Treat bags!

Leaving my boys for a week feels like nothing compared to the 6 weeks we left them to go to Ukraine. Leaving Oksana for a week, however, feels a bit like an eternity! She will be in great hands with my mom but the most we have ever left her before this is a weekend. As the reality of travel came closer I was thinking that I wanted to do a couple of things for Oksana. First, I wanted to have something that she could use to count down our time apart. Kind of like a paper chain where you remove one each day until the end. I also wanted a small incentive for her to behave herself while we are gone!! In the end I combined the 2 ideas and came up with what she calls "treat bags".

I made them for all 3 kids even though they are primarily for Oksana. Still, they are fun and I wanted the boys to enjoy them too! Each day we are gone (not including the day we leave or the day we come home) Oksana and the boys will each have a paper bag with their name and the day of the week on it. Inside is a small surprise. Oksana has things like balloons (of course), a book, bubbles, those fuzzy balls like Anya got, etc. The boys both have things like Lego mini figures, silly string, Pokemon cards, etc. All 3 kids have a coupon in their last bag (Friday) to go out for ice cream! I hope they enjoy them. We had a lot of fun putting them together! I'm not sure if we will do this for our second trip. It was hard enough to come up with ideas to fill all of those bags without breaking the bank! I'm going to have to get creative and come up with something different next time.

Anya's stash

Before I start I need to apologize for all of my paragraphs being crammed together lately. For some reason blogger isn't recognizing my new paragraphs. If you know why feel free to fill me in! Anyway, when we met Oksana we had very little indication of her developmental level. We took our best guess at what she might like to play with when we visited her. A couple of things were a hit (the bubbles) but most were a big flop. A coloring book and crayons don't go over well with a child who I'm not sure had ever been exposed to coloring. All she did was empty the box of crayons out and stick them back in...over...and over...and over again. So in that case I guess the crayons were a success! Anyway, this time we have the benefit of having an estimated developmental level on Anya (21 months) as well as the experience of another adoption under our belts so I am very excited about the stuff that we are bringing along to play with Anya. A family that met her suggested we have plenty because she is busy :)! Here is what we got:

She has bubbles (no spill so that if she insists on doing it herself we are safe), balloons, a beach ball, a thingy that spins and lights up, a stuffed animal that will stay with her when we leave, a photo album of our family, a couple of fuzzy ball things that Oksana loves, 2 wind up toys that she can chase around, a magna doodle, a sing a ma jig (the magna doodle and sing a ma jig were recommended by another family because they were big hits when they visited their boys in Bulgaria), and a water snake (those things filled with water that slip out of your hands when you squeeze them). Hopefully this will be plenty to keep Little Miss Busy...well...busy!

Counting Down

Today I woke up and told Larry "Do you realize that now we can say we are leaving next Friday?" That sounds SO close and I feel SO overwhelmed with all that needs to be done before we leave! One step at a time. That's what I keep telling myself. Really I jumped on here to blog to assure you that we will be blogging daily from the moment we leave. When we adopted Oksana I blogged regularly and at the time I was doing it for all of our family and friends back home, but now I realize it was just as much for me. I can't tell you how often I need to know a date of something that happened in Ukraine for one reason or another and all I have to do is go back to my blog to see what day I wrote about that event. I also love to go back every few months and read those blogs again. I get to smile at the fun parts and be happy that the bad parts are now long behind us! All that said, I will be blogging as much as I can and I will also be posting my blog on Facebook. In other news, we got some updated information on Anya. She has had 3...yes 3 surgeries for her gastric reflux. I don't understand all of the terminology but I understand enough to know that the GI doc will be one of our first stops after we arrive home. The other first stop will be the cardiologist. I had our pediatrician review her file and she is not overly concerned about what she saw but we will need to have her heart checked out soon. On top of that we got new height and weight, fairly detailed info about her birth family, and my favorite part was that it said she can differentiate between strangers and people she knows. In the report we got when we committed to her it stated that she showed no understanding of strangers. The new information was very encouraging to me! OK I'm off to try to get something done today. In the middle of all of this we have some friends coming in town tomorrow night! My friend Karyn was one of my dearest friends in Little Rock. Her boys and my boys were inseparable but we haven't seen them in a few years since Karyn's husband got transferred to Omaha. We are excited for their visit!

Travel dates!!!!

