We first met Elena on Thursday, April 28, 2011, after flying through St Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, and into Kotlas. That's exactly two years ago today. Here's what we did two years ago, with some pictures.   Two years is a fair chunk of Elena's life, as you might be able to tell from these two pictures, one taken two years ago and one taken yesterday:


Elena, April 28 2011, at the Kotlas baby house.

Elena, April 27 2013, gardening in Detroit.
She's sporting her "I love shopping" T-shirt

And, just for fun, we sort of re-created a scene from Kotlas:

Wow, that's... really interesting.

As I've pointed out before, the Kotlas orphanage turned 25 earlier this year.  The anniversary hasn't passed unnoticed - I stumbled across an interesting, professionally edited video of Kotlas orphanage as it turns 25.


Фильм к 25-летию Котласского дома ребенка (2013 г.) from Plusnin Alexandr on Vimeo.

Even though I don't understand the Russian, the video is actually really interesting for its look at a lot of different places in the orphanage and shots of what kids of all ages do during the day.  We get to see some of the things that Elena probably experienced, that we never had a chance to see.

Oooooo... kasha

Kasha, in Russian cuisine, is any kind of porridge, and includes porridges made from oats - what we would call "oatmeal" - and wheat - our "Cream of Wheat."  But Russians hold a special place in their heart for buckwheat kasha:

Buckwheat kasha

Buckwheat kasha comes in different varieties, depending on how its roasted.  It's nuttier and more flavorful than oatmeal, and can be mixed with honey or fruit to make a sweet breakfast dish, or with stock and spices to make a savory side dish (not unlike a rice pilaf, for example).

I was thinking about this yesterday because we made buckwheat kasha for breakfast.  The Russian food store near us has a good selection, and it's also available in Polish markets, of which there are a number close by.  Teresa often makes kasha for Elena - Elena adores it, and it's a link to her Russian heritage.

It's also a link for us, remembering our trip to Russia.  The Sovietskaya hotel we stayed at in Kotlas had a small cafeteria, and during breakfast they'd cook up a pot of kasha.  In addition, some of the other hotel guests would cook kasha in their rooms, so every morning the entire hotel smelled of kasha.  It's a pretty distinctive smell, and smelling it in our kitchen instantly brings me back to the Sovietskaya cafeteria, eating a hard boiled egg and a bowl of kasha.

And that makes me wonder what memories kasha evokes for Elena.  Smell and taste are powerful memory triggers, and Elena would likely have eaten kasha most mornings (if not every morning) in the orphanage.  Does she remember her morning kasha?  She says she does, but her details are scattered and fleeting, as early memories are.

But she still loves kasha, just as Masha does in the Russian cartoon Маша + каша (Masha and kasha):
 

"I love you"

One thing that's important in child-parent relationships (and maybe the thing that's important) is unconditional love.  It's important because it's the security blanket the child has to fall back on; the context of the relationship.  If you know your parents love you, things make more sense, worries decrease, and it's much easier to weather the occasional and inevitable misunderstandings.

But how do you know your parents love you?  Most kids are born to their parents, and the bonding and love come early and naturally.  But for someone raised in an orphanage, and taken away by a pair of strangers, that knowledge takes time to develop.

Miss Elena Goes to School

It wasn't so long ago that Elena went to her first class with other kids, and out of sight of Teresa and I - her Monday afternoon dance class.  Part of the reason for sending her to dance class was (appropriately) because she likes to dance, but other parts were to give her a chance to socialize with other kids her age, and to see how well she does taking instruction from another adult.

We didn't really have any worries about the socialization part - Elena spent 2-1/2 years socializing with other children 24/7.  However, there aren't really any other kids her age in the neighborhood, so she hasn't had a chance to play a lot with other kids recently.  And playing with talkative and active four-year-olds (which Elena is now) is something different from playing with toddling and barely talking two-year-olds (which Elena was then).  So even though Elena has (I assume) a good base of socialization skills to draw on, they're probably starting to bet stale.

