Ella’s Development

Everyone asks us, “What is she saying now?” In truth, there are only a few new ‘words’ that she’s added in the last few months. Most of the following started while we were at the Black Sea.

She’s getting better at animal noises, though. Dog barks used to be a gentle, “ooh”. Now, it’s a healthy, resounding, “Aaaff”. Cats are greeted with “Ksss” which resembles the Russian word for cat that people use with kids (kee-sah).

First sentence: Da-da, aah-you?
(Danya, where are you?) It’s pretty cute to hear her sing-song phrase called out repeatedly, looking for either brother. Sometimes, she tries to say a sound more like “Tima” but usually she calls both boys “Da-da”.

Ella has learned to shake her head ‘no’. At first, it was amazing to be able to communicate so well with her, figuring out what she wanted. But after we all started encouraging her to show off, now she just answers every question with a ‘no’:
“Ella, do you want some jello?”
“Zzzh,” she hisses please, while shaking her head ‘no’. Hmmm.

By the way, Ella likes blueberries, cherries, raspberries, jello, and animal crackers. We’re not sure how many vegetables she actually eats, since she likes to chew her food and then spit it out. So after she finishes off a bowl of veggies, we find most of it in her bib.

Tima's Dog

I can't spend all the time I'd like to today writing, but I just overheard a gem.

Tima [coloring] to Danya: Look how big this sobaka is.

Sobaka is the Russian word for dog. I've never heard Tima use it before.

The Beach

My favorite part of the Black Sea

Evalina (who lives in Krasnoyarsk) Ju-hui, Tima, Ju-eun, Danya

Tima and Ju-hui racing in and out of the waves

6-year olds Danya (orange hat) and Ju-eun (in visor)
4- year olds Tima (blue hat) and Ju-hui

And the one-year-olds Ju-an and Ella. The newest members of our symmetrical tribes.

On the train to the Black Sea

Danya in May

Danya really gets math. I don’t see the process much. I show him an example and he does the rest of the problems. A lot of things that the curriculum presents as taking time to learn, he understands intuitively. It's quite amazing.

But reading, on the other hand, is requiring more work than I expected. I thought that once the magical transformation happened, he’d be excited to read all the time. In December, he picked up Morris the Moose and started reading it out loud. So, there, it’s crystallized, right? But we are still laboring through our homeschool readers, stumbling over ‘bit’ and ‘bin’, mixing up ‘dad’ and ‘bad’. And just this week I’ve convinced him to finally try reading any books that aren’t part of the curriculum. Normally, he complains about having to do any reading outside of ‘school’ hours. It’s taking forever, and he’s frustrated, too. A few sentences really tire him out. (And when he’s tired and not giving any effort, the mean mom-teacher comes out in me, which never helps anything!)

Danya is very attached to his letters. To how he writes them, I mean. We are working on handwriting, which is the one subject that the kindergarten really didn’t help him with in the fall. He has already learned very bad habits, so we’re starting from scratch. I love the work-sheets, as they are one of two subjects that he can do without my help. But when I leave him unsupervised, I find out that he’s forming the letters in his own way, instead of the correct way he just learned. (And in case you think that it’s not that big of a deal, you should see him draw an ‘e’. He makes a ‘c’, then draws the cross bar, then connects that cross bar up to the ‘c’. Another classic is the ‘r’ which he draws like a crook from the top left side down, then adds a little curve to the right side.) Anyway, a few days, he’s burst into tears when I’ve insisted that he print the new way. “But I love my ‘e’s.”



Today, at the playground, Danya was very jealous of the other boys’ guns. His gun is just a plastic one, without any noises or clicking triggers, and it doesn’t even look like a machine gun! (Spencer and Annette, it’s that orange one you gave us two years ago!) His dollar-a-week allowance isn’t adding up very quickly toward the purchase. And when Danya repeatedly begged the other boys to use their guns, they didn’t want to even play with him anymore. So, with some encouragement from me, he asked them if they wanted to play soccer instead. But they didn’t. A little more whining, and then Danya asked Tima to play soccer with him. “Surely,” replied Tima, who often gets left out when Danya plays with the bigger boys. But after a few minutes of that, Danya came moping over to me. “Nothing is making me happy, today,” he said, as he scuffed his soccer shoes in the sand.

Yesterday, he had a great time playing soccer. There is a hard packed, dog-poop and broken-glass field at the corner of our building, full of unexpected holes. And that’s where the older boys play. Our babysitter’s son, Oleg, came with her, and Danya played on his team with the big boys. Danya scored all three goals, to win 3-0. (Although, at least one of them involved falling, starting to cry, and then stopping when Oleg explained that he’d scored on his fall.) Our babysitter told us that the youth-league accepts boys at age 6, starting in September, and we should really get Danya into the most prestigious club. What we’ve seen of children’s sports here is both positive and negative. On the positive side, the kids really excel at the sports. We’d probably have the best soccer player in Colorado. On the other hand, those skills come from hours of practice, and a commitment to the team that we won’t be able to make. We just don’t believe that it’s the most important part of our lives! When we talked with Danya about the difficulties—the time every day that would result in loss of play time, for example, he said he needed time to think about it. Later, he said that he’d decided he wanted to play. Now, we just need to decide, and find out what the costs are (in time, energy and money) for the teams near us. It sure is tempting to play for Dynamo, though!

