And go figure, I missed the one-month mark!  It just blew by, so here’s the update of being at home for a whole month.
Things are getting better each day (well most days).  At first we would have a good day, followed by a couple of bad days, then we worked our way up to a couple of good days followed by a bad day.  Now we don’t really have too many bad days.  (Hooray!)  We may have a bad morning at times, but overall, everyone is beginning to settle in.  The boys are beginning to realize that they have boundaries and they simply don’t move.  They learned that they will get in trouble in the car just like they get in trouble in the house.  And they get their hands held and hugged at the store, just like at home, too!  And the boundaries with the dog, well, still working on that one.

So far, we have been “cocooning”.  We are deliberately staying at home as  much as possible.  The neighbors, which some weeks are permanent fixtures in our home, have purposely been not visiting.  We want to set ourselves apart-Mom, Dad, Sissy, and Brothers-so that the boys get to know us, and see us as family.  They don’t have a reference to that (and the little reference they do have, if they are able to remember the experience, was Not Good).
Their freedom has increased.  At first we couldn’t let them out of our sight, but now they can go downstairs alone.  It does lead to problems at times (Nathan got bitten yesterday for no apparent reason we can figure out) but overall they are pretty good.

Language is improving.  We are a very Eng-russky house right now.  Everyone who comes comments about how we’ve learned Russian, which is true only a little bit.  (A very little bit).  We learned the important words, like “come here”, “sit down”, “no”, “stop it”, “don’t bite”, “bath,” “eat”, and a few others.  The boys are growing in their vocabulary as well, mixing languages completely effectively with descriptive body language so that we usually know what they are talking about.  They may say, “ya budium jump” because they want to jump on the trampoline.  Words they are learning really well are words that they don’t know in Russian.  We have been going through a great book called “First 1000 Words in Russian,” and I’m having the boys tell me what the words are.  It’s almost like having them read to me!  Unfortunately, they don’t know many words that most 4 year olds know.  All things that crawl are “Pyooks,” which is the Russian word for spider.  Nathan did not know the word for piano, trumpet, or knife.  He knew what they were, but not what they are called.  Nor do they have a word to describe “Scooby Doo costume” or “duck costume” but they do now!  (We know what they’re going to be for Halloween!)

We have taken small trips to church.  We haven’t taken them to worship time just yet, but we plan to in a couple of weeks.  We have brought them to our fellowship meal, which we have each week, so they are getting to know others in our church body.  We have also taken them to places around town for small trips: to the store, the doctor, the dentist.  One of their favorite parts of the day is piling into the mommy bus with Heidi the big dog (referred to as “balshire cebaka”) to take brother and sister to school (and pick them up at the end of the day).

Last weekend we went on our first family outing together.  We went to the Begg’s pumpkin patch, a family farm not too far from us where you can ride in the back of a tractor and pick your own pumpkins (along with mazes and a big slide and animals to feed- way fun).  Everyone had a great time; we did have some mixed results afterward with being overly stimulated, but we are beginning to recognize warning signs and causes for the bad behaviors.  I was amazed yesterday as my wife described what would happen to Ben after she gave him some M&Ms.  He was in super-hyperactive mode, and she said, “in about 15 minutes he’ll be totally calm.”  And he was.  So she really does a much better job of recognizing their behaviors than I do.

All in all, we are making advances.  The boys we have today are not the same boys we had in Moscow.  They are happy, joking, playful boys.  But for the record, I can’t wait until I don’t have to hear Russian any more.