Happy Independence Day, Ukraine!

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Today, August 24th is Independence Day here in Ukraine. It is the anniversary of the day that Ukraine became a free independent country from the U.S.S.R. Some businesses are closed today, especially government offices. We were fortunate enough to be allowed to visit Andrew in the orphanage. Since it is Independence Day, we brought a Ukrainian flag with us for Andrew to play with. He loved it. At first he must have thought it was a fly swatter because he kept swatting the ground like he was killing flies. Then I took the flag from him to show him how to wave it and then gave it back to him to try it. He imitated me and was having fun waving it.



Also this morning when playing with Andrew we only brought a few toys for him to play with. The last couple of days, Andrew seemed a bit over stimulated with too many toys on the blanket at once that he couldn’t focus on playing with one toy at a time. We worked with him mastering putting the pegs into the pegboard and he is doing very well with that. He has favored playing with his drum, which opens and closes on one end to take out the shapes from the shape sorter. I would ask him to open it and he would and then he would close it when I asked him to and when he shut it real fast he would bust out laughing. Of course whatever he finds funny he keeps doing it over and over again.



This afternoon when picking up Andrew from his groupa, I found him on his potty with the other children in his groupa. I asked the caretakers if I could take a picture of Andrew sitting on his potty. They gave me permission, so I got the camera from Robert and took some pictures of our cutie on his potty. He would scoot over towards me on his pot without getting up and spin around on his pot to turn around and scoot backwards. The children are not allowed to get up from their potty until the caretakers say it’s okay. When he first saw me come in, Andrew started flapping his arms and scooted towards me and at one point start to get up off of his pot. I told him in Russian “Sadeece” which means, “Sit down”. I didn’t want him to get in trouble or spill anything that was in his pot. It’s so funny to see the children scoot across the floor on their pot to get to their destination.



Robert and I have been working with Andrew to speak certain consonant sounds. He is very good with imitating people so we figured if we speak to him certain sounds over and over again he would start speaking them by imitating us. Today we were working with him on the “L” sound. As I was singing “la,la,la,la,la,la,la” Robert would make up his version of “lughb,lughb,lugb…of course Andrew starts imitating Robert grumble some sort of “L” sound by moving his tongue from side to side instead of from the top of the roof of his mouth to the bottom of his mouth. It was soooo funny to see and hear him say this sound over and over again.



We’ve been teaching Andrew to kiss by puckering his lips to kiss, however, instead he curls his lips around his teeth and makes a chewing motion like someone does that don’t have their dentures in their mouth. It looks funny, however, he does lean toward you to put his mouth near you and then makes a kissing sound as he kisses. Since we thought it was funny of course he has no problem with laughing at himself either. He would continue to give us gummy chewing kisses and laugh.