International Women's Day

Tomorrow marks 6 weeks since Rachel came home. It’s also a second biggest holiday in Ukraine (after New Year’s) – International Women’s Day! Women of all ages receive gifts – daughters from mothers, teachers from students, aunts from nephews, etc. And since it’s a national holiday, everyone gets a day off! We don’t celebrate it with the gifts in our household anymore - Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day are enough – but it still feels like a holiday to us!

We’ve come a long way during these 6 weeks at home. I’ve become a strict disciplinarian, which is a totally new role for me :) We have a routine for everything: playtime, study time, TV, bedtime, etc. Of course, Victoria had a routine before, but now I really enforce it, and I think it’s the reason Rachel is doing so well. All children are different, and it wouldn’t even occur to me to send Alex to bed at 8:00 pm when he was 10 years old. But Alex was always very mature, so this approach wouldn’t work for him. As most post-institutionalized kids, Rachel is emotionally much younger than her biological age. She’s more like 7- or 8-year old, and she needs a totally different approach than home-grown 10-year olds. I’m tutoring her every day in Math and English, and she’s really making progress! We started from scratch with the kindergarten and first-grade level work, and both Victoria and Rachel are doing amazingly well. I’m sure Rachel will be able to catch up very soon on her age-appropriate level when she learns the basics. Victoria really benefits from these sessions, and I’m afraid she’ll be bored in kindergarten next year :)

What else is new? Rachel experienced a lot of “firsts” during these 6 weeks.

First visit to the Strong Museum, which is one of the best children’s museums in the nation. The girls had a blast “working” as cashiers at the children’s Wegmans:

doing the weather forecast on TV:

and riding the carousel:


First visit to the mall, with an ice cream at Maggie-Moos:


First visit to the zoo:


First haircut! The hairdresser just trimmed the ends, but the result was awesome:






First gymnastics lesson! Rachel is very good in gymnastics, she should definitely try out for varsity team in high school :)

I started thinking about summer and already signed Rachel up for soccer and swimming. Both girls will go to day camps, it should keep them busy :)

Overall I’m very pleased with our transition so far. Rachel’s attaching very well, the girls are the best of friends, and our life is slowly getting back to our “new” normal.