We do have some nebulous worries about the taking instruction from another adult part.  There are two pieces to that: one is bonding - it takes time to establish a firm parent-child bond, and to reassure a child like Elena that she won't be taken away to somewhere else yet again (remember this has actually happened to Elena - strange people took her away from the orphanage and never took her back - so a fear like this is perfectly logical).  Would leaving her in the care of another adult worry her? 

Snow baby

Kotlas is pretty snowy, as one might expect from its location in the north of Russia. Here, shamelessly stolen from another blog, is a picture of the playground at the Kotlas orphanage in the dead of winter.

Kotlas orphanage playground, January 2011, via Denise & JJ

Still, fresh air is good for kids, so the thinking goes, and the children will play outside even in the winter.  I don't think they let two-year-olds just wander around in head-high snow (instead, the kids use the playground shelters seen in the picture below), but they do get outside into the snow.

Kotlas orphange playground, April 2011.  The toys in the
first picture are just off-camera to the left.

Detroit, though, doesn't get near as much snow as Kotlas. In fact, here's a graph of average snow depth, courtesy of Weatherspark, for 2011:

Snow depth in Kotlas, Russia: historical average (grey band)
and 2011 actual (bright blue line)

The actual 2011 data shows about 20" of snow on the ground for all of January - March. For reference, Elena was just about 30" tall at that time.  Must be a pretty impressive sight, when you're that small, to see so much snow.

(Oh, and if you're wondering, below is a graph of daily high and low temperatures for 2011, also from Weatherspark. Note the brutal weeks in January and February where the highs were below zero Farenheit.)

The Lifebook

We just put together a "Lifebook" for Elena.  For those of you who haven't heard of this, the Lifebook is an interesting concept - it's a short book that documents the child's life from the child's perspective, focusing on recording memories and life events that occurred prior to adoption.  Lifebooks are important in that they document te child's life, and help children keep the connections t o people and places that have been important in their lives, and understand and come to terms with all the information about their past experiences in a healthy, constructive manner.

The Lifebook is different from the "Elena" book we put together in the past; the earlier book is really about Elena's adoption, when we met her at the orphanage, and what we did when we came home.  We tried to put that book together from Elena's perspective, but it's still really about us - us as a family, yes, but it doesn't really touch on Elena's earlier life.

The lifebook covers Elena's whole life, starting from when she was born, and includes everything we know about her early life. 

The cover of Elena's Lifebook

There are several tricks to writing a lifebook, not all of them obvious.  It needs to clearly discuss how and why the child was seperated from her mother or family, in an age-appropriate manner.  In some cases (although not in Elena's, thankfully), those reasons can be horrifying, and in all cases they can be at least a little sad.  Those negative things make it tempting to just glide over the issue and make do with half-truths... but that's not fair to the child, who deserves to know everything about her past.  Having a lifebook that covers these issues helps the communication between child and parents, and is something that the child can consult later and ask questions about at her own pace.

The lifebook also needs to clearly cover common misconceptions that adopted children have - for example, it's not unusual for adopted kids to think that they weren't ever born, they were just created. (That's not as silly a misconception as it may seem, if you consider how one might differentiate non-adopted kids, who "grew in their mommy's tummy," with adopted kids who did not.)  As another example, children often believe that what happened to them - particularly the seperation from their birth mother - was somehow their fault.  The lifebook needs to clearly explain exactly who made decisions that affected the child's life.

The lifebook is also supposed to be a lifebook: it will change and expand as Elena grows, partly with her input.  (It's looseleaf, so additions are easy.)  In fact, she already has some ideas on what other information she wants to include in the book.  And, I should add, the lifebook is private.  Elena might choose to share it (or some of it - again, a looseleaf makes selecting only certain pages easy) when she's older, but it's her choice...because it's her story.