Recap of 2008
The girls are starting to become more "American" and open up and deal with their trauma. I am very thankful for our therapist Magda Tevdoradze - we started bringing the girls to her within the first few weeks of being home, and I think she has been the only reason Andrew and I are mostly sane still. LOL. Katie, as she likes to be called now, is mostly a normal teenager - self consious, likes boys, is responsible, likes her mp3 player and facebook, and tried to get around the internet parental controls a few times. She had a cell phone for about a month before we took it away for her misusing it - again fairly normal. She is still trying to pass her driving permit test - she's taken it two times and can't seem to get enough questions correct to pass. There is a boy - Alex - who we are trying to push her towards. He is a friend of the family, goes to a gifted private school, likes swords (like Andrew), and is a really great kid. He's cute too of course. Katie is having a lot of dental work done - she now needs 3 root canals and 2 crowns, and I think that will be the end of the work for now. We did one of the root canals today, and I am looking into having the other root canals done in Ukraine when we visit next month as they are tons cheaper there, and the dentists are just as good. Ukraine is actually listed as a medical tourism hotspot! Katie is still having problems with clothes - she dresses ok, but she still doesn't grasp the idea that people judge other people by what clothes they wear, and that clothes can be an indicator of what kind of person someone is - for example "gangster" type clothes. She gets all upset at the store when I pull her out of those clothes sections and chide her that she can't wear those kind of clothes until she is an adult (if she chooses to at that point) because we don't agree with the lifestyle associated with them. She says her friends wear those clothes, and they are not "bad" people. This usually leads into the discussion of guilt by association, and if one of these "friends" has drugs in their pocket when they are all hanging out together, the police will arrest all of them, not just the one with the drugs. etc etc
Marina on the other hand is still not "normal" but she is doing so much better. She has obvious attachment and behavior problems, but she is learning to use her words instead of her disruptive behavior or biting etc. to get the feelings out. So systems of stars, marbles, points, rewards etc never worked for very long. She does the bare minimum to get the point or star etc, and then after a few weeks, she doesn't do anything at all again, and we are back to square one with no chores getting done. We don't buy them toys, and we have started limiting the computer access and TV. We don't bring them out too often - but maybe we can scale that back even. Nothing seems to motivate her to do chores. Katie on the other hand, does chores without us even having to ask her. Both girls are getting better at doing homework and getting good grades - it started to slip for a while there.
Marina is now reading in English at a 3rd grade level, but her writing is still at first grade level. The neuropsych testing did show that she has deficiencies in the memory parts of her brain, and the visual spatial sections. This is why she has problems with math and writing - the letters and numbers and their order don't make any sense to her and they move around. We are worried that she won't be able to pass the "gateway" graduation test to get into 6th grade this year. We are still trying to figure out what to do with her middle school situation anyways - Shamrock is horrible, but getting better, and I don't know if Henderson Middle would be any better.
Marina's behavior is getting better too, though she almost got kicked out of the afterschool program for a series of mishbehaviors including "pants-ing" a boy on the playground. She is still sassy and backtalking at home, but that has lessened with our new method of addressing it. She is also still having problems "lying" and just plain being disobediant. She makes up stories that are clearly not true, and "plays" about losing something important or that one of the animals ran away etc as a "joke" of sorts.
Will write more about our upcoming trop to visit Ukraine soon.
