Thursday, November 29, 2012
What our life is like now
Our next door neighbor found this illustration from a Bulgarian children's book, and it's an accurate depiction of our house at the moment:
A bit of our story
The boys are sleeping well...it's 5 a.m. and Elisey is still asleep and Dimcho got up to pee but otherwise went back to bed. A few minutes of peace after a good night's sleep... You parents know how it is, but imagine if you suddenly met your kids at ages 5 and 7, barely knowing their personalities and they not knowing you and your rules, and not even having a language in common, which exponentiates the challenges of parenthood.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
We arrived in Sofia after an uncomfortable flight. We'd had barely ten days notice to buy tickets to Europe and back over Thanksgiving week. But if we didn't go then, we'd have to wait another 3 weeks, and we have been waiting too many years already. In particular the Lufthansa flight over the Atlantic, from Denver to Frankfurt, was uncomfortable, stashing us in the middle with no leg room and no room for our handbags under the seat even.
We arrived in Sofia on a crisp autumnal Sunday, and went out to Pizza Ugo on the corner of Vitosha Boulevard and Ulitsya Gladston for what we knew would be our last quiet dinner out for a long while. We were in a rented apartment arranged for us by Vesta, the Bulgarian NGO who handles the in-country trip as well as all the Bulgarian paperwork.
Because we were there Thanksgiving week, the US Embassy was closed on Thursday. This meant a compressing of our schedule. So early Monday morning Petko from Vesta picked us up and drove us the hour and a half to Kyustendil, an agricultural town of about 50,000 people. The morning was foggy so the landscape did not look familiar, and as he drove Petko told us how no one was looking forward to the euro replacing the lev as Bulgarian currency in a few years.
We'd spent nearly a week in Kyustendil back in June and so it looked very familiar, especially the drive up the hill to the orphanage. Once there we had to wait outside, and Petko made a phone call. Although they were expecting us, the orphanage director was on vacation and so we had to wait for someone official to arrive. This was disconcerting, because we needed to file our paperwork for the boys' passports before noon so they'd be ready to take to the US Embassy on Wednesday afternoon.
Finally we were let in. We weren't sure how Elisey and Dimcho would receive us--it had been six months since we'd seen them, and although we'd sent them pictures and letters we had no idea what got through.
Well, the orphanage did its job on cranking them up. Elisey ran and jumped into Donna's arms, exclaiming (in Bulgarian) "Our Mama!" They were clearly very excited.
As we put new clothes on them, we still had to wait for someone official, in this case the boys' social worker to show up, go over the paperwork, and then make copies. This took quite a long time. While we were waiting one of the caregivers told us a bit about their schedule and what they typically ate--soup for lunch, a light snack at 4, dinner quite late right before bed. Finally the paperwork was completed and we climbed into the car, with the clock ticking, and heading back.
To make matters worse, Dimcho started feeling carsick so twice we stopped and let his stomach settle. The roads weren't that curvy but neither boy had spent much time in cars before.
We got into Sofia an hour late and went straight to the police station to file paperwork. This must have been hard on the boys as it meant no lunch and we had to wait a long time. We wondered about the noon deadline, but apparently Vesta is the master of making things happen in a bureaucratic country; we'd seen the same thing happen when we gotten married in Italy so many years ago.
Finally we got into a booth with an official, the boys got their pictures taken, and we were whisked back to the apartment and left alone with them until the next day. And so everything changed.
We'd laid out a few toys and their clothes. You must remember the boys had never owned anything of their own: all the toys and clothes were communal. The caregivers had carefully kept out the pictures we'd sent and the few toys we'd brought the last time, but that was it.
There were of course things we did not anticipate.
As I've written, the boys don't really know how to play with toys. They mostly just corralled their possession, as if defending them against the other orphanage kids, no longer there but those ingrained habits die very hard. They'd also had no freedom, very little to explore, so the boys exploded, especially Elisey.
They had been used to a television, and they were very disappointed when we told them the apartment television didn't work. Elisey didn't believe us, and decided to fix it himself, mostly by plugging and unplugging everything. Repeatedly and endlessly. Attempts to get him to stop were met by him running away and pushing at something else. Within a few minutes, even as we tried to stop him, he managed to do something to disable the apartment computer--and I'd fairly good with computers. Alas, my own laptop had suddenly stopped working the previous day, probably a blown motherboard (I haven't had a chance to take it to a repairshop yet), so this crippled our internet connection, leaving us feeling even more isolated. All we had were the Android tablets we'd bought for music and movies for the boys. We could do some basic e-mail and a few other things but posting long blog posts was really too difficult.
