ВIК-ЖОН

Day 12 – September 21 – Well today was much better than yesterday regarding our baby home visits. Our persistence with her worked out for the best so far. Yesterday we made her “use her words” to get something. It was a little challenging for us all. She was so not wanting to talk at all, just point and grunt. We wanted her to say “pazhawsta,” which means please. And today she did it! We were so excited and then she got excited because we were excited. It took about 3 tries before she remembered yesterday’s events and decided to participate in our fun. We were so proud of her. She barely says it above a whisper, but who cares, she said it. We just don’t want her to get accustomed to not using words at all. Our 17^th and 18^th visits with her went much better.

We mostly spent our time, both visits, with her outside. I know we cannot do that everyday, so we will take it as long as we can. We try to bring some kind of fruit to her everyday, and today we had an orange. I think we will have oranges for the next few days because our grocery store is out of bananas.

I forgot to tell you yesterday about all of our purchases at the market. Our biggest and best item that we are proud of was an electronic water “kettle.” (I don’t really know what they are called.) We are most excited about this because we can have soup in our room as well as oatmeal, coffee, and hot chocolate. We also bought 3 bowls (for oatmeal), shoes and a coat for Veeka, Caleb bought a lego knight, an umbrella, bubbles, balloons, and little bit of food (prepackaged items only). We were excited about all our purchases.

I do want to tell you about our hotel…it the called the ВIК-ЖОН (pronounced as Vik-Jon). We don’t really know what it means. It is the most interesting place. You would have never thought that this would be in the middle of town. There are 4 lodge type cabins, 3 “houses” (we are in one of them), small playground for kids, and a few outdoor picnic places. The house that we are in is really not a house. We have a room but we are in a stand alone structure. It is nice to know that we are bothering anyone below or beside us when we get a little loud. One thing that makes this place unique is that it is all like something you would see in Colorado. Most all of the buildings are made like log cabins. It really looks like it doesn’t belong with anything else that we have seen here in the Ukraine. There is a pond in the middle of the courtyard with two beautiful swans. They know Caleb will always give them food (they actually like just eating grass). They are always improving all of the property to keep it looking so nice. It is one of the nicest places that we have seen. You can tell they really want it to look nice and updated.