Sadness 2

Elena is usually pretty easy-going. Because of this, she's had (I think) less trouble adjusting to family life than a typical orphanage child. Sometimes, though, things hit her just right. She's been upset before when watching a cartoon that had a subtext of abandonment (see this post). And just this weekend she had a similar reaction to a puppet show.

This last Saturday, we went out to Noel Night in Detroit. There were a ton of free things to do, and the first thing we went to was Kolobok, put on by the PuppetArt Theatre at the DIA. Kolobok is essentially the Russian version of the Gingerbread Man, where a couple bakes a little loaf of bread (Kolobok), who then runs away from his parents, plays in the woods, and eventually needs to outwit the hungry fox.

In this version of the story, two forest spirits interact with Kolobok and join him on his journey. The "forest spirits" are live actors, and control many of the puppets, and so act as both viewpoint characters and as the technical method to move the puppets around the stage. We see the forest spirits playing with leaves at the beginning of the play (there's a short video here), and later they play with Kolobok when he jumps off the windowsill where he was cooling after coming from the oven.

That's a nice way of handling the puppetry, except... Except Kolobok really is a puppet, and when in the story he "jumps" off the windowsill, in reality he's being taken off the windowsill by the live actor forest spirits. Being taken away from his mother and father, in other words.

Elena saw that and it hit her hard enough that she immediately began crying. It didn't matter that the story Kolobok wanted to jump off the windowsill, or that the story would eventually have a happy ending, or that Elena had actually seen the same puppet show before (a year ago, and not having made the same inference, obviously); it just mattered that the poor little loaf of bread was being taken from his Mom and Dad.

We wound up leaving the puppet show and regrouping in the corridor. Elena's just old enough that she can understand why she's sad and articulate that to us, so we all talked about what was happening and why she was sad. It was a good conversation, but Elena was still shaken enough that we went off to do something else: in this case a half-hour rendition of the Nutcracker, and then off to decorate a gingerbread man. So this incident didn't stop Elena from enjoying the evening. But still, it's a reminder that there are some things that will affect Elena differently than other kids, and sometimes those things can be quite unexpected.

It's that time of year again

We are once again preparing to file a post-adoption report with the Russian government.  All in all, we need to file four post adoption reports: at six months and one year after adoptio (ones we've already completed), at two years (due this year) and a final one in 2014 at three years after adoption.  We're filing these primarily because we promised we would: Elena is still a Russian citizens, and the state has an understandable interest in her welfare.

Last year, though, there was the added incentive that not filing the required post-adoption report could affect those families that were currently in the middle of their adoption process in a negative way.  This year, however, the Russian governement halted US adoption of Russian orphans, so there are no  American families currently in the middle of their adoption process.

We're still filing, of course, and preparing the report gives us an opportunity to look over the last year's worth of pictures; always fun for any reason.  But it's a bit sad that our timely filing won't actually make a damn bit of difference to anyone.

What was said and what was meant

One thing you prepare for, when preparing for adoption, is dealing with comments from other people about adoptive children. 

Unlike many adopted kids, Elena actually looks similar to Teresa and me. I think that's not co-incidental; the Russian Ministry of Education intentionally matches children to parents in part by looks.  Whether or not that's true, it means we don't have to deal with the same kind of questions or comments from strangers (well-intentioned or otherwise) that, for example, White parents of an African-American child deal with.

However, we were recently chatting with an acquaintance, while watching Elena play, about how similar she looks to us.  In the course of the conversation, the other person said, "oh, you can't even tell she's not your daughter."

"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? 

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.

Let her dance, let her dance, let her dance dance dance

We've noted before that the Kotlas baby house used a lot of songs to teach and entertain the children, and Elena still likes singing. And not just singing - dancing, too.  Moving to the music.  I imagine she's not much different than most three-almost-four-year-olds in her love of movement, but she does indeed love it.

Knowing how much Elena loves dancing, we enrolled her in a toddler's dance class this past November.  It's not a "dance" class, per se - it's more a "movement" class, where the kids practice moving their bodies and listening to the teacher's instructions.

