russia respectively. The girls are totally psyched about this as they want to talk to other Russian speaking kids badly. The will watch High school musical on disney chanel with Dee's kids and maybe play with our karoke machine (the girls insist on bringing it with us).
Here are some photos
