Music and Balloons and I Love You's

We arrived at the baby home yesterday afternoon to see Vera with

two awesome pigtails! Isn't she just too cute for words?!

As she did earlier in the day, she went right for my backpack...

and found my airplane headphones.

Jon hooked them to his phone and turned on some music for Vera.

But she wanted to share the experience.

She finally looked at a few flashcards.

I've been trying to get her interested in these for days.

And then we went outside.

It was another tank top and underwear day, but we

were thankful her caregiver put something else on Vera to go outside.

Vera's arms are quite strong. And she loves to hang like a monkey.

When we got to the playground, there were many adults and children there.

It turns out that the adults are part of a church ministry

that come to the baby home to play with the kids.

They brought candy and balloons and shared with Vera.

I promise that in the above photo, Vera is very excited and laughing.

She loved the way Jon made the balloon pop into the air.

She even tried to do it herself...

several times.

I recognized the group that was there playing with the kids from a photo my new friend, Missy, had posted on Facebook yesterday. Missy and her husband Kevin are here in Nikolaiv adopting a boy that used to live in Vera's baby home. He is now in an older child internat. Missy and Kevin had dinner with this ministry group a few nights ago. I knew one of them spoke English, but didn't know which one. I kept hoping one of them would hear us talking and come introduce themselves. It turns out that the one person in this group who speaks English was not there yesterday. At one point, one of the women, in very broken English, put her hand over her heart with one hand and asked us, "You...(she pointed up with her other hand) God?" "Da, da. We love God." She was quite excited about this news and went and told the others. Missy had called when our visit was almost over. When I came back to the sandbox Jon asked who had called and I said, "Missy." Two women from this group got excited and said, "Oh...Missy...more words we didn't understand." They asked us if we know Missy and Kevin. Da, da. Anyway, one of the women had a conversation with Vera while we were playing in the sandbox yesterday. She got my email address from Missy and I got an email from her today. She said it seemed like we didn't understand Vera very well and she wanted us to know about their conversation. It is SO sweet and I'm so thankful she shared it.

Vera had told another little girl, "This is my mama and she came only for me."

Oksana (who had the conversation and sent me the email) asked Vera if she loves her parents.

Vera said 'yes' and Oksana asked her again. Then Vera said (to us, but we didn't know it because she was talking in Russian), "Mama and Papa, I love you."

We heard Oksana saying something about "I love you" in English, but had no idea what they were talking about. She was trying to get Vera to say it in English but Vera wouldn't do it.

That's okay.

It's enough that she said it in Russian.