"Oy!"

When we were leaving last night, Anatolia kissed me on my cheek.  However, when she kissed Ben with his day-old-whisker-scruff, she said, "Oy!"  ;)  

We can tell from the responses she gets from other adults that she says a lot of charming/witty things, but we are missing them right now.  Someday we will all understand each other better.

Playing with our daughter is a challenge.  After a few moments with any new thing we have brought for play, she wants to package it back up and tote it around, almost as though the having is more important than the opportunities it invites for play.  She wants to show the other children, but then she becomes horribly possessive if they want to touch it.  She prefers to show adults.  They say all the right things and don't try to take anything.  If we try to pull the new object back into play, she doesn't want to let it go.  If we introduce another new thing, she sits on the first and explores the second.  Eventually she will relinquish one since she cannot hold onto two (unless they are small), but really playing with anything in depth doesn't seem to be something she understands very well.  And we don't have the words to engage her in pretend (or to even assess her concepts of pretend).

Her favorite "package" thus far has been a little plastic tub that we brought filled with grapes.  She did not like the grapes (took one bite and spit them on the ground) but she happily fed them to us.  And then she saw the container...and proceeded to fill it with small things like cars and blocks...and carried it around for the rest of the afternoon (and a number of afternoons since then!).  If ever she wanted to explore something new, she sat on the container so it wouldn't get away from her.  The poor thing now is pretty cracked and banged up, but it is still a favorite.

When we were planning our trip here, we didn't know what age child/ren we were coming to see, so we packed a small suitcase full of all kinds of things that we thought we could use to create positive play interactions with our daughter/s.  Now that we are here, we realize that we overshot the age-range and brought many items that are too old/advanced for Anatolia.  She is five, but her play is much younger.  From what we can see, she doesn't interact very deeply with the other children but hangs on the periphery.  Some of this could be a product of how long it took her to recover from early traumas, as it is evident that others of the children play often together in meaningful ways.

She loves kicking balls around with us, riding on Ben's shoulders, playing in the sandbox or on the merry-go-round, occasionally sliding on the slides or swinging, pushing the swings, playing "scare" the other person with a loud "rawr!", or just running around.  However, Her attention span for any one activity is about 60 seconds.  She doesn't want to use the chalk, although many others in her group love it.  She can't quite get the bubbles to blow (the hole is too small in the wand).  She doesn't want to color, just to tote around the crayons.  She prefers to carry the books to reading them.  Ditto with the animal finger puppets and also the young-child cardboard dominoes with pictures and numbers.  She did string beads on a pipe cleaner the other day, and we were excited to see her small motor skills at work.  She can manage playing a toddler game on the iPad, if she remembers to take it slowly and not to just wildly poke at it.  If other adults are around she often wanders off to talk to them, see if they have anything more tasty or interesting or to tell them what they can and cannot do.

I don't blame her for seeking other people out.  We cannot communicate very well with her.  She must find it laborious at times.  I know trying to keep her interested in being with us is a bit of a trick from our end.  She wants to, but her play is limited, our communication is limited, and it is all so new.  Yesterday the children were all playing at a park outside the orphanage and Anatolia wandered over to a grandmother and asked her for one of her store ad flyers.  Since she had three, she gave Anatolia one.  Anatolia asked for another, and the lady gave her the second.  At that point I pulled her away.  I don't know what kinds of boundaries she has!

The lady realized that I couldn't speak Russian, and she walked over and began to talk to the orphanage ladies.  My perception of the conversation was that she was asking them how we were going to adopt and care for this little girl that we couldn't even communicate with, but Ben says I am probably just being insecure.  It is a good question that I ask myself a lot.  I don't know why our Father in Heaven has this scenario set up this way, but it is obviously in His hands, so I am doing my best to have faith.

Here are some more photos showing the beauty of her orphanage yard:

We are off to explore some more of the city -- Jewish museums and synagogues today!