Neat tools for protective parents

I know we are all super protective of our adopted kids, but at the same time we want to make sure they get to benefit from some of the great technologies and resources we have access to in the US. I found these two resources that were a great help to us and our girls, and have turned on other parents (not just adoptive ones either) to these tools.

Glubbles by Firefox
http://www.glubble.com/glubbles
This is an internet safety program. It uses a “white list” instead of “black lists” or keyword filters. Basically kids can only access the internet through the Firefox Glubbles interface (you have to be sure they can’t get to internet explorer, or otherwise they will just use that instead), and the only websites that they can view are the ones you explicitly approve. It comes with a set of preapproved sites that you can enable or disable, things like Disney.com, Barbie.com, Discovery channel Kids, etc.

Some other websites I’ve approved include:
YouTube (I know this can be bad, but there are tons of Russian TV shows and music videos on there that the kids like to watch)
Millsberry.com - arcade games by General Mills cereals
Brainpop.com – educational videos and quizzes on every subject
Clubpenguin.com- owned by Disney now, arcade games played by your penguin avatar.
Wikipedia.com – online encyclopedia, great for school work
Rosetta Stone online through our library – award winning language software, offered free through many local library systems. Good for practicing their English, and remembering their Russian!

Kajeet mobile phones for kids.
http://www.kajeet.com/4u/index.html

Kajeet phone are finally available at Target and Walmart and the phones look like “normal” cell phones, unlike the FireFly kid mobile phones that look like toys. You buy the phone, activate it online, set up your controls, and then buy minute refill cards. No contracts (unlike Disney Mobile), no overages, and no HUGE bills – it’s all prepaid. It can even be part of your kids “allowance package” if you want. Katya got one of these phones before she went to visit my parents for a month this summer and she liked it.

You can lock the phone so that your kid can only make calls during certain times of the day (like you can make sure that no calls are made during school hours, or after bedtime!) and you can limit who your kid can call and who can call your kid (no boys for Katie and no telemarketers or 900 numbers)

It has games and ringtones that the kids can download for free, and it looks like a regular phone. You can set certain numbers to “always” be allowed – like your cell phone or home number, so they can call anytime day or night or while in school in case of emergency.

You can get one of the phones for around $20 and the minute cards are comparable to other companies’ rates.

VisaBuxx cards

I hate giving my kids cash – cash gets lost, spent inappropriately, etc. And our new American culture is becoming more and more “plastic” in our money. VisaBuxx cards are prepaid credit cards for teens that come with a bunch of online tools and educational resources to teach kids how to manage money, and use their credit cards wisely. Parents can set up auto refills on the cards from their own bank accounts for the kid’s allowance and other family members (grandparents) can “gift” your kids money onto this card for birthdays or good grades. You can also log on to a parent portal to monitor your kids spending and balance.

Life books

So, I finally am near finishing up the girls life books. I’ve had to add a few photos to the existing layouts as Gene got us some additional photos that I hadn’t expected. We also finally got Marina a regressed baby photo from Phojoe.com and she wanted that added to her “birthday” page.

I decided to do an 8x8 scrapbook for each of them as apposed to the larger sizes, since I knew I would be short on photos in some places and larger pages are harder to fill when you have limited photos. They also fit nicer on book shelves than the larger books. I used the Creating Keepsakes layout magazines to come up with my layouts – I altered them according to the photos I had and I tended to lean towards the more geometric, balanced layouts.

Here is the general table of contents I used:
Cover page – “Your Lifebook”
Your Birthdate
Your Birthparents
Your Birthplace
(here it varied due to the girls life experiences)
Your Childhood- Katya/ Shelter Nadiya- Marina
Your Journey (shelters and orphanages)- Katya
Barvinok Children’s home- Marina/ Oleksandriya Boarding School- Katya
Your German Host Family – Marina
(here it goes back to the same for both girls)
Your Birth Family (still working on clarifying this as it is complicated)
Your Adoption

When I didn’t have photos, I used Flickr.com to find “fake” photos or photos of important objects. For example, Katya remembers riding on her aunt’s pig when she was little, so I found a photo of a little pig and used that in the scrapbook. Or they had some experience in a Ukrainian outdoor market (Rinok) so I found a generic photo of a Rinok and used that.

If your kids are older, talk to them and try to construct a timeline of their life – it may be fuzzy at first, but they will remember more and more as they become more comfortable with you and they start coping with their loss. ** A therapist is a good idea for this as well – not only to bring up memories of their early life, but to SAFELY deal with those memories!** Talk to the kids about things they did in the orphanage – ask about funny stories. These can be focal points in your kids’ life book. If they are younger kids who have been in the orphanage their whole lives, try to take photos of every inch of the orphanage. If you forgot to, or weren’t allowed to, talk to other adoptive parents who adopted from the same orphanage – maybe they have photos they can share.

Also, charity groups are a great resource for photos of the orphanages in Ukraine and possibly your kids! I found a group that had done work in both my girls’ orphanages over the years, and they had photos of my girls when they were younger! I saw the low quality photos on their websites, emailed the group via their “contact us” email on the website, and got a warm response with 20 or so high quality original photos. Peace Corps volunteers are also a good source of photos. Do a Flickr.com search for “Ukraine” “orphans” “orphanages” “children” etc and you will find tons of photos.

Birth family search

So we finally had the extra money to attempt a search for the girls’ bio mother and get some photos to fill in some gaps in their life books. Thankfully, our girls remembered much of their early life, so we had a lot of good info for Gene Sagin to start with. We also gave him Aunt Nadiya’s address and phone number as she would have even more info and be able to help him find the girls’ bio father’s grave in the cemetery.



We had some specific questions and tasks we wanted him to accomplish and he was successful in all but one, which was not his fault. The birth mom, as usual, is roaming with gypsies, and was not nearby to visit. Gene got photos of the maternity hospital where the girls and their little brother Kolya was born, better quality photos of the birth parents wedding photos, photos of the girl’s grandparents and birth father as a child, photos of the birth father’s grave and the graves of the
paternal grandparents graves, and he managed to find the maternal grandmother’s home and to speak to her. The maternal grandmother gave Gene info on the birth mother –
saying she had visited only one month ago and that she returned on a fairly regular basis to Znamenka, and lived mostly in either Znamenka or Belgorod Russia. The maternal grandmother also confirmed the existence of a 4th sibling – a 3 year old little boy named Georgiy who is still with the birth mom. Funny enough though, the
birth mom wrote down the girls’ birth father as the father of this 4th child on the birth certificate, even though the bio father is the gypsy she lives with – maybe for stigma reasons? The baby doesn’t look gypsy at all, based on the photo Gene got from the maternal grandmother – big chubby cheeks and white blonde hair. Can’t tell the eye color though – probably brown like our girls. The birth mother looks HORRIBLE in the photo though – I think she may have HIV or tuberculosis.


Not much else was able to be accomplished with the maternal grandmother as she was drunk and Aunt Nadiya was ready to fist fight with her.

Upcoming blog topics

So, I have been wanting to update this and keep it going - I think of topic ideas almost daily, I just don't have time to get on the internet and update it. I need to figure out how to email the posts to the blog again like I did when I was in Ukraine.

So, what I hope to blog about soon:
Review of the girls first year home!
Neat tools and services for keeping our kids safe
Lifebook's I made for our girls
Our birthfamily search results
Medical problems in our kids - including the emotional and developmental ones