I think it's safe to say...

Who's special day is today??

Me!

This kid right here!

Andrik!

Happy First Gotcha Day Andrik, A.K.A. "Lowercase a" but not to be confused with his big brother "Capital A" and certainly not his little sister, "Cursive A".

Who had the bright idea to name all the children with A names?

When I decided to home school the boys I didn't have a newborn baby to care for and as the first day of school started approaching, I began to get a little nervous on how I was going to juggle a four year old and two year old in the classroom along with a two month old. But with the help of our new live-in maid, the first day of school was a great success!

A few months ago I spent several days interviewing women to be our live-in maid. Live-in help is VERY cheap here in UAE and many people have help in their home. Our house has a separate maid's quarters that is closed off from the rest of the house with it's own entrance through the garage so we can still maintain our privacy while the maid has her area of the house. After interviewing 5-6 women I gave up, not feeling 100% about any of the women I met and decided that having a live-in wasn't in the cards for us. In July, a couple days before I was leaving for the states, someone I know approached me asking if we were interested in a maid. I explained that I'd already met with several women and didn't find the right match and that I was very picky on who we'd have in the house and didn't want to interview anymore women since I was leaving in a couple days. She promised me I'd like this women and I reluctantly agreed to meet her and within two minutes of the women being in our house, Randy and I were looking at each other mouthing, "I really like this one!!" So despite the fact that I left two days later and Randy would have to deal with the business end of employing a maid on his own, we now had a wonderful maid that would start working for us as soon as we all returned the end of August. We didn't know then that we'd be coming back as a party of five instead of four, but it's funny how things work out! And as a bonus, our maid has two grown daughters and one just had a child the same time Atalie was born and she's been a bit sad that she can't be there for the grand baby, but she gets plenty of baby snuggle time now.

I had to tell you that long story so you'd understand that if I didn't have our fabulous maid to help me this morning, I don't know that home schooling would have gone as smoothly as it did. Atalie started off the morning with us but when she got hungry and fussy, my super maid took over and watched Atalie for the remainder of school. From here on out, Atalie will be with us as long as possible while our maid works around the house and when Atalie losses interest in beginning sounds and rhyming words, our maid will be there to help out.

Our classroom is a true multi-age classroom!

And also a multi-species classroom!

First day of school picture...barefoot! One of the perks to home schooling.

When I planned the lessons for this week I had some things for Andrik to work on separate from Artem since I figured he'd lose interest really fast. But Andrik shocked me today with how well he paid attention and how much he wanted to do the same work as Artem.

And when he did get a little fidgety or Artem needed some extra time with me, Andrik was happy to sit in the classroom chair and read some books. He thought he was so big when he got to read a book that didn't have hard pages.


So far so good on the home school decision. I know I'm going to have some challenging days ahead of me, so remind me of this one when things get tough, but for right now, I think this decision suits our family really well.

When we weren't at the ER, we were going to the zoo, riding trains, and watching Artem tackle his first rope course. We thought he would be afraid of the height, but he did a great job and took his time to think about his moves and finished the course off with a zip line ride to the bottom.

The boys spent some time on the water fishing with cane poles and Andrik caught his first fish! Artem was an old pro at fishing having done it last year at our Moscow Reunion, which we attended again this year and I'll blog about separately, but this year it was Andrik's turn and he ended up catching several fish.

We also had Andrik's first yearly post placement visit with our social worker in Central Texas. In September it will be one year that he has been in our family and we had arranged for our social worker, (the same one we have used for the past four years since we started Artem's adoption) to come to Florida to complete our visit but after trying to contact her several times to work out the details I couldn't get a hold of her and told Randy I had a feeling I needed to leave Dubai earlier than planned and drive out to Texas with the boys and have Andrik's meeting in her office. (We later found out her adult son had passed away and she was out of the office dealing with his unexpected death) We planned for Randy to join us the first week of August (our original date home) since he couldn't take additional time off of work and we would continue on with our vacation.

My flight home with the boys was uneventful, the two day drive to Texas went great and the meeting with our social worker went really well.

Towards the end of the meeting, our social worker asked if we had considered adopting a third child. I thought she was making small talk and I told her that we actually had considered adopting another child but weren't sure which direction to take. Our international agency, Catholic Social Services of NC, had recently closed their Russia program and I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to Russia for a third time to deal with all the paperwork struggles, let alone the huge financial tab that goes along with an international adoption. We had talked about other countries but didn't feel a pull to a particular place. I explained to our social worker that we had discussed domestic adoption but knew we would have a hard time finding a birth mother that would pick us since we lived in the Middle East and already had two children and "we didn't exactly have a woman ringing our doorbell asking us to take her baby". Basically we knew we wanted one more child but didn't feel like we had a lot of options.

Then she asked me something and I'll never forget this moment for the rest of my life. She paused after hearing me explain everything and then said, "Can I show you something?" and got up from our table and retrieved some paperwork and pictures. She returned to the table and placed a few pictures in front of me and said, "We have a newborn baby girl that was born two weeks ago and we don't have a qualified family to adopt her at this time and she's currently in foster care. Would you feel comfortable talking with Randy about adopting her?"

I was in shock and stayed that way for the next couple of days. Were we really being asked to adopt this baby? How would we get her a passport in time to return to Dubai together as a family? How would we pay for this adoption? How would we fit three car seats in our car in Dubai? Our home study was expired so how would we get it updated? What would we name her? My head was spinning and I literally walked around in a fog the next couple of days.

