2 weeks home

After being home for almost 2 weeks, we are slowly adjusting to our “new” normal routine, which is not an easy task :)

Rachel started school last Wednesday, and all this week she rode the bus to school as any other American 4th-grader. Luckily I have my Mom who’s getting Rachel ready for school in the morning and picks her up on the bus stop in the afternoon. It’s obviously harder for her to take care of both girls now (even though Rachel is in school for most of the day), but she’s a trooper! Alex is helping out as well – yesterday he picked Rachel up at the bus stop since my Mom had an appointment.

Most of the time the girls are getting along very well. However, I noticed some sibling rivalry between them, nothing unexpected, but totally new to me because Alex and Victoria never experienced it with the 14 years age difference. It started just a couple of days ago when the novelty of having a sister wore off for each girl :) “Mama, she’s doing this and that!”, “Mama, she’s not doing this and that” and so on. After growing up in the former Soviet Union, I’m very intolerant of tattling since in the communist times people were forced to tell authorities on each other. So I told them I don’t want to hear this nonsense unless it’s something really important. Rachel is craving our attention, but we can’t spend all the time with her only, so we have to be inventive and make sure we have quality time with Victoria as well. And with Alex when he’s available :)

Next week Rachel has a dentist appointment, and I’m afraid she’ll eventually need to have a lot of work done :( But at least the dentists in America are not as scary as in Ukraine, so I hope it won’t be to so hard for her. Our pediatrician declared her very healthy (I’m knocking on wood :) and the only thing left is the Eye Doctor appointment.

Overall I’m very pleased with our transition despite our daily ups and downs. It helps a lot to be able to seek advice from the other parents who also adopted older kids. My friend Tami returned home last week with her new daughter. Kathy and Kelly are in Ukraine now adopting older kids. And Melissa and Steve returned home a couple of weeks ago with their 3 sons, so now they are the parents of six kids having 3 boys and 3 girls! They created a very touching video of their story, make sure you have a tissue in hand when watching it: