Orphanage

Yesterday we visited Nicholas for a couple of hours. We played Uno and assembled a puzzle and played. We went over the English alphabet with him and a few new words.
There are only a handful of Russian words that we know so we are starting with those! (cat, dog, apple, bread, water, cookie - well we didn’t know cookie - but we were eating some and used the visual aid :o) ).

I don’t think I’ve talked about the Vice Director of the orphanage. She is such a cool woman. I’m a really bad judge of age - but I would guess she’s in her 50s. We met her the first day that we met Nicholas and we misunderstood Luba and thought she was the “Wise” Director (instead of Vice Director). So we have secretly called her Wise Director as that title also fits! It’s obvious she loves the children and she certainly commands their respect. She must be a teacher as she has that “teacher presence” about her. She has been encouraging and working with Nicholas on English phrases - including “Have a nice day” - which we thought was so cute and funny.

The Wise Director also gets a kick out of learning the English words. She gets excited when she pronounces a word correctly. I really wish our Russian was better so we could understand her. She talks a mile a minute in Russian to us and we may catch one word. It’s obvious she has a lot to tell us and I think we need to sit down with her and Luba or Yelena and go over all that she wants to say.

The Wise Director brought us some photos of Nicholas when he first arrived at the orphanage. His appearance is quite different!! He is more than just skin and bones and his hair is grown out. We can’t wait to get him back up to a normal weight! We’re not sure how much he weighs right now but Mike and I can both pick him up so easily. I compare everything to a bag of wood pellets - which is 40 pounds - and he is no where near a bag of pellets. I’m guessing he’s around 30 pounds.

Yesterday we were trying to find his clothing sizes so we can buy some clothes while we’re here and hopefully find a European/American clothing conversion chart on the web. The shirt he was wearing had a 104 on the label but when I gestured to the Wise Director she shook her heard like that was not the correct size. We know his shoe size is 32 or 34. He is 46 inches tall. Do any other adoptive parents have any suggestions? We may just buy a shirt and pair of pants to pick him up in and then go to the store to find his correct size. His waist is 20 inches and his pants legs (not inseam but from the top of the waist to the floor is 24 inches).

We learned in our adoption classes that children lose a month of development for every 3 months in the orphanage. Nicholas has been in the orphanage for two years so he is about 8 months behind. We want to read more about shaving a year off his age because of this developmental delay. There were so many conversations about it on the yahoo groups but I must admit that I only scanned the conversations because at the time I was so focused on the pre-adoption issues. I’m hoping I can access those conversations to see the pros and cons of changing his age. Both Luba and Dr. Yuri said to subtract a year and they stated it like it wasn’t anything to give a second thought about. But I would like to check it out in more detail.