We finally know when we are going to meet Anya! We will be leaving May 4th and arriving in Bulgaria on the 5th. Once we arrive on that Saturday we will settle in for a night in Sofia. Sunday we will start the journey to the city where Anya is. I'm not sure I can say where that is at this point. Just know that the drive is going to be a long one and I am not a good car traveler! After we arrive we will spend a night in that city and then on Monday we will meet her and begin our visits with her. We will visit with her Monday -Friday. I think we will do morning and afternoon visits but I'm really not sure about that. It might just be once a day. Tuesday is her 5th birthday! How cool is that?! We will be there to celebrate her birthday! On Friday I believe we will do a morning visit and then head out around noon to go back to Sofia. I'm dreading this. We have to leave her knowing that we will not see her for 5 more months. That is not going to be easy. We will spend Friday night in Sofia and then start the journey home on Saturday. Like I said, it will be about 5 months before we go back to bring her home. I'm thankful that those 5 months are over summer. We have a very busy and fun summer planned so I think that it will help to keep our minds off of the wait and make it feel like it is going by faster. But that's not to worry about right now. Right now I have a trip to plan!

Birthday Celebration Day 3 and some great news!

In typical Erin fashion I stop blogging and then go blog crazy! So today was part 3 of Oksana's birthday celebration but FIRST I have to tell you that we got our WRITTEN REFERRAL!!!!! I should hear about our travel dates tomorrow so I'll be sure and update yet again! I will be so happy to finally have those dates on the calendar! OK, back to the birthday. A couple of weeks ago Oksana came home with this in her back pack:

She told me that it was from her friend Olivia. She talks about Olivia quite a bit so I knew this was one of the little girls in her class that is very sweet to her. That week Oksana's teacher e-mailed the classroom newsletter to all of the parents and I noticed Olivia's mom's email on there so I contacted her. I told her who I was and a bit about Oksana. I told her about the picture that came home, that we had hung it in Oksana's room because we thought it was so sweet, and that she has a very special daughter. She emailed me back and told me that Olivia talks about Oksana all the time. She asked if we would be interested in a play date! I was SO excited and I knew Oksana was going to flip out! I told her that Oksana's birthday was over spring break and that she had been wanting to go to a place with inflatable bounce houses so we set up our play date and then we began counting down to this day! The girls had a blast together and I loved getting to know Olivia's mom. I only got a couple of pictures and if you've ever taken a child with CP to one of these bouncy places you will know why...I spent most of my time hauling her around inflatables! Here are just the couple of pictures that I got.

See this slide? By the end of our time there Oksana could climb the stairs to the top independently! I, of course, stayed behind her just in case but she could not do that when we went to a place like this over Thanksgiving.

Oksana and Olivia

Crazy boys :)

If you think the celebrating is over you are wrong! On Tuesday, when spring break is over, Oksana is bringing cupcakes to her class to celebrate her birthday. That will be later...for now I'm just anxious for some travel dates!

Birthday Celebrations Day 2

Today is Oksana's actual birthday and she has spent the day making sure that every random stranger she walks by knows that! She has received many "Happy Birthdays"! Her day started with IHOP pancakes, which was her request. As soon as we left IHOP we headed to an inclusive playground in our area. We have 2 of them and this one is fairly new so it was our first time there. It was a blast! The disc swings you see below were a huge hit. My kids want them in their back yard!

After the park we came home and enjoyed some time outside with some of her new birthday presents.

The fun continues tomorrow with her very first play date with a friend from her class! Pictures to come!

Birthday Celebrations Day 1

Oksana's birthday is tomorrow but the celebrations began today with a party! It was just a small party with our family. Oksana has prepared for this party for MONTHS now. She has planned every part of it which has been so fun since last year she was clueless as to what was going on. I know you will be shocked ;) but her theme was balloons! She had a balloon cake, balloon plates and napkins, and we let her choose 7 balloons to decorate the house. This was one excited little girl! Here are some pictures of her awesome day: Here are some pictures of the house all decorated. You can see the balloons that she chose hanging up. Her favorite was the HUGE #7!

The birthday girl and her awesome balloon cake. It was so yummy!

I'm 7!!!

She got lots of fun gifts. This indoor swing is what we got her. Here she is swinging with her balloons!

It was a great day and the fun continues tomorrow on her real birthday but I'll tell you more about that later!