The biggest concerns Randy and I had were purely logistical; securing the baby a passport, getting her residency visa in UAE, and scrapping together the money for the adoption. The agency uses a sliding scale based on income and it's based on GROSS income, not net and that put our agency fees alone at $41,500 and didn't include all the birth mother expenses, foster care fees, and medical costs. This adoption was going to cost us much, much more than an international adoption but it was a lot less of a paperwork headache. We were able to write a letter to the agency that they took before their board of directors requesting a reduction in fees and although it wasn't as cheap as we hoped it would be, it worked out in the end.

We also had the issue of our expired home study. A few of our documents were out of date and by Texas law the social worker had to meet with us in our home, but the good news was, our home in Central Texas that is for sale has not sold yet so legally we still had a home to meet in with our social worker. In the following week, we had our TB tests redone, had Artem and Andrik's pediatrician write a health statement on our behalf, and the best news of all...our FBI clearances that we did last year just before court for Andrik's adoption were still valid and Catholic Social Services was able to fax the clearance letters over. The paperwork was easily coming together and 16 days after our social worker asked to show me some paperwork, we had custody of a beautiful newborn girl! I still can't believe how quickly this happened. It was truly meant to be.

This country also knows how to offer a variety of great food. I never thought I would love eating Lebanese food as much as I do and the other night Randy and I went to a Portuguese restaurant for Date Night. Delicious!

One of the things I LOVE about Dubai is everything can be delivered. Want an order of Wendy's fried mozzarella cheese sticks and chocolate Frosty at 9:00 p.m. at night? No problem, a man on a motorcycle will have it to your house in 10 minutes. (not that I've ever ordered that) Too lazy to drive to Chili's to eat? Not to worry, Chili's can get your meal to you in just a few minutes. How about KFC? Chinese food? Hardees? Burger King? We've got it all and it can all be brought to your house on the motorcycle.

But could it be too much of a good thing when your two year old tells the person on the phone to make sure they include tomatoes, pickles, and lettuce on their order? I like to think he's a quick learner rather than admitting that I may indulge in this service a few times too many.

*All that sleep is necessary for bossing us around during the day. I get a lot of pointed fingers at me lately telling me what I need to do or telling Artem what to do. He's definitely learning to assert himself, even if he gets a little too big for his britches at times.

Years ago when I was a brand new public school teacher I had my opinions about home schooling. I thought it was for the children that couldn't behave in public school, or for the children of the super liberal, granola/hippy parents that didn't want the system to "corrupt" their children, or for child actors that were living on movie sets. But home schooling wasn't something that I would ever consider doing because, after all, I attended public school and turned out just fine. Thank you very much.

Isn't it fun to look back and laugh at oneself at some of the simple-minded beliefs we held when our rose colored glasses were brand new?

Home schooling...the thing I said I'd never do...guess who is now home schooling her four year old?

Here in UAE expat children must attend private schools rather than the public schools that the local children attend and the majority of private schools here are "for profit" and charge an arm and a leg for tuition. Randy's company pays for a good portion of the tuition but we would still have to pick up quite a bit of the price tag to educate our boys.

The schools that follow the American curriculum have a KG1 and a KG2 program and the children start when they are four and they must be four by December 31st of that school year. KG1 is the equivalent to the American PreK program and KG2 is equal to Kindergarten in the states and according to Artem's birthday of November 15th, he would make the cutoff here in UAE and go to KG2 (Kindergarten). However, if we were in the states he wouldn't make the cut off which is normally the first day of school in August and he would have to wait another year to attend Kinder if we were in the states. That's fine with me because even though I think he could handle it academically, maturity wise, he's not there. Plus, if I put him in KG2 (Kindergarten) here, when we return to the states he would be the youngest in the class by almost a full year and the rest of his schooling he would be the baby. I was the youngest in my classes all through school since I have an October birthday and started when I was four. It's not that big of a deal for a girl, but I think for our son, he needs to be older rather than younger.

So for those clear as mud reasons, we decided to keep him out of school this year and have me homeschool him instead. I shipped a large portion of my teaching things here to Dubai including 750 children's books, which I think means I could start my own library for the neighborhood and we use an extra room upstairs as our "classroom". I also include Andrik in our classroom time and have him practice colors, shapes, writing, math, and he joins Artem and me for calendar time.

I wanted our classroom to look and feel like a typical classroom so we ordered some white boards and Randy installed them for me. To the left we have our calendar area and to the right with all the letters is our word wall. In a couple months that will be filled with sight words.

I love that we have sliding doors and a balcony outside of our classroom. When the weather gets cooler it will be a great place for the boys to plant seeds and do messy projects.

I brought our old kitchen table upstairs to the classroom since I finally bought my dream round table from Pottery Barn for the kitchen. (Only took me about five years to find one I like, can't accuse me of making an impulse buy) This old table has been well "loved" the past three years here in UAE and was ready to be replaced so it's perfect for the classroom. Two major moves done by cheap labor have not been kind to it. The boys can get messy on this one and it won't matter a bit.

I bought this alphabet chart when I first started teaching. Randy thinks I need to update the chart since letter V has a VCR tape as the picture.

The boys work with math manipulatives; Artem makes patterns while Andrik strengthens his fine motor skills by clicking the unifix cubes together and identifies the colors of the cubes.

More patterning practice.

Finding letters on the word wall.