Statistics

As I've mentioned before, one nice thing about the Blogger software is that it includes a crude statistics package, that allows us to track who's looking at this blog.  There aren't a lot of people who find this blog, but those that do are searching for specific things.  That's interesting to us, because hopefully this blog helps people find whatever they're looking for.

You can see part of this statistics package on the right-hand side of this page, under "Popular Posts."  These are the top ten posts that people read.  At the very top is "Exploring St. Petersburg," with, as of now, a little over 600 views.  Next in line, with roughly half as many views each, are "Let's explore Kotlas" and "The baby house in Kotlas, illustrated."  Then, with a little under half of that,  are "Our baby house schedule" and "The Hermitage part II: The upper floors," then "The Hermitage part I: Down in the basement" and "Who elses here has seen the Kotlas baby house? Anyone? Anyone?" with a few less. Finally, with under 100 view each, "It's all about the Yaroslavs," "Malye Korely", and "What happened in court" round out the top ten.

That's actually kind of an interesting mix: five of those post ("Exploring St. Petersburg," "The Hermitage part II: The upper floors," "The Hermitage part I: Down in the basement," "It's all about the Yaroslavs," and  "Malye Korely") are related to Russian tourism, and five ("Let's explore Kotlas" "The baby house in Kotlas, illustrated," "Our baby house schedule," "Who elses here has seen the Kotlas baby house? Anyone? Anyone?" and "What happened in court") are related to in-country Russian adoption, with all except the last one about Kotlas and the Kotlas baby house specifically.

Sadness

I've mentioned before that Elena's a fan of the Claymation Pingu video shorts.  We watch them on YouTube.  She's pretty much a fan of all things penguin, including a couple stuffed animals and books featuring penguin characters.

YouTube, being the time-waster that it is, offers up new suggestions based on what other things you've watched before.  Since we watch a lot of Pingu, we get a lot of other suggestions for penguin animation.  Yesterday we tried out this one.

And Elena was completely grief-stricken by it.

If you don't feel like clicking the link, let me hasten to add that the video doesn't seem like anything much.  It's a loop of bouncy music, with splices of animated penguins line-dancing and one penguin determined to head south.  It's a long loop - ten hours - but with only about 2-3 minutes of original content that gets repeated over and over.

We only watched five minutes of this video, and it ended with Elena sobbing. She was completely distraught for probably half an hour. Holding her, moving to a quiet room, deep breathing then a walk outside helped. She wasn't able to articulate just what it was about the video that upset her, except the big penguin "was scary."

We rewatched it after Elena went to bed.  I think the issue here is that there's a baby penguin who tries to keep the big, unhappy looking penguin from taking his suitcase and walking away.  Yet despite the baby's many efforts at being cute, charming and funny, the big penguin just... keeps... leaving. Over and over and over.  And then it shows the baby penguin looking very sad and alone. Over and over and over.

The video obviously pushed a button, and it was probably the fear of abandonment that many adopted children have. (....We think. Or maybe it was grief from something else that happened in her early life?)  We know she must have these fears, so in retrospect her reaction isn't so surprising.  It's a nuanced reading of the video, based on her experiences, that makes her reaction what it was.  And it's a reminder that there are things inside her head that may take a long time to manifest.

Russian culture and Russian Life

One of the things we want to do is keep some Russian culture in Elena's life, and we've been on the lookout for ways to do that.  As I alluded to before, we'll occasionally swing by one of the Russian delis here in SE Michigan and pick up some Russian food.  We even bought a couple music CDs there.  It's not necessarily the food that's important here - although it is fun picking up little meat pies or imported candy - but more that we're trying to maintain a habit of going to a place that's identifiably Russian, a place that is a sort of link to Elena's earlier life.

We also all went to see the Fabergé show at the DIA.  Elena, being three and all, was somewhat unimpressed by the collection of fiddly little gold and enamel Czarist doodads.  But that's OK; pointing out pictures of people and objects from Moscow or St. Petersburg relates other things in the world to Elena's own story.  What she liked better was going to the PuppetArt Theatre.  The theatre puts on a variety of shows based on folktales; two of them (Kolobok and Firebird) are based on Russian stories.  Elena loved them - not because they're Russian, but because of the puppets.  And that's OK, too.

We're also subscribing to Russian Life magazine. The magazine's bimonthly, and contains a mix of short news and entertainment headlines with longer articles that delve into history, culture, and tourism.  The mix makes for an interesting read, with broad coverage of current events (as broadly as you can get in a bimonthly, at least) and a narrow focus on specific subjects in each issue.  Elena's still a little young to read a 5000-word article on the Napoleonic War, but by the time she is, we'll have it ready.