What's more significant, though, is that Elena's attendance in class is something of a milestone for her.  Since we adopted her back in September 2011, she's been out of our sight exactly once - a half-hour experimental stay with her grandmother.  That half-hour stay went relatively smoothly, but we weren't sure how Elena would react to being "left" in a dance class, out of sight of either of her parents.

Lots of kids have separation anxiety, but it's a little different for adopted kids.  Remember that Elena has already been abandoned by her birth parents (and was rather precipitously removed from the orphanage by us), so, for her, a fear of abandonment isn't a nebulous and irrational fear - it's something she's experienced. But life goes on, and it seemed to us that participating in something fun, but short - like a dance class - would be good preparation for the longer separations of preschool, kindergarten, and first grade.

We prepared Elena as best we could-we visited the class the week previously, and explained to her exactly what was going on, and showed her where Mama would be sitting.  Elena was pretty excited about the whole thing. Still, it was not without trepidation that we took her to her first class.  Teresa dressed her in her leotard and tutu (which Elena loves, by the way), drove her to class, and watched her file in with the rest of the toddlers.  Elena looked a little nervous, but...she loved it.  Absolutely loved it.

Dance class tutu

I think she enjoyed the dancing, but she also enjoyed being around kids her age again, something she's done only occasionally over the last year.  So much so that any anxiety she might have had was quickly swept away.

That's a relief, but makes me wonder if I should have been worried in the first place.  There are things that adopted kids in general - and Elena in particular, I'm sure - struggle with more so than most kids, but I wouldn't want my own worries to hold Elena back. Something for me to chew on.

But in the meantime, let her dance, let her dance, let her dance dance dance.

Thanks to the Bobby Fuller Four for the title of this post.

Graphs and charts and leftover kids

So after the last post, I started to wonder - just how significant is the elimination of Russian-American adoption to the Russian orphanage system?  It's obviously hugely significant to the children who have already met an American family, but won't be adopted due to the suddenness of the ban.  And it's obviously hugely significant to those families.  And it's hugely significant to those particular kids that won't be adopted this year or next year or the year after that. 

But how many is that, and how does this number compare to the number of Russian orphans adopted each year by Russian families, or other non-American families?  In the Kotlas orphanage, at least as of 2008 (translation), about half of the children adopted went to non-Russian families.  That's one data point.
For another, I looked at some recent news stories on Russian-American adoption.  Unfortunately, these stories tend to be a bit thin on numbers.  Even the best of them, like this one from the New York Times, throw out a couple numbers and leave it at that.  From that article:

In 2011, about 1,000 Russian children were adopted by Americans, more than any other foreign country, but still a tiny number given that nearly 120,000 children in Russia are eligible for adoption.

American Adoption Statistics
The numbers in the Times story are correct as far as they go, but the impression they leave is somewhat misleading.  The story compares 1,000 adoptions per year to the total number of Russian orphans of all ages - comparing apples and orchards, in other words.  In addition, it turns out that the 1,000 orphans adopted in 2011 by Americans (of which Elena is one) is the lowest number since the early 1990s.  Here, courtesy of the US State Department, is a graph of Russian orphans adopted by Americans in each of the last 19 years:

Russian orphans adopted by American citizens, by year
FY 1993 - 2011, from the US State Department site.

It's rather startling to realize that adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans have already declined 75% compared to a decade ago.  The tighter restrictions imposed since c. 2006 have had a larger effect in reducing the number of Russian orphans adopted by Americans than the last turn of the spigot that completely eliminates the adoption of Russian orphans by Ameroican families.

Even accounting for the recent dropoff, 60,000 Russian orphans have been adopted by Americans since 1993 - and that's not a tiny number at all compared to 120,000.

Russian Adoption Statistics
But the other part of the puzzle is: who else is adopting Russian orphans, and how many are being adopted?  How does the "tiny number" of 1,000 stack up against that?

Those who exploit the powerless anger their Maker...

Proverbs 14: 31-33, from the Common English Bible:

³¹ Those who exploit the powerless anger their Maker, while those who are kind to the poor honor God. ³² The wicked are thrown down by their own evil, but the righteous find refuge even in death. ³³ Wisdom resides in an understanding heart, but it’s not known in fools.