What the walls are made of

Here, we live in a 10 story concrete building, that looks almost exactly like the ones in which we always lived in Irkutsk. However, our apartment has been remodeled to be more beautiful than any place we’ve ever lived. Early on, we noticed that the walls, floors and ceilings here are actually flat. In Irkutsk, there walls were warped, so that we had to be careful of where we tried to hang pictures. We also had to watch our step walking through the halls—there were a few long bumps that ran the whole length of the apartment. In our first weeks here in Kyiv, I wondered how they made the walls here so flat. In fact, I often find myself taking pleasure in simply pondering the flat floors and walls. There is beauty in their smooth perfection.

Since we moved in, we’ve wanted to hang a few things on the walls. But we knew, from our previous concrete buildings, what a process that was! I’ve been sad that all the decorations that we brought to make this feel like home—the kids’ name-quilts by Rebecca, the artwork from preschool and kindergarten—have stayed in the closet. Bit by bit, with great effort for each step, we got there. We spent weeks finding out which of our friends had a concrete drill. Then, I spent part of my precious babysitting time to go pick it up and carry it home on the bus. After marking the walls and figuring out when we could drill, we realized that we didn’t have the little plastic sheaths that are needed to hold the screws in the wall. But, on one of our dates, we passed by the outdoor construction market and spent 15 minutes searching for the right kind of store. A few days later, Eric started drilling. And those first holes were really easy. Too easy. Curious, he probed, and discovered that our walls are covered in drywall. So we proceeded to use thumbtacks to hang all of the long-awaited decorations.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am happy about this. We are hanging a lot more than we thought was possible. But it’s representative of the strange cultural environment we find ourselves in. Life appears to be like in Russia. We have to assume that things are like what we knew in Russia, since most of the time, that proves true. And life is definitely different from American life!

So we spend unnecessary weeks trying to drill through concrete before even trying a thumbtack.

Tima in May

As I mentioned previously, Tima used to have trouble remembering how to answer one of ‘the questions’ at bedtime. When I ask, “Why do I love you?” he now knows how to say, “Because I’m …your son.” He points to his forehead as he says, “I’m,” and points to me as he says, “your.” But, since it used to be so sweet, I’m always smiling in anticipation of him struggling to say it right. He started asking, “Why do you always smile?” Lately, he’s started to preface his answer with, “Try not to smile this time, Mom.”

Other Tima gems:
“When I grow up, I want to be a real King Peter.”
“I’m Edmund, pretending to be a lion.”
“I’m half Spider-man, half Edmund, half puppy.”

(Yes, coincidentally, we are living in Narnia. Eric started reading the books to the boys a few months ago. So we are on the 3rd now. Tima actually doesn’t listen, usually wanders off during the long chapters without pictures. But we’ve watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and now we live and breathe it.)

It seems that Tima almost purposefully doesn’t remember people’s names. The first time I heard this was in December, when our niece Madyson came to visit. Tima had met her before, had seen her in pictures often. Yet, all week, Tima would say things like, “Momma, I wanted to give a present to… what’s that girl’s name?” Eventually, he did start to use her name, but he does the same thing with many others. When we started reading the Chronicles of Narnia, he quickly learned almost all the names. But as he listed them, he paused every time, and asked, “Mom, what’s the big girl’s name?”
“Susan.”
“Mom, you be Susan…”

Now, we have a new Barney video (the boys would never guess that we bought it for Ella, not them.) Tima always wants to pretend to be the little white boy. (And he does dance better than the white boys on Sesame Street.) Tima calls him ‘the boy with the gray hair’. But Tima refuses to learn his name—or maybe to acknowledge that he’s learned it. He is always saying, “Momma, I’m… Momma, what’s the boy with the gray hair’s name?”
Now, I’ve started to ask, “Does his name start with a T?”
Tima says, “No.”
“Does his name start with an ‘A’?”
“No.”
“Does his name start with an ‘M’?”
“Yes!”
“M…I…”
“Michael! Momma, I’m Michael.”
Just tonight he started saying it without being reminded. And every time, he pointed out to me that he’d remembered himself.

