Word mystery: solved

For as long as I can remember, Elena has been using the word "foochi." We thought, for the longest time, that this was just little-kid-nonsense word that she'd made up, and remained enamored of.

But then something clicked: I noticed that she always used the word in the same context: when she woke up, she'd cover her head with the sheet, as if she were a ghost, and say, "this is my foochi sheet," or "I'm a little foochi baby." So maybe... maybe she's remembering something amusing or important from her time in Kotlas, and "foochi" is Russian for "sheet" or "ghost" or "baby" or something. It sounds Russian, right?

Except it's apparently not Russian. I looked it up, using Google translate, and there's no Russian word close to "foochi."

So there it stood for a while, until this weekend, when I had an epiphany: there may be no Russian word quite like "foochi," but neither are there English words quite like "somefink" or "muffroom," both words which Elena also uses quite a bit. One shouldn't, in other words, put too much stock in the pronunciation of a five-year-old, especially one using a two-year-old's memories. So maybe "foochi" is really "thoochi" or "shoochi" or something.

And, lo and behold, шучу (pronounced "shuchu") is indeed a Russian word. It means "joking" or "kidding;" in the sense of "silly," I assume. As in, "I'm a little joking baby," or "I'm a silly little baby."

Google Translate has a "listen" feature, where you can hear a word's pronunciation. I turned it on and called Elena into the room. "Elena, what's this?" asked, and played "shuchu" back.

Her face lit up. "Foochi!" she said.

I added a word to the translation - малышка ("malyshka"), meaning "baby" to make "shuchu malyshka," or "joking baby." "Who's this?" I asked, and played it back to her.

"Me!"

That's about as close as you can get to a confirmation that "foochi" = "shuchu" = "joking/silly." And it gives us a bit of an insight into something Elena must have done when she was little: hiding under a sheet or blanket and making the orphanage nurses laugh. "Shuchu malyshka," they called her...and she never forgot it.

Memory

A few days ago, Elena was standing at the bathroom sink pretending to make tea.  She had her little plastic teapot, and used the bathroom sink glass as a tea cup.  And then she did something a little surprising - she quite naturally sat the "tea cup" into an upturned cap from a vitamin jar.  She called it the "tea holder."

Tea time for Elena - note the "tea holder"
 under the glass

We drink tea on occasion, but it's usually steeped in a coffee mug, not in a teapot - and we never use "tea holders."  But guess where they do use tea holders?  Russia, of course, where they call them "podstakanniks" (which means, literally, "the thing under the glass").

Podstakanniks, with their tea glasses.

The natural use of a "tea holder" is an interesting window into her early memories from the orphanage. The day we met Elena, the care-givers at the baby house gave us a sample menu and her daily schedule, and we found out she often had tea in the morning. (They gave us this info so we could try to keep as much similar as possible when she transitioned to her life with us ).  We assumed tea was served in the same glazed metal cups we saw in use at snack time.  But she must have had tea in a tea glass holder on some memorable occasion!

Elena's getting old enough that her memories of the orphanage are fast fading.  We'll ask her questions about her time in Kotlas, and often she won't remember, or will mix up more recent memories with those fading memories of Russia.  Every once in a while, though, a true memory will peek through - and it gives us another little glimpse of a part of Elena's life that we'll never know much about.

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.

The line game

We're recently started playing the "line game" - a two-person game handed down from Teresa's parents. The rules are: One person draws a simple squiggle, and the other person uses the squiggle as the basis of a drawing.

Drawing has been something we've been working on, in a low-emphasis way, for a while.  Way back when we visited her in the orphanage, we brought some markers.  Elena had a unique approach to drawing, where she would pull a marker out of the box, pop the cap off, and very carefully make the tiniest dot on the piece of paper. Then she'd recap the marker, put it back in the box, and repeat with another color.

April 2011 - Elena draws, a dot at a time.

That's a very process-oriented approach, and one I suspect stemmed from limited practice time with markers and crayons.  The orphanage doesn't have a lot of money, so I think there's little room for consumables like paper and crayons.

It took some time after Elena got home before she actually began scribbling and drawing, and so it's pretty satisfying to see her actually draw something. It's been just recently - in the past month or so - that she's been able to consistently draw something recognizable.  Which brings us around to the line game.

We started the line game with Elena squiggling and me drawing, but just today she decided that she wanted to draw.  So I made a red "V" shape, slid the paper to Elena... and she made this:

A line game birdie.

A very recognizable little bird.  From her own imagination, in her own hand.
 

The power of stories

Elena's always been fascinated by books and stories, ever since she first came home - likely because, I think, no one ever sat down and read a book to Elena in the orphanage, and so the experience was new and fascinating.  I've told this story before, but bear with me:

For a few weeks or so, when Elena first came home sitting down to "read books" meant having her randomly page through the book, pointing out objects, and naming them.  She didn't yet understand that a book is read from front to back and contained a story.

