"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.)