Ella’s Allergy Update

When we gave Ella some yogurt last Friday, we expected to see something new… or nothing at all. Our doctor-friend here is convinced that Ella never really had a dairy allergy, or has probably outgrown it. I was very hopeful that we would see no reaction. And, since she’s never had any milk products, I expected a strong reaction if she was still sensitive to them. For 10 hours, we saw no reaction—thankfully, no diarrhea, vomiting or hives. But in the evening, she was terribly fussy. And at night, she woke up three times, crying hard. Each time she only quieted down when I breastfed her. The next day she was fussier than normal. And on Saturday night, she also woke up three times. So, two nights like that, and I’m convinced that she’s quantifiably sensitive to dairy. I expected something new, but what we saw was exactly the same as the whole month of January—except milder, thankfully. Just a baby-on-edge. Definitely worth the trouble to avoid milk products.

So, it’s good to know she won’t go into anaphylactic shock in response to milk! We are getting ready for a two-week conference, this time at the Black Sea city of Odesa. I’m not looking forward to the pensionat-cafeteria, where we won’t have much choice of food. I’m grateful that we’ll be living in a cottage with a kitchen, so preparing Ella’s food separately will be possible. But, I love being out of the baby food stage, at least at home. I was so looking forward to not having to bring any food for her…

I'm pretty lost as to how to wean her. We can buy goat's milk here (for a meager $20 a gallon) but when I tried drinking it a few months ago, she was fussy. There is a hypo-allergenic formula made from broken-down milk proteins that we might try. I have this constant alarmed feeling of, "What am I doing, still breastfeeeding her so much at 15 months?" The boys were feeding less often by three months! And by this point, they were both weaned. But I remind myself that every baby is different. I know that Ella needs this physically-but I'm concerned that with her...how shall we say...more demanding temperament, and how she will tolerate weaning at a later age. I must say, she is less clingy than a few months ago, when she whined and cried if it was close to her feeding until I breastfed her. But I still can’t show my face at breakfast or lunch until after she’s eaten solids, or she’ll just wail in her highchair. She has rejected bottles since about 9 months old, and we’ve tried all sorts of cups to no avail. She’ll try anything for fun, but doesn’t actually drink from anything! Our babysitter considers it a victory when Ella drinks an ounce from a cup. I think she is reducing how much milk she gets from me, often due to her squirmy impatience. And I know she’s eating more and more food. But we need to figure out how to get the fat and calcium to replace milk, and how to get her to take it! So, if anyone has advice on weaning to a cup (without milk!) and on weaning from late night feedings at such a late age, I’d love to hear of your perspective and experiences.

Ella in May

Ella loves to sit in our laps. Whether she wants to read a book, or put on socks, she backs up and sits down in the nearest lap. Danya usually welcomes her, but Tima scoots away and she sits down hard on the floor. Now she’s started to walk backwards just for the fun of it, though not very well! When we had guests last week, we got the potty out for their little girl. Ella now loves to sit on it. She hisses, “thhhh,” trying to mimic the “psss” we’ve learned from Russians to encourage kids to pee. (Of course, our Ukrainian babysitter thinks that we should have started her on the potty months ago. And American friends are surprised we’d think of it for another year.)

That same “thh” hiss is what she says for ‘please’ as she makes the sign with her hand. She now has added a belly laugh to the phrase. I think that she loves being able to communicate, instead of whining and crying. When I ask her, “Do you want your burpie/some milk/ the toy?” she responds by rubbing her hand on her shoulder, saying “thhh” and then laughing. Sometimes now, she just laughs. It’s a pretty obvious answer. I’ve never heard a baby laugh so much!

Ella’s sweetest new behavior is blowing kisses…when I leave her in the crib, she now always says, “mmmmah” to blow a kiss. Other times, when she says goodbye to people, she makes the smacking noise, while waving her hand away.

We have more and more word- like sounds. Ella’s best words are “Mama” and “Dada” and her “Dah-dah” for Danya is coming along. When she’s repeating it, she’ll make a different sound for “Tima” yet it’s not really clear even what consonant she’s using. And if she’s calling out for either boy, she says “Dah-dah”. Her latest almost-word is “Teek-yee” or something near to it, which means “thank you”. She also says, “kee-kee” when I read a book with a mouse squeaking in it.

And how could I forget, "Bo." Ella loves to mimic a peek-a-boo game with Eric. She covers her face with her hands, then suddenly pulls them away and says, "Bo!"

Ella has a few Russian word-like sounds. “La-da” means ‘Ladoshki’ which is a song much like the English pat-a-cake. Although she isn’t into the English song anymore, she loves clapping and cooing along to the Russian version. She also has been heard to say, “Na” when she gives something to someone.

Ella loves to sing even more than talk. Whenever she hears music she starts to “oooh” along. Even in January, when we had to rock her to sleep a lot, one of the recognizable stages as she calmed down, was her singing along. She would switch from crying to whining to a slightly whiny sing-song voice. And then she’d go to sleep. Now, she loves to dance—waving her arms and bopping along—sometimes with her eyes closed.