We started our morning off with Dzintars first official private Head Above Water swim lesson! Today he swam with Miss Stephany, who has been my kids teacher for the past two summers! Thankfully she was up for the challenge of teaching a 14 year old Latvian speaker how to swim! She did fantastic! Dzintars gave swimming lessons two thumbs up (can you tell this is our main ways of communicating that he likes things) and asked if he gets to go again tomorrow. Sorry buddy, tomorrow is the 4th of July, you'll have to wait till next week! He did quite well following along despite the language barrier, but it quite evident that he's very scared of the deeper parts of the pool, even while using a kickboard. His fear makes him stiffen up and then he starts to sink. So my "homework" is to help him learn to relax more so he can stay on TOP of the water:)
After swimming lessons we loaded up the sand toys and headed to one of our favorite parks to explore! Dzintars wasn't quite sure what to do at first. He didn't seem into playing in the sand but wasn't sure how to just "play" on a playground. He'd never seen any of the equipment before but once I showed him how everything worked, he started to explore on his own! He seemed to really like the toys that spin around and make you dizzy:) He told me that in Latvia they don't have toys like that. Once he discovered that the sandbox had some pretty neat toys he spent some time scooping sand and watching it fall through the holes in the bottom of the bowl to his bucket. He's super into figuring out how things work. I love that about him, it's exactly how Brennan is. Here are some pictures of our first park adventure!
Boo, I had a whole lot more written to this post and it somehow got lost:( And that's on a night when I was excited to finish my blogging before midnight.
We're gearing up for the annual Mayflower Village 4th of July parade. I'm not so sure how much Dzintars understands, but he knows he gets to ride his bike, so he's excited about that. We went and bought things to decorate their bikes with today so they'll be ready for the parade in the morning.
Brennan loves having Dzintars with us, in fact today he said "I love you Dzintars!". He also told nearly every person we met, "He's an orphan, he has no mommy and daddy." Most of them were strangers, so I wonder what they were thinking. This is definitely one of the few situations in which I am glad that Dzintars doesn't speak English:) The boys are really starting to gel well together around the house. They'll ask the other one to play, it's usually baseball, Wii or the Rokenbok. Which is great, because they are all things they can do together with no help from me if I need some time to catch up on things around the house...there has been little time for house work and I'm just getting by with the very minimum so I can have as much time with our boy as possible.
My Latvian and my fireman playing Mario Kart:)
When it came time to put the kids to bed tonight I had Dzintars get his Latvian Bible and bring it into the room with us. Then I chose a story from my kids Children's Bible and found the corresponding chapter in his Bible so he could follow along. He seemed to really enjoy doing this and even offered to read the story aloud in Latvian for us as well! It was great to finally hear his voice, with the language barrier we don't hear as much of it as we like, but we're working on it. It was a special time and he seemed to already know what the story was about. We'll definitely be making this part of our nightly routine!
To be honest, when it came time to choose a child from New Horizons For Children's website Dzintars wasn't even really on my radar. I think it was because he's got that pale Latvian skin, he was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater and was posed against a beige wall. He just blended in with the background so much I didn't really take much notice. I continued to ask my coordinator about other children, usually ones much younger, thinking it would be easier to blend all the 3 kids interests if they were of similar ages. But she kept leading me back to Dzintars. She even put me in touch with a very sweet lady in Georgia named Angie that had met Dzintars while on a missions trip to his orphanage. Angie loved Dzintars and was advocating for someone to host him! She couldn't say enough great things about him so finally I decided to listen and get over my fear of hosting an older teen with a 4 and 2 year old at home. I'm so glad we did! We are having such a great time with Dzintars, other host families haven't been as fortunate. Some host kiddos can't handle not being about to communicate well with their host families and have been having meltdowns, others are displaying signs of emotional issues or having trouble getting along with their host siblings. We have seen none of that!! And we are so grateful!!
Angie has two young men from Latvia staying with her this summer. They aren't part of the NHFC program, but one of them, Reinis, was a chaperone and translator for the program last year and offered to facilitate a translated conversation tonight! Oh my heart, we learned that our sweet boy has been in an orphanage since he was 2 years old! That just breaks my heart! He's just got so many amazing qualities to have been sitting around in an orphanage all his life waiting for a family to choose him! Please, please, please share this blog with everyone you know, someone needs to scoop this kid up! He also said he was nervous at first on his journey to America because it was a lot of travel, he lives quite far from the city of Riga where the airport is located, so there was extra travel involved beyond just the flights. But once he got here he likes America and us very much and he doesn't want to go back to Latvia. He also one of his favorite activities so far was the batting cages where he got some baseball instruction (a nice man was watching us from outside our cage and could tell this momma had never done this before. He tried to give some tips verbally but once I explained that he didn't speak any English he stepped right in and demonstrated everything for him!). He also said he likes playing baseball and going on the bike ride with Peter. I thought for sure swimming would be on his list, but it wasn't!
It was another great day with our young man! He even said he wanted to sleep today when the kids napped so I got most of my blogging done at a decent hour:) YAY!
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