First week of school

Hold on to your hats... it has been a good week :)  Dennis went to school 3 days this week.  One day was closed for  weather that never happened and he was sick the other.  Dennis loves school and leaves/comes off the bus with smiles each day.  Apparently his classmates think he is fun and he's well liked.  I can image having more kids around (there are like 80 2nd graders where there were about 80 kids in his entire boarding school), getting the 1:1 attention, and people putting effort into him for his education has to be nice.

Dennis finally getting to ride his bike.  He's been asking since his first day here.

On the bus... he sits near the front and they let Ashley sit with him to help.  Ashley has also been requested to pick him up and drop him off at his class, at least until he knows enough English to ask if he gets lost :)  One day the bus driver asked me if he was allowed on the bus as I don't thing anyone told her about the "new kid" and his siblings tell her Dennis was their new brother wasn't apparently believable enough.

Ashley on roller blades chatting with Sam.  Amanda is hiding in the snow somewhere off camera.

Dennis teacher has apparently decided Ashley is a reliable communication mechanism to us.  I'm actually really proud of Ashley... she's being a great big sister.  The feedback on how he was doing came through Ashley, she's his escort, and when the teacher asked for us to review his ABCs with him she asked Ashley to do it.  He didn't even have a problem stopping listening to music and playing his DSi to practice.  At first I was a little upset that we heard nothing from the teacher but I'm ok that he's doing well enough that she has nothing to report.

Amanda poised to attack.

Melissa got a bit tired of the default DSi songs so I grabbed an ancient 32MB (yes MB) SD card I had in a drawer and put 3 Toby Mac songs on it for him (ones I had bought).  He loves them so I'm going to have to get a bigger SD card for him... and Sam has requested such too.  Just wait until he sees I can put pictures on for him too.

Oh yeah... helmet.  Knew we forgot something... a helmet on a trike, ugh.
My sister-in-law will be happy to know we keep him in a booster seat
due to his size... yes, a 10yr old in a booster.

Last night was neat... well, he decided to spend like 45minutes in the shower which wasn't so neat.  But I can't really blame him... but the neat part was bed time prayers with the boys.  Normally we pray for the family, the boys, people we know in Ukraine (like O this week), and his sister Snezhana.  We've told the kids it is ok to pray that S will change her mind but not to bring it up on the phone calls... when I mentioned praying for Snezhana he said Violetta and "Lalik" (he's pronunciation of Yarik, his brother's nickname).  This is the first real indication that he understands what we are doing and he's engaged.

Today we got a couple of new pictures of Snezhana so I showed him those.  There is this "Russian Translator" application for the Android which is fantastic.  You can speak/type english and it will translate to Russian both in cyrillic and phonetic.  It will go in reverse too though you can't just speak Russian to it.  The big thing for us is that it will speak the Russian text and of course I have my phone with me all the time.  It speaks well enough that Dennis clearly understands.  I told Dennis that I love and miss Snezhana and asked if he did too... he said he missed her and with a big smile said he loves her too.  She's got some hard choices to make really soon... we'll keep praying for her and for her relatives.  Tomorrow we'll try to call her since all the kids are home.

We also looked at a blog on someone Dennis knows from Ukraine and her [new] mama and papa... he got a kick out of that.  Melissa and I are still working out and praying about another dossier and timing.  Even after all the craziness and heartache we had we still feel we need to adopt again from Ukraine... we'd have to do it all to go back for Snezhana if that happened to work out but, even if not, we still keeping moving forward as there are other plans for our family.

On a completely unrelated note, there are people from over 12 different countries reading the blog.  I understand United States, Ukraine, Canada, and India as we have many friends and colleagues there.  Even Latvia makes some sense... want to say hi to the people from the UK, Norway, New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, and a half dozen other countries.  To let you know 43% of the people reading this use IE, 24% use Safari (lots of Mac and iPhone users), and 22% use Firefox.  The next highest is Chrome with 5%. Anyways, as an IT guy I was interested.  We had one person get to us with a search on "snezhana, blog, adoption" which I actually thought to be the most interesting way to get to our blog so far.