Patience is a virture...

If you have any spare patience, please send it our way, both for us and for the boys. 

We had a good morning yesterday, but by late morning Elisey was throwing rocks, which meant Donna had to keep him in his room while I scoured the backyard for rocks and put them all in the locked garden shed. A little later, however, Donna ran out for groceries, and Elisey broke down in tears, despite my reassurances that Mama would come home soon. Clearly and understandably some abandonment issues; we'll take more care the next time one of us leaves the house.

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We are slowly and unsurely starting to do better here, always trying to keep in mind that the boys are scared and and confused. It was a rough week in Sofia, as well.  As I mentioned we quickly learned we had to keep their room stripped at night not only of toys and the TV but of any additional furniture, pictures, and so on. Even the lamp was a big power struggle. (And power struggles are what we should be trying to avoid right now.)

On Monday we had the appointment for their passports. Tuesday afternoon we went to the clinic where an approved doctor filled out their medical form for the US embassy. In the meantime we filled our time going to a little playground down the street from our apartment, or a little further to the large park surrounds the "National Palace of Culture." The rest of the time was in the apartment, much of it spent with the boys trying to turn on the TV or slamming doors. We hadn't quite realized at this point that we would have to teach them even simple things such as how to play with blocks. We are now doing that.

Wednesday we went to the US Embassy.  The normal schedule would be to go on Thursday, but it was Thanksgiving so the Embassy was closed. So on Wednesday we got picked up along with the boys' new Bulgarian passports and their medical documents and driven to the very very nice (your tax dollars at work) US Embassy.  Aside from a somewhat brusque security check, the person doing the actual interview was quite nice.  He talked to the boys for a while, who informed him their favorite food so far was fish. We were puzzled by this, and only later realized they were referring to the "goldfish" crackers we had used to keep them quiet in the waiting room.

At the embassy we were told the boys would keep dual EU/Bulgarian-US citizenship, giving them education and occupational rights in the EU, a nice thing for them.

After a bit more discussion, we were done, and we went home.

Thursday was a totally free day for us. A Bulgarian friend of ours, the widow of a colleague of mine, came to visit, and was totally charmed by the boys (they tended to be on much better behavior for people who could speak proper Bulgarian), and we had a simple "Thanksgiving" lunch, mostly of cooked chicken, cut into small pieces for the boys.

Elisey did keep pushing buttons, plugging and unplugging appliances and trying to talk on the telephone. Around this time Donna caught enough to realize he was calling back to the orphanage to report on his new family, telling them what good food Mama was cooking. The flip side of this is when he was mad at us, he pretended to call the police to report us; we're pretty certain the Bulgarian caregivers sometimes threatened to call the police to get the children to behave. (We weren't totally above this ourselves; on the flight home we told the boys the flight stewards were "airplane police" they had to obey about buckling in and so on.)

It was hard, because even though we knew we were supposed to "redirect" the boys when they acted out, we had really almost no tools to do so. We are now learning better, but it has been stressful, on-the-job training.  That first week, getting them to sleep and staying asleep was a battle. We lay down in their bed with them, as that helped to calm them a bit, though not completely. If this sound strange, it was recommended by our agency; in fact they suggested we put the boys in our bed, but our bedroom both in Sofia and here in the US is too cluttered and distracting.  Other battles were over the lights. Elisey is afraid of the dark and probably always slept in a lit room. 

Fortunately we had no battles over food (aside from some minor stealing, despite a locked kitchen, but we had better tools for dealing with that and now at home we think we've mostly solved that) or the toilet, both of which are common issues with newly adopted kids.

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It's interesting to talk to people. Most, understandably, have no idea what newly adopted children need. They tend to be focused on the need for language acquisition, or in "welcoming" the boys in more mainstream ways such as through gifts or taking them to the zoo, the beach, to see Santa. (Santa Claus would probably freak them out.) But what they need, and we are struggling to meet this need, is parents who show them basic, basic, basic love. It's hard to understand, and we didn't really at first despite our training, just how basic and simple love they needed.   I will feed you. I will keep you safe. I will help you be unafraid. (Not easy when a child provokes you to anger, almost certainly subconsciously in an attempt to see if you will abandon them as has everyone else.) I will be patient with you. I will teach you how to manage both freedom and rules. I will show you how to stack blocks, how to climb on a jungle gym, how to swing on a swing, how to play with a ball, how to make a superhero cape from a towel, how to dig in the sand, how to ask for more food. They boys came to us knowing almost none of that.  Most children their ages can play by themselves for a while, but we need to focus nearly every minute on them.  Part of this is teaching them that we are always nearby, at first physically and then later emotionally.  It's hard work, even harder than we imagined.

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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.