We're not the most religious of folk, but then Proverbs is far from the most religious book in the Bible.  Most translations render the word "powerless" in the headline as "poor," but I like this translation, because it appropriately describes the following:

"Putin Signs Bill That Bars U.S. Adoptions, Upending Families," from the New York Times; dated today:

President Vladimir V. Putin signed a bill on Friday that bans the adoption of Russian children by American citizens, dealing a serious blow to an already strained diplomatic relationship. But for hundreds of Americans enmeshed in the costly, complicated adoption process, the impact was deeply personal....

The law calls for the ban to be put in force on Tuesday, and it stands to upend the plans of many American families in the final stages of adopting in Russia. Already, it has added wrenching emotional tumult to a process that can cost $50,000 or more, requires repeated trips overseas, and typically entails lengthy and maddening encounters with bureaucracy....

The bill that includes the adoption ban was drafted in response to the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Obama this month that will bar Russian citizens accused of violating human rights from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there....

Sad Mama

We've tried to be very open with Elena about her adoption, her experiences at the Kotlas orphanage, and how she came to live with us.  That's not really that difficult to do, because we have lots of pictures (see for example this post, where we've collected some of the pictures into a book), and more importantly shared experiences that we can talk about.

What's a little harder is talking about the first part of Elena's story: her and her birthmother.  That's not because it's a taboo subject (because it's not), or because it takes some thought and sensitivity to talk with Elena about such an important person (although it does), but because we don't have lots of pictures, and we don't have shared experiences that we can talk about.  In fact, we know almost nothing about Elena's birthmother other than her name, age, and where she was born; Elena, of course, has no memory of her.

What we do have is a photocopy of her passport picture.  It looks like it was photocopied on a vintage Xerox: there are no grey tones and the blacks are a little blobby.  Moreover, it's a passport photo.  No one looks all that good when posing for an ID picture, and passports, where neutral unsmiling expressions are required, are worse than most.

Scars

We visited Teresa's parents over Thanksgiving, and during one of our outdoor hikes, Elena slipped, fell, and cut her palm on a sharp rock.  It wasn't just a tiny cut; it was a nice 1/2" gash, and pretty deep to boot.  It bled pretty well, too.

We cleaned it up and put some ointment on it, but Elena really didn't want a bandage.  She's expressed that opinion before: when she scrapes her knee or whatnot, she'll specifically request "no Band-Aid."  With a scraped knee it's not a big deal to agree, but with a fairly deep cut on her palm (a place that's sure to attract more dirt), a bandage is kind of a must.  So we insisted.

And Elena was upset.  She cried and cried, much longer than she normally does, stopping and starting more than once.  Maybe it wasn't the bandage, maybe it was the painful gash, but she's bonked herself pretty hard before, and after the initial shock wears off she's usually relatively stoic.  But she wasn't being stoic this time.

Her reaction, plus the fact that she specifically rejects Band-Aids, plus the fact that one of the things she remembers well enough about the orphanage to talk about is a trip to the doctor; all makes us think that there's something traumatic in her past associated with bandages.  A painful shot, or being (seemingly) abandoned in an examination room - not necessarily something that would be traumatic to an adult, but something that a child wouldn't understand.  We don't know; we weren't there.  And we'll probably never know.

Luckily, Elena seems to be pretty resiliant.  Before long, her uncle distracted her with a ride on his shoulders, and she forgot about the bandage long enough to realize that nothing bad was happening.  She was even OK with putting on a fresh bandage later in the day.

The gash in her palm is doing nicely, and now is nearly completely healed.  Elena and I were talking about it last night.  I showed her the scar on my own palm, where a broken garage door handle had gouged a hole years ago. 

"See?" I said. "Soon your cut will turn into a scar just like mine."

She looked closely at my hand. "Hard to see it," she said.

Sometimes it is.  But it's always there.

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.

In the toooown, where I was boooorn... (Definition A)

As I mentioned a couple posts previously, we've been talking to Elena about her time in the orphanage in Kotlas, and how she came to leave Kotlas and live with us.  It's part of her story, and important to her.  We're talking to her about Kotlas because that's a place that she remembers, and something that we can talk about using first-hand information, because we all were there. 