We later found out that the whole plugs/buttons things is a typical obsession for boys Elisey's age, especially orphanage kids. We had to remove the TV from their room before they destroyed it (they still managed to somehow pull down a strolled stowed atop a 7-foot-high closet, breaking off a wheel) and to lock the kitchen, because turning on a stove is just as tempting as turning on a light switch. Although the TV is a tempting babysitting, it was the right decision, because if we'd given in early they'd be clamoring for it constantly and trying to change channels constantly.
By bedtime they were so wound up they couldn't get to sleep. And we didn't blame them, though we were exhausted ourselves and struggling with jetlag. We found we had to strip everything, not just toys but even furniture out of the room--Elisey would open and close the drawer on his sidetable obsessively, and Dimcho would slide the closet door back and forth and back and forth--because, remember, these kids had nothing they could control at the orphanage.
I don't remember if I did it the first night, but several nights I bedded down with them. Our agency encourages this, or having them sleep in our room (but our room has too many distractions) as it facilitates the bonding process, recreating how babies sleep with their parents, and they desperately need that connection.
And that was our first day.
When I get a chance, I'll write more. I will also add pictures, once I have a moment to download from the camera. I've added locks to our studies so they cannot break our computers, or at least to delay the inevitable breakage of our computers. Amazingly, they seemed to have slept through the night.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
We arrived in Sofia after an uncomfortable flight. We'd had barely ten days notice to buy tickets to Europe and back over Thanksgiving week. But if we didn't go then, we'd have to wait another 3 weeks, and we have been waiting too many years already. In particular the Lufthansa flight over the Atlantic, from Denver to Frankfurt, was uncomfortable, stashing us in the middle with no leg room and no room for our handbags under the seat even.
We arrived in Sofia on a crisp autumnal Sunday, and went out to Pizza Ugo on the corner of Vitosha Boulevard and Ulitsya Gladston for what we knew would be our last quiet dinner out for a long while. We were in a rented apartment arranged for us by Vesta, the Bulgarian NGO who handles the in-country trip as well as all the Bulgarian paperwork.
Because we were there Thanksgiving week, the US Embassy was closed on Thursday. This meant a compressing of our schedule. So early Monday morning Petko from Vesta picked us up and drove us the hour and a half to Kyustendil, an agricultural town of about 50,000 people. The morning was foggy so the landscape did not look familiar, and as he drove Petko told us how no one was looking forward to the euro replacing the lev as Bulgarian currency in a few years.
We'd spent nearly a week in Kyustendil back in June and so it looked very familiar, especially the drive up the hill to the orphanage. Once there we had to wait outside, and Petko made a phone call. Although they were expecting us, the orphanage director was on vacation and so we had to wait for someone official to arrive. This was disconcerting, because we needed to file our paperwork for the boys' passports before noon so they'd be ready to take to the US Embassy on Wednesday afternoon.
Finally we were let in. We weren't sure how Elisey and Dimcho would receive us--it had been six months since we'd seen them, and although we'd sent them pictures and letters we had no idea what got through.
Well, the orphanage did its job on cranking them up. Elisey ran and jumped into Donna's arms, exclaiming (in Bulgarian) "Our Mama!" They were clearly very excited.
As we put new clothes on them, we still had to wait for someone official, in this case the boys' social worker to show up, go over the paperwork, and then make copies. This took quite a long time. While we were waiting one of the caregivers told us a bit about their schedule and what they typically ate--soup for lunch, a light snack at 4, dinner quite late right before bed. Finally the paperwork was completed and we climbed into the car, with the clock ticking, and heading back.
To make matters worse, Dimcho started feeling carsick so twice we stopped and let his stomach settle. The roads weren't that curvy but neither boy had spent much time in cars before.
We got into Sofia an hour late and went straight to the police station to file paperwork. This must have been hard on the boys as it meant no lunch and we had to wait a long time. We wondered about the noon deadline, but apparently Vesta is the master of making things happen in a bureaucratic country; we'd seen the same thing happen when we gotten married in Italy so many years ago.