That is, until one night when I forced us to read through "The Cat in the Hat," (or the "кошка в шапка" -- koshka f shapka--as we read it) reading every word in order. She was kind of fussy, but less so when I did it the next night.  More importantly, the act of reading the whole book showed Elena it contained more than just words and pictures - it contained a story. I could almost see the lightbulb go on in her head when she figured that out.

'Blacka! 'Blacka!

The Russian word for "apple" is "яблоко," which is (roughly) pronounced YAblacka.  The word is kind of dear to us because it's one of the first things that Elena spontaneously asked for that we understood.

Our September 2011 flight back from Moscow to Washington DC was a grueling 11 hours.  That's enough to make adults fidgety, let alone a then-two-year-old.  However, we tried to keep her occupied. and she actually did very well, especially by two-year-old, cooped-up-on-an-airplane, lacking-sufficient-sleep standards.

One thing we were concerned about, though, was what she would eat.  We weren't really aware of what she liked or didn't, and we were kind of at the mercy of whatever the airline chose to serve.  We had a few snacks to fall back on - raisins, for example - but that was a little sparse.

I forget exactly what the meals were, but one of them came with an apple, and when Elena saw it, she immediately reached for it, with an excited, "'blacka! 'blacka!"  Teresa knew exactly what she meant (thanks to a little study of basic Russian food words) and Elena got her apple.

I was reminded of this story because the preschool that Elena goes to held a small bake sale to raise money to help another kid's learning center.  They were selling small bags of cookies, brownies, slices of cake, etc. for $1.00.  Since they were small, an only $1.00, we had Elena choose her favorite.  She chose... an apple.  Over a chocolate brownie, or a frosted slice of cake.

I know darn well she loves chocolate and frosting, and it's a bit of a surprise that she loves apples more, at least at that time and place.  Maybe apples are something special from her past, something that has a unique, important meaning.  Or maybe, with my sophisticated adult sensibilites, I'm underestimating the attraction of a crisp apple.  Or maybe she just felt like an apple - she happily bit into it, and actually finished the whole thing over the next 20 minutes or so.  But in any case: hooray for the 'blacka!

"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.

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 B)

Teresa and I had been married, and childless, for quite a long time before adopting Elena.  Before adopting Elena, we didn't really participate much in kid's activities.  We anticipated them - buying toys and clothes, putting together her room, that sort of thing - but didn't really participate.

Now, of course, we're doing kid things.  And one of the important things is music. This is important to Elena, because the Kotlas baby house used a lot of songs to teach and entertain the children, and Elena still likes singing.  So we've gone through the classic kid's songs, mostly cadged from YouTube: she likes the A-B-C song, "If You're Happy and You Know It," and "The Wheels on the Bus," among others.

But kids music has limited appeal; I'd rather find "grown-up" songs that everyone likes.  Yes, kid's music is pitched for children, and has easy-to-learn lyrics, but songs are songs, and songs for grown-ups can be appealing, too.

So we started introducing Elena to grown-up songs, from female singers to begin with (higher pitched, you know), and Elena quickly found her own favorites.  Her first was Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'", mainly because of the boots in this video.  Since then, we've listened to a number of things.  Elena has her own favorites, which she often requests, but there are a lot of things she's indifferent to.

Then we started branching out from female singers.  Elena's current favorite song, one she absolutely loves, is the classic "Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles.  She's even got most of the lyrics down by now.  And, since we're listening to the Beatles, she's starting to sing along with other songs by the band.  I think it's kind of neat to see her listen to Beatles songs for the first time; she doesn't like them all, but there are some that grab her attention, and there's a little burst of pleasure seeing her "get" a song for the first time that's different from seeing her mastering the A-B-C song.

And, I think, I'm not the only one who feels that way.  Here's Dave Grohl, of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters:

Recently I showed my 6-year-old daughter, Violet, the brilliant Yellow Submarine movie. It was her introduction to The Beatles, and she instantly shared the same fascination I felt when I was her age discovering The Beatles for the first time. She wanted to know their names, which instruments they played, who sang what song, etc etc etc....

In the tooooown where I was booooorn
Lived a ma-a-an who sailed to sea
And he toooold us of his life
In the la-a-and of submarines....

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.

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.

A process-oriented approach to food

We went food shopping yesterday at Detroit's Eastern Market. When we got home, we got busy putting the food away, and in the hubbub, Elena ate a few bites of food without asking.  I caught her eventually, when she slid her hand in and pulled out another piece of... broccoli.

Yes, broccoli.  Her surreptitious between-meal snack was little pieces of broccoli.  I didn't say anything, of course, because (a) it's not a big deal, and (b) it's broccoli!  Oh, no, my baby ruined her appetite by eating too much broccoli!  Whatever shall I do?

Seriously, though, this illustrates an interesting approach Elena has to food, and to things in general: she's more interested in the process than in the final result.  In this case, I don't think she was actually hungry, but the whole process of reaching in the bag and breaking off little florets (from broccoli she picked out at the market, I might add) was just irresistable.

(More after the break.)

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.