But Elena wasn't always in Kotlas; there's more to her story than that.  Elena was born in the town of Nyandoma.  Nyandoma is almost due south of Arkhangelsk and due west of Kotlas. There's a map of the area below, or you can click here for a larger Google Maps view (or, for more detail, try Yandex).



We're going to have a harder time talking to Elena about the Nyandoma part of her story, because we know only a little about it.  We weren't there, and no one we talked to was there, and we just have a few notes.  We know when and where she was born (Jan. 26 in the Nyandoma Central District Hospital, shown below).

Nyandoma Central District Hospital

We also know her birth mother's name and when Elena was transferred to Kotlas, but almost nothing more.  We don't know where else she lived, we don't know much else about the the city, and we've never been there.   That's unfortunate, because it was an important time in her life, even if we didn't know her then, and she'll eventually have more questions, ones that we'll have a hard time answering.

Vacation

We like to travel, or at least go on trips for vacation.  And, honestly, that was one of the great things about adopting from Russia - the chance to visit St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as Arkhangelsk and Kotlas, and just do things in a place away from home.

However, once you adopt a child, particularly one from an orphanage who's used to routine, it's best to stay home and stick to routine tasks.  This helps the child get used to her new surroundings, and reassures her that she won't be once again uprooted and taken somewhere else.  For example, recall that Elena's first experience in sleeping in strange places was when she was taken away from the orphanage by a couple strange people (us), so it would be perfectly natural for her to be worried if she again winds up sleeping in strange places.

But still, we like to travel, and we wanted to make sure Elena also enjoyed traveling, which meant easing into the travel experience.  We didn't know Elena's tolerence level for sleeping in strange places away from home, so we started slowly.  (more after the cut)

We're starting to have "the talk"

One of the things kids from orphanages (and adopted kids in general) can struggle with is the questions of How and Why: Why was I in an orphanage? How did I get there? How did I wind up in this family? Why me?

Those aren't just questions of curiosity; at the root are two important questions: What did I do that made this upheaval in my life happen? and Will it happen again?  Those aren't silly questions at all: if you've gone through a traumatic upheaval in your life, it's natural to suppose something similar might happen again.  Moreover, it's human nature to ascribe responsibility to yourself for events completely out of your control: the concept that you might deserve things that occur from random chance.

Because these questions are important, it's important that kids ask them, rather than chewing on them in private, and so it's important they know that these questions are OK to ask.  We try to signal to Elena thatasking questions about her past is OK - we share stories about us visiting her, and we often page through her picture book containing the pictures we took in Russia.

We let her know that she's staying with us, and not going back to Kotlas - an idea she often repeats back for confirmation.  At first I wasn't sure if she was repeating the idea because she felt it was important, or only because we seemed to be attaching importance to it, and she was picking up on that. But now it's pretty clear that it's important to her. (more after the cut)

"Family Day"

It was one year ago today that Elena appeared in our hotel room.

I've been asked two or three times whether we plan on celebrating Elena's birthday, OR the "family day" when she came to live with us.  Then answer, of course, is both!  We want to acknowledge both the importance of  her becoming part of our family (family day), and Elena's own personal importance, independent of the our family (her birthday).  Minimizing either of these does a disservice to either Elena herself (by failing to acknowledge her life before she came to live with us) or our attachment to her (by failing to acknowledge the huge change in her life). 

And celebrating twice a year isn't such a bad thing, either.  Wish Elena a happy family day.

Empathy

Elena and I sometimes troll around YouTube for kid's videos, just to see what she likes.  Just yesterday we stumbled on the Swiss claymation series Pingu the Penguin (Elena's got a stuffed penguin she really likes).  We watched a couple episodes (they're short), including this one, where Pingu's a babysitter:

The video features Pingu taking care of a pair of baby penguins, who spend most of their time crying to get food or attention.  The crying parts are done in a surprisingly realistic representation of babies in total sobbing meltdown, (especially for something done in claymation).

When Elena first saw it, tears just streamed down her face, poor little thing.

