Thursday, December 2, 2010

Adoption Adjustment: Improvement, Wonderful Improvement

Praise be to our gracious God who is so generous with his grace and wisdom!

We've had our best school morning yet since starting back to our homeschooling last Monday, November 29. Attitudes were good in our newbies, and our nine kiddos who've been ours for some years pitched in and helped at just the right moments. Jaynie was truly a blessing. She has a gift for teaching younger children and helped Princess Bink, who is at that key stage in math of learning to "trade/carry" in two-digit problems. She taught her so clearly that Princess bink earned a 100% for her effort.

We truly operated like a good old-fashioned one room school house!

My heart is full of joy! I love being home with my children. I love teaching my children, and I especially love teaching my children to read. Today I began the process of teaching Daria and Alexander how to read in English. We started with the most simple books we own--The Bob Books. These are like "baby" books for them, and I thought they might object, but they cooperated beautifully. For the two of them who can already "read" some English, I think my reading lessons will be more about proper pronunciation and increasing their vocabulary.

The photos below were actually taken yesterday. Alexander likes to draw and draws remarkably well. I asked him to draw a get well card for someone we love and he imitated the scene on the front the story book sitting on the counter.


This next couple of photos were taken when Deb and Polly, managers of the crisis pregnanacy center where Tessa has volunteered for the past couple of years, gave Oksana a brand new teddy bear when Tessa and her sisters stopped in.




To those of you who are remembering us in prayer, our deepest thanks! You efforts on our behalf make all the difference in our effort to make a life-chaning difference in the lives of these former orphans!

2 comments:

Tony and Dawn said...

So happy to read about the family's progress in settling in. The hardest thing for me (and I am sure you also) was that once our children started to really trust us, they started to tell us stories of their old life. All I could do was hug them, tell them I love them and that those things would never happen again.

God Bless-

MacMeister said...

BOB BOOKS!!!! :-) Those bring back memories - do y'all have the set that you can use to act out the books with puppets?

It's so great to see your new family bonding together so well! :-)