Disclaimer: This was supposed to be Saturday night's post, but I confess: I fell asleep at the kitchen table before I could complete it. These full days and late nights are catching up with me! So here's the beginning of our weekend recap.
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This morning was our first Kidsave event. We attended a paint-your-own-pottery event at Glazed Expressions.
Mike assumed such an athletic kid as Michel wouldn't be interested in painting, but I had a hunch there was an artistic streak in there. (I think we both have a bit of gender bias!) She chose a ceramic heart-shaped box and seemed to love choosing the colors and decorating it to make it her own. She listened and followed instructions well in a group. She beamed when she saw her traveling partners (the other kids visiting Iowa and Minnesota) and enjoyed catching up with them. Later this evening, she mentioned that there is one host child with whom she does not get along well. However, she approached the girl at Glazed Expressions this morning and asked how she was doing in her host home. I was proud of her for initiating conversation, and for her compassion when she said she was glad to hear the girl was doing well. "I think she's getting better," she told me.
After Glazed Expressions, we had lunch at Bruegger's Bagels (an old college favorite of mine). One of the employees was a friend of one of the Kidsave volunteer translators, and she remembered us from the airport! I love Iowa's frequent small world connections. Those connections are great for introducing the kids to the community.
After lunch, we took a driving tour through Des Moines. There are perks to living in a capital city with plenty of amenities, yet with the ability to circumnavigate the entire city in about twenty minutes! She enjoyed seeing the downtown area and the state capitol. We pointed out as many landmarks as we could along the way. We stopped by John Deere Financial on the way home, where my husband works. Michel really enjoyed the display of flags out front.
Mike and I told her what we believed to be true: that there is one flag for each of the countries where John Deere sells tractors and other machinery. Yet we promptly discovered that the Colombian flag was notably absent, much to our chagrin, yet Mike was fairly certain that Deere is in Colombia. (The bracelets Michel made for all of us are in the colors of the Colombian flag: red, yellow, and blue.) We also realized that there are probably not nearly as many flags as there are countries where Deere is established. Perhaps the flags are for the original countries where Deere equipment was sold? Maybe a reader out there knows more John Deere history than we do. :-) We didn't go in to see the office, because Michel said she preferred to come back and see the office "when work was going on." I think she is curious to see what Mike does each day. I'm hoping she is not disappointed when we go to the office and she learns that he's not actually building green and yellow tractors all day!
We stopped by Target on the way home to buy Michel her first swimsuit and a few other "girl items" that our mostly boy household lacks, such as nail polish. The boys balked at having to enter the cosmetic aisle and made a grand show of wanting to escape the section. However, Andrew immediately came alongside Michel to help her pick nail polish colors. He has always enjoyed picking out gifts for others. It turns out they have the same taste in blue sparkle polish! She chose a fragrance spray, as she seems to like different scents quite a bit. (Several times a day, she puts on scented lotion I put in her bathroom.) She picked out a couple of different hair accessories, which baffled the flock of neighbor boys who stopped by tonight and have never seen pink flower headbands on our kitchen counter before!
Michel continues to get along well with kids of all ages. When playing in the hot tub today, a four-year-old neighbor girl stopped by to join the fun. Michel immediately got up to help her get in the water and was very gentle and helpful toward her. (Maybe she was just excited to see another girl in the sea of boys around her!) We visited a neighbor's week-old baby today. Michel was very gentle with the newborn. She cautioned me in a whisper as we approached the baby's room, "She's sleeping, so we have to be very quiet."
Up until now, Michel has mostly spent time with both of our kids or with our nine-year-old son. Today, she had more opportunity alone with our six-year-old. When he was playing on our swingset, she joined him and played for quite a while. They seem to get along very well and play easily together. She is using a lot of single word English commands while interacting with our kids, e.g. stop, come, let's go, etc.
Michel didn't balk at all at leftovers for dinner this evening and ate a great dinner. She enjoyed watermelon for dessert. We had our first minor injury today, when the dog ran behind her outside and she got a rope burn on the back of her legs. (If any of you have ever gotten a "Flexi-burn" from a retractable leash, you KNOW what I'm talking about - it is shocking how much it can hurt!). She definitely expresses pain but was not overly whiny or upset about it. When we walked to the park afterwards, she looked up at me a few times and said quietly, "I'm really hurting." It broke my heart, and I just wanted to take the pain away (or rewind time to make sure she was clear of the leash when it happened!). She allowed use to ice it (okay, so a cold water bottle was our best available substitute). I checked with her chaperone to see if I could give her Tylenol or Advil if it still bothered her at bedtime, but she wasn't complaining by the time bedtime rolled around. She'll definitely have a mark there by tomorrow though. :-(
Michel enjoyed our first trip to the playground (although the rope burn hampered some of the running around - she was climbing the steps to the slide like she was eighty years old). She laughed all the way down the slide and wanted me to take lots of pictures and videos of her coming down. At one point, I told her the boys (ours and two neighbors) were playing Hide-and-Seek Tag. I hadn't explained much of the game, but she wandered off toward the younger kids' section of the playground. In the dark, it was hard to see her, so Mike and I set out to find her. She didn't respond when called, but we discovered her almost immediately, hiding in the tunnel on the toddler playground. She laughed and laughed when we found her - apparently "Hide and Seek" is a universal kids' game that requires no explanation.
We ended the night with more sparklers at the neighbors' house. She played great with all the kids, running around and helping to light their sparklers from hers. She is quick to settle down at the end of the night and fell asleep immediately after reading two boys with Mike.
Tomorrow will be her first time coming to church with us. Most of the other host families in the Midwest this year attend our church, so I'm sure she will enjoy more time with the other children she traveled with. They seem to have forged very close bonds with one another during their preparation before coming to the United States.
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