Well, our day at the orphanage was awesome! We had a great time playing with the girls and getting to know them! We also had several conversations with the caretakers, orphanage director, and their social worker. These ladies all answered many of our questions and helped us to become better acquainted with Anya and Tatiana.
We have to say after all of this, we are still sitting on the fence with our decision. The reason for our hesitance is because of Tatiana's health. We have no reservations about Anya. We met her and she was exactly as we pictured her. She is a total "ham", in fact, she kept calling us "Mama" and "Papa". She was definitely working us over! She is smart, she colors very well (we brought coloring books), and she is definitely an athlete! Woo! Hoo! We played with her.... She was very affectionate....and the day with Anya was amazing!
Our visit with Tatiana was also good, however, we still have reservations about her potential for physical, emotional, and psychological development. She has some delays and is one of the weaker students in her group. She has a short attention span (this was obvious to us when we played together). And...we know that her mother drank quite a bit of alcohol (which leads us to believe that she has FAS). However, we assume that it might only be a mild or moderate level of FAS because she did show some definite signs that give us hope for her future.
The girls are in the orphanage because their mother's parental rights were terminated. She was an unfit mother and the orphanages actually took her parental rights away from her. Tatiana has been in an orphanage since she was about a month old. Anya has been in an orphanage since she was a little more than 3 years old.
Today, we also found out their correct birthdays. The information that we orignally had must have been an error in translation. Anya was born December 11, 2001 and Tatiana was born June 6, 2003.....so Tatiana is about 6 months younger than we originally thought.
At this point, we are unable to upload pictures to our blog. We are going to work on making this possible. We took some great photos and video footage today....so eventually, we hope to show you some of it.
We are planning to go and see the girls again tomorrow. We are hoping to see some progress with Tatiana tomorrow that will give us more hope in her future. We will pay special attention to her response to us and we plan to test her intellectually a little more as well.
Please continue to pray that God will help us in making this decision. We are completely undecided right now and we really need to have an answer soon on whether to accept or decline these girls. We ask for your prayers as this is such a big decision in our lives.
We hope that you are all doing well! Take Care and God Bless!
1 comment:
Observe the way the girls interact with each other. Does Tatiana look to Anya for help, protection, etc, or does Anya react to Tatiana in a "motherly" way? I wondered about their degree of bonding with each other. Also, keep in mind the fact that Anya has known life on the "outside", whereas Tatiana knows only institutional life. That can make a vast difference in their coping skills, etc. Sounds like Anya is pretty "street smart", whereas Tatiana has never had that opportunity.
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