A better afternoon

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It's Adrienne, and I wanted to write a quick update about our Monday. As Wendy mentioned, our morning did not go well. One reason may be the weather. It is so hot and humid here, so we are constantly miserable and sweating, with nothing but a cold shower to provide relief (I never thought I would appreciate a cold shower, but there you go). Our host said it was 40 degrees Celsius yesterday, and there was no breeze. The thermometer in our room said 84 degrees Fahrenheit last night. Needless to say, we did not sleep well. So today did not get off to a good start. Our room had only cooled down to 83 when we were leaving for the orphanage.

Then our group of kids was acting weird, so that made us feel very down. Last week was just non-stop happiness with the kids, almost a honeymoon period, so I don't think we were prepared for our kids to be out-of-sorts around us.

This afternoon (after Wendy's entry) we returned to the orphanage, where we were looking forward to working with a new group. This one is very small--4 children--and is made of the younger Downs' Syndrome children. We hoped this was a sign that they thought we had done well in the first Downs' group we had.

When we arrived, this group was surrounded by the oldest group the orphanage has (6 and 7 year olds), and a group of younger children (1 and 2 years, maybe). The caregivers here were not only expecting us, but one of them knows a little English so she was really trying to communicate with us and tell us about these children. So we climbed into the playpen to hold 2 of the Downs' infants, and the older group lined up around the playpen to talk to us. We have picked up a few Romanian phrases--How old are you and What is your name--so we were tossing those out. The kids were responding and seemed to be very engaged with us. Then they take off their shoes and climb in to the playpen, too! It was so much fun!

These older children were really enamored of saying our names. Two girls in particular are incredible mimics, so they repeated everything we said. We sang that Name Game song with their names, which they loved. Then they would ask us if we knew their names, and we had fun saying wrong names to them while they yelled NO! We showed them a kind of pattycake game and got them to play it with each other--we want them to continue "play" after we leave for good. All of this was going on while Wendy and I were holding babies.

So our spirits our much higher this evening, and we are really looking forward to going back tomorrow. I know the older kids will get a kick out of looking at photos, so I am going to take a big stack in my purse tomorrow.

Wednesday we may be going to a winery with the other volunteers, but the trip is being planned by Igor so who really knows what is going to happen.

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