Hair Do Surprise

After all the excitement yesterday we were eager to see our girls and get back to our fun routine of spending time playing games, learning English and perhaps make a few more valentine's. When we got there, however, something else appeared to be underfoot but we were not sure what! We were escorted by our daughters to the big group room where lots of kids were hanging out.

It seems that Saturday's at the orphanage are filled with many jobs such as clothes-washing and for the girls a special time of hair-washing and drying of their lovely long locks. We noticed that most of the girls had their long hair down instead of in it's customary braids, pig or pony tails, but we assumed that was because it was still drying. We saw a line of about six chairs in the middle of the room and several of the girls we knew were sitting in them. We couldn't compose a question that was clear enough to get a satisfactory answer so out came the notebook and pen. I drew a quick sketch of the chairs and put the names of the girls in the chairs and then drew a big question mark. Our oldest daughter saw immediately what we wanted to know and explained that the girls were waiting to get their hair done, or put-up into braids, etc,. Ah! - that made sense. What we didn't expect was who the hairdressers were going to be!!

Soon behind each girl was one of the boys (ages 12-14) wielding a hair brush, rubber bands, and the equipment needed to style hair. Our guess is this was not a daily occurrence as the finished results were not up to the standards we normally see the girls hair in each day, but it was funny to watch, as the girls were patient and the boys were quick!!

Next came the Russian Orthodox religious class taught by an older lady who had brought tangerines for the children, which she gave out at the end of class to each child in return for a picture drawn by them. We were hoping our daughters might skip this class in order to spend time with us, and our older daughter wanted to, but the younger had already found her place at the table and seemed interested in the lecture, often raising her hand to answer questions, so we all stayed. It was a group of about 15 children, ages 8-14, with about five girls and the rest boys. Behind the scenes, which we were privy to, there was a certain amount of horse-play, but overall they were very quiet and attentive. We were impressed with how often the children spoke up with answers to the teacher's questions. Many of them seemed genuinely interested. Finally, after turning in their pictures for fruit, our daughters were ready to go back to their room with us:)

The main highlight of our shortened time together was the map lesson. Often David and I divide and conquer in our lessons, by splitting up the girls and each of us working one on one with a topic and then changing girls and repeating it again. To make it fair, I set the timer on my watch, as they always seem to like one activity better than the other no matter what! Today it was maps with David, where they got out the photo albums we had given them on the first day, and matched faces and names with the cities on the U.S.A. part of the world map. We had done something similar before, but now with the photos in front of them it became even more real and they just loved it. David also told the girls that we had heard through the computer recently that the two girls in Cincinnati who speak Russian and used to live in Sevastopol, had written notes to us and were looking forward to meeting them. Their faces lite up at this news!!!

Tomorrow we are looking forward to another afternoon of art classes with Galya. We don't have plans for lunch out tomorrow, and the younger one was STRONGLY suggesting another round of pizza. When my verbal skills were not convincing her that we had just had pizza on Friday and so it was not going to happen again so soon, I decided to draw a calendar, showing that we had pizza on Friday and so would not be having it two days later. We all laughed out loud when the older daughter pointed to the calendar and said, "Pizza, Pizza, Pizza.....as she pointed to each day of the week and then reached her hands out very wide and said something like..."we would all be very fat!" That explanation seemed to work much better than mine:)