February 6- Friday- DAY 3
We decided to go shopping this morning, both to give the girls a little break and to get some shopping done. So after breakfast of granola we rode a bus downtown. We started at the bookstore. We picked up a Ukrainian dictionary for older two (one for us as well) and an English picture book for the younger two. We picked up another internet card, meant to pick up more but this communication thing is difficult. In fact, the clerk was trying to tell us something that we didn’t have a prayer of understanding so she just took our money and sent another clerk somewhere down the street to pick up the card. But at least we are good for another day. Then we saw another store (I think Luba called it “Children’s World”). We ended up getting tights there, two pair for each girl. Spent nearly 500 grivna. Then we walked through another mall and didn’t see any kids’ clothes. So, Keith thought we should brave the OPEN AIR MARKET. (Did you all hear that ominous music?!?!) So we rode the bus there, got off and walked and walked and walked forever. We were told that the market was 3 km. We had this discussion about whether the market was 3 km or if you stacked all the rows end to end, if that was 3 km. Well, we have definitely come to an agreement that the whole market is 3 km long and if you walked down each aisle you would end up walking 15 or 20 km or more. It feels like we walked that much. But the good news is we were able to communicate enough (with the electronic translator and gestures) with two booths to be able to buy hats and scarves for each girl. We were trying to get each girls’ favorite color. Kristina- red, Alina- green, Anastasia- pink and blue for Ryah (she doesn’t know her colors yet and blue is different enough from the others). Problem is most places had blue, pink, red, black and cream. But we did end up finding a booth that had a pretty mint green set. Whew! Not very many places we went by had backpacks- the only other thing we had to buy that didn’t have size attached.
At 2:00 we drug ourselves home, hot and tired, but feeling very pleased with our purchases. Pretty pathetic—especially when we still have so much to buy. Good thing we have a native speaker going with us tomorrow.
We wanted to make sure we had measurements of the girls because it looks like at the market we can’t take things back if they don’t fit. So we took the dvd player to keep the kids busy while we measured them. The dvd player ended up being more of a pain than a help. We showed them a Sesame Street video-- admittedly too young for the older girls and only a half an hour long. So they brought out one of their videos (is there NOTHING that they DON’T have?!?!) and amazingly, it played. Ukrainian cartoons. Then one of the boys brought out his book on tape, that he got when he was hosted in California. But no one had patience to listen to it. K kept pushing buttons randomly so we just put it away. But we were able to get all the measurements except R’s dress length (she wasn’t very cooperative).
Elijah fell asleep on the away home from the orphanage so we laid him down and asked Luba if we could leave him there while we walked to the grocery store—we were getting pretty low on food and Sunday was coming up. Of course she said yes. She tells me everyday that every time she sees Elijah she just wants to scoop him up and hug him (or some variation of that). He’s not so cooperative though. He is just now getting to where he will go to her sometimes and will play with her most times if she doesn’t try to hold him.
It was nice to be able to walk to the store and hold Keith’s hand! We took the backpack and purchased juice, milk, water, bread, cheese, granola, a few dumplings, yogurt and some other things I can’t remember right now. Walking home wasn’t too bad as the heavy stuff was in the backpack. But the mud was a little hard to navigate in the dark.
We got home just in time for Elijah to wake up. We had supper and luckily, after an episode of Star Trek, he was still tired enough to go back to sleep. He is getting a hearty appetite, which is a good sign!