Finally we got into a booth with an official, the boys got their pictures taken, and we were whisked back to the apartment and left alone with them until the next day. And so everything changed.
We'd laid out a few toys and their clothes. You must remember the boys had never owned anything of their own: all the toys and clothes were communal. The caregivers had carefully kept out the pictures we'd sent and the few toys we'd brought the last time, but that was it.
There were of course things we did not anticipate.
As I've written, the boys don't really know how to play with toys. They mostly just corralled their possession, as if defending them against the other orphanage kids, no longer there but those ingrained habits die very hard. They'd also had no freedom, very little to explore, so the boys exploded, especially Elisey.
They had been used to a television, and they were very disappointed when we told them the apartment television didn't work. Elisey didn't believe us, and decided to fix it himself, mostly by plugging and unplugging everything. Repeatedly and endlessly. Attempts to get him to stop were met by him running away and pushing at something else. Within a few minutes, even as we tried to stop him, he managed to do something to disable the apartment computer--and I'd fairly good with computers. Alas, my own laptop had suddenly stopped working the previous day, probably a blown motherboard (I haven't had a chance to take it to a repairshop yet), so this crippled our internet connection, leaving us feeling even more isolated. All we had were the Android tablets we'd bought for music and movies for the boys. We could do some basic e-mail and a few other things but posting long blog posts was really too difficult.
We later found out that the whole plugs/buttons things is a typical obsession for boys Elisey's age, especially orphanage kids. We had to remove the TV from their room before they destroyed it (they still managed to somehow pull down a strolled stowed atop a 7-foot-high closet, breaking off a wheel) and to lock the kitchen, because turning on a stove is just as tempting as turning on a light switch. Although the TV is a tempting babysitting, it was the right decision, because if we'd given in early they'd be clamoring for it constantly and trying to change channels constantly.
By bedtime they were so wound up they couldn't get to sleep. And we didn't blame them, though we were exhausted ourselves and struggling with jetlag. We found we had to strip everything, not just toys but even furniture out of the room--Elisey would open and close the drawer on his sidetable obsessively, and Dimcho would slide the closet door back and forth and back and forth--because, remember, these kids had nothing they could control at the orphanage.
I don't remember if I did it the first night, but several nights I bedded down with them. Our agency encourages this, or having them sleep in our room (but our room has too many distractions) as it facilitates the bonding process, recreating how babies sleep with their parents, and they desperately need that connection.
And that was our first day.
When I get a chance, I'll write more. I will also add pictures, once I have a moment to download from the camera. I've added locks to our studies so they cannot break our computers, or at least to delay the inevitable breakage of our computers. Amazingly, they seemed to have slept through the night.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Settling In
Whew. I've literally not had time to post. Barely had time to check e-mail.
We have settled in, a bit. The boys are a little bit less rambunctious--they actually wear themselves out by 7 or 8 pm in the evening and are easy to put to bed the last few days. Keeping them in bed is a different matter; they've been waking up around 4 and wanting to get up and simply saying "Stay in bed" doesn't work. Their life in the orphanage was highly structured and highly controlled, and they are learning to negotiate a home with more freedom and more to explore and yet still many rules, not an easy task. And our task is to learn to be patient while teaching them.
Some things are strange. Elisey loves, loves, loves to take showers, asking several times a day when he will take his next shower, while Dimcho screams hysterically when we try to make him take a shower, even though we saw him take one at the orphanage.
I'll post more later, when I have the time and energy...
We have settled in, a bit. The boys are a little bit less rambunctious--they actually wear themselves out by 7 or 8 pm in the evening and are easy to put to bed the last few days. Keeping them in bed is a different matter; they've been waking up around 4 and wanting to get up and simply saying "Stay in bed" doesn't work. Their life in the orphanage was highly structured and highly controlled, and they are learning to negotiate a home with more freedom and more to explore and yet still many rules, not an easy task. And our task is to learn to be patient while teaching them.
Some things are strange. Elisey loves, loves, loves to take showers, asking several times a day when he will take his next shower, while Dimcho screams hysterically when we try to make him take a shower, even though we saw him take one at the orphanage.
I'll post more later, when I have the time and energy...
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Home
We arrived home safe and mostly in one piece.
