- 2/17/2008 10:00:00 PMMoscow Trip - Day 7Today is Sunday - the Lord's day. This morning, Peggy and Luda when grocery shopping in a small shop that is located below the apartments. Many of the buildings around here are like that - stores on the bottom, apartments on the top. The store that they went into was about the same size as the largest convenience store attached to a gas station that you might see anywhere in the States. For the most part, it seems to have most everything you need but perhaps not at the price you want. Luda shops there quite a bit. Cheese, eggs, butter, noodles, an occasional beer for Peter...
While they were away, Yuri and I did some school work. We brought along some flash cards that have the alphabet on them. We are working on letters A-F. Every time we get to the letter "B" he says "V". It makes me think of the Volga-Bona mobile. There are other letters that will be very different for him. "H" is pronounced as "N". For example, on Sveta's computer - she runs Windows XP. When you are prompted with a Yes-No question, NO is written as "Het", but pronounced "Neyet" or "no". This makes me think of a cartoon musical we have at home. It is Peter and the Wolf. In the opening credits, the title shows as "Peter and the Bonk". Apparently "Bonk" is "Wolf" in Russian.
After going through the flash cards a few times, we do some counting. Yuri is good in math but he has to overcome some of the new names for numbers. For example, 5 is pronounced "fife" rather than with a "v" as "five". This is minor. Some of the other numbers have entirely different names.
After doing numbers for a while, we do some handwriting. I put down his name - his new American name. There is some significance to Russian names. People around here take their father's first name as their middle name. If you are a boy, you add "ovitch" to it. If you are a girl you add either "ovena" or "evena". I think it is some kind of masculine/feminine kind of thing.
When we introduced the new name to Yuri, he didn't like it. We are dealing with a boy whose life story is a tale of losses. This is yet another loss - his personal identity. Our reasoning for changing his name to what we did was this: we had heard that often times, children want to feel like they are getting a fresh start when they come to America. One of the ways to do that is to give them an American name.
Yuri's middle name is Mikhail. Mikhail is Michael in American English. That is a name that will not seem as unusual as "Yuri". However - we know him as "Yuri", so that became his middle name. We asked him what he wanted to be called and he was adamant about "Yuri". That is fine with us. Him dealing with the new last name was a different matter. He kept yelling out "NOOOOO SOPATA!!!". Luda tried to explain that his original last name is our last name but in English. While this is not true, I think she means well by doing it. For now, he is just "Yuri". We'll deal with the rest later.
After handwriting, I broke out the workbooks. They have number dot-to-dots and come pages for coloring. Yuri wanted me to draw some pictures. I drew an airplane and a tank. He definitely liked that and thinks I am some kind of art-god. We colored them afterward.
On the laptop, I have installed a game called "The Zoom-benies". It is a pattern matching game. If the laptop batteries did not run out, he would stay zoned in for hours. We let him play 1 hour on the computer, 1 hour of TV and the rest of the time is coloring, drawing, playing "go-fish" and the "memory game" with a deck of cards, and talking with Luda. Yuri doesn't know it but aside from the TV, there is a lot of learning going on.
We also tried to do some exercises. Last night during Yuri's bath, we took a close look at his legs. He has not grown since we saw him last spring but rather lost some weight. His knees appear to be swollen knobs and his calves look like they are atrophied. Yuri showed us the exercises he did at the orphanage. Those are useless. He lays on his back and twists his body into a small knot. It is more like stretching.
We tried to get him to bend his knees and squat a little while I held his hands. He thought it was some other kind of game and he picked up his feet and tried to swing between my legs. Like most American men, I have a long and painful story about my lower back. Swinging Yuri like this is not going to happen so I quickly put him down. At this point, we really do not know the extent of the condition of his knees, ankles and feet. We need to get him home.
In the evening, we decided to go for a walk outside. It would be nice to get some fresh air and perhaps Yuri could get a little exercise that way. Down the elevator and out the back door we went. We made it as far as going around the side and to the front when the blowing wind hit us. I'm not sure of the exact temperature. I think Luda said it was -22 C. I don't know off hand what the conversion is but I think that is pretty cold.
When we came in, I had a nice hot cup of instant NesCafe Gold. It is widely regarded around here as the finest instant coffee money can buy. Luda let me have her copy of the local news paper. It comes out weekly every Wednesday, so it reflects the news for the week and up to the day we picked up Yuri. I am afraid that by the time he is old enough where it is of interest to him, he will no longer be able to read it.