I'm not quite sure why;  the video's not scary at all, nor is it particularly "sad" to my adult sensibilities.  My best guess is that seeing a couple babies crying so much, then getting only their basic needs taken care of (but not picked up, notice) hit just a little too close to home.

After a few big hugs, some explanations about how babies need LOTS of care, love and attention, and then some extra "pretend baby care" for her too, Elena asked to see it again and was OK with it.

Orphanage behavior

OK, a long and serious post now, one about orphanage behavior, in general and in specific. 

"Orphanage behavior" is something of an ill-defined term.  People seem to use it to refer to things that kids who've grown up in orphanages do, that other kids commonly don't, because of their orphanage experience.  Exactly what it encompasses, though, seems to depend on who's using the term.  Moreover, in many cases, "orphanage behavior" is just behavior: things kids do.  Behavior is a continuum, and non-orphanage kids may do the same things, just to a lesser (or even greater) degree.  Of course, in what way and to what extent both of these types of behavior manifest themselves depend on the orphanage and in some part on the child herself.

Because this post wound up a lot lengthier than I had envisioned when starting it, I'll break it into sections.

Background
When professionals talk about orphanage behavior, it's almost always a negative; something that must be overcome.   Here, for example, is a short article with a rundown of behaviors exhibited by children raised in orphanages. The author calls this "Post-Orphanage Behavior," because he's focused on children who enter families after orphanage life. He defines the behavior like so:

Regression Analysis

Teresa was an artist at the Bucktown Arts Festival in Chicago this weekend.  The Festival runs two full days, Saturday and Sunday, so all three of us made a long weekend trip out of it.  We've been on short vacations with Elena before, but this wasn't really a vacation-it was something of a hectic trip, with odd hours and activities.

Elena did have fun, particularly so since the Festival was held right next door to Holstein Park, which has both a playground and a pool.  Saturday was sunny and hot, and both the Festival and the playground were pretty crowded. The playground, of course, had a lot of kids about Elena's age.

I think the combination of the excitement, the lack of sleep, the different location, and the gaggle of kids pushed Elena harder than we thought it would.  She played with other kids in the playground, but then started interacting with the other kids' parents.  Her first "look, man, look!" directed at another adult was kind of amusing, but then she did it more, and it was less amusing.  I finally pulled the plug when she asked to be picked up by a strange woman.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the playground atmosphere seemed very much like playing at the orphange, and the strange surroundings made Elena less sure of her place: the last stressful, crowded travel experience she'd had was one where she wound up living with two strange people half a world away.  Consciously or subconsciously, being "taken back" to an orphanage-like playground probably pushed a few to many buttons.

Sunday afternoon was rainy, and the playground was nearly empty, and we had a perfectly fine (although somewhat wet) time on the swings.   So no real harm done, I think.  In any case, it's not unusual for adopted children to regress to this kind of coping behavior when they're feeling uncertain or overwhelmed.  However, this is a good reminder that it's not always obvious beforehand when Elena is feeling that level of uncertainty, and that might take some thought.  On the one hand, I don't want to underestimate her adaptability and shield her from things she doesn't need to be shielded from, but on the other... she's still three years old.

And she's our daughter.

The Swedish are Coming! The Swedish are Coming!

One nice thing about the Blogger software is that it allows us to track, in a general way, who's looking at this blog.  We started it with friends and family in mind, as an easy way to let people know how our trip to Russia was progressing.  However, this blog is indexed by search engines, and a fair number of people find their way here through a search engine.  That's actually really fun - I've had email conversations with half-a-dozen people who we didn't know previously, who had "met" us through this blog.

This isn't a huge number of people - this blog just topped 7000 pageviews, which is relatively tiny as blogs go - but that's OK.  We're talking about pretty specialized subject material, and there's not all that many people who might be interested.

One of the stats Blogger coughs up is the country of origin.  As you might expect, most people reading are from the US - about 65%.  Most of those are probably people we know.  Of the other countries, Russia is, again as you might expect, high on the list.  But it's in the third spot.  The second-most number of people come from Sweden.

Sweden? Why? Well, there's a general answer and a specific answer (more after the cut).