The 24-hour journey home was exhausting--it simply couldn't be any other way. However there were no hitches and the boys were remarkably well-behaved, all things considered. They melted down a few times, especially towards the end when they were completely exhausted, but that can hardly be blamed.
Now comes the hard part of getting them settled here. It will be especially hard because Elisey is at an age when he reflexively tests limits, and he uses the fact that we don't speak very good Bulgarian to try to further push limits. Our "handlers" in Bulgaria told us this is very typical. Being typical, however, doesn't make it easier.
Over the next few weeks I'll try to post more news, more about the trip now that I have access to a proper computer. However that will be at night when the boys are sleeping and if and when I have the energy/insomnia.
I'll just make one observation. While the boys' orphanage was relatively warm and caring, and they had some toys, they slept in a large common room with no toys. We have learned the hard way they only way they will get to sleep is strip their room of absolutely every distraction. Not only toys, but if there is even superfluous furniture they will move it around, or pictures hanging on the walls they will touch and take down. Even lights they will turn on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and unplug and plug in and unplug and plug in and unplug and plug in. This is largely because they had pretty regimented lives in the orphanage and very little control over their environment, so any control is fascinating, even central to them. Indeed, they barely "play" with toys at all. Dimcho spends most of his time taking possessions in and out of bags, while Elisey loves more than anything pushing buttons, not only emotional and psychological but real buttons. He wants to "watch" television but for him the real enjoyment is not the images and sound but control, changing channels, changing volume; on the airplane flight he changed the brightness on the screen from darkest to lightest and back again, over and over.
On occasion they will throw a ball back and forth, or ride a bike or play with a car, pretending it is driving around; but just as much Dimcho, for example, will "play" at cleaning, because that is one of the main tasks he saw his caregivers perform. Part of our job over the next months, then, will be modeling for the boys how to truly interact with and play with toys. This is part of the reason we have strongly discouraged gift-giving at this time because they don't fully know how to enjoy being a child at play.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Heading home soon
We knew the week would be rough but it has been far harder than we even imagined. In 24 hrs we head to Sofia airport.. fortunately at least one other family is travelling on the same flights to the US as us.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Everything changes now
Sorry for the silence. On top of becoming instant parents my laptop died 5 minutes after arriving, the boys somehow gound the one button on the apt computer that made it unusable (they push EVERY button and not just emotional ones) and i had forgotten a plug adapter. Last night the agency drove us to astore where we could buy a n adaptet. Im writing this on a smalll 7 in tablet. One character at a time.
The boys veer from being thrilled to have a mama and tatko, complementing mama on her meals and wanting to tell tatko everything,, to screaming at the top of their lungs for not allowing them to unplug every device or, in dimcho's case, making him wear pajamas which he rejects on principle.
Many of you probably how one underestimates how much effort parenthood is. We knew we were underestimating it, but even so and unsurprisinhly we underestimated how much we were underestimating.
Because this tablet it not eady for long entries my posts will be sporadic and brief until we get home. We will post picturees then too.
Monday, November 19, 2012
technical difficulties
Sorry computer died and elisey broke the apt computer in 20 sec. Otherwise all is well but may not be able to post or read email until we return home.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Arrived
We have arrived in Sofia.
The trip went smoothly, though not terribly comfortably. The middle, transatlantic leg, from Denver to Frankfurt, we were squished into two middle seats on a Lufthansa flight. I recall Lufthansa being more civilized, but apparently no more. Not only were we in the middle, for the 4 seats in our section there were only 3 sections for under the seat luggage. I couldn't stretch out my legs because there was equipment directly in front of my seat. Needless to say, we didn't sleep much.
Nonetheless, we are here, and aside from the lack of comfort the trip went smoothly. We are now in a 2-bedroom apartment rented for us by Vesta, the Bulgarian NGO in charge on this side.
Tomorrow we go to Kyustendil to pick up Elisey and Dimcho.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Friday, November 16, 2012
Countdown to the next big adventure
In less than twelve hours we are on a plane to Sofia... Well, first to Denver. Then to Frankfurt. Then finally to Sofia.
Meanwhile we have been busy preparing, preparing, preparing. Now it's packing, cleaning, more packing, more cleaning. We'll sleep on the plane.
We'll post news and pictures when we have time.
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