Ouch

The last two days Samatha and I had to travel to Kiev in order to complete some required paperwork needed for travel and passport arrangements. We are now back near the orphanage and took another opportunity to visit Larissa. Today was a little tough for everyone I think Samantha and I were a little drained from traveling the day before and Larissa was distracted by other couples also in the playroom. Sam gave her a small cracker and I offered her some tea from the set Samantha brought in. I brought my phone with her and started to show her some pictures of she recognized sam as Mama. We continued to play and I decided to pick her up and fly her around the room like the last time. After setting her down she told us she needed to use the the bathroom Samantha took her to the caretaker who later came back several moments later and said that Larissa wanted us to go home. We respected her wishes and left as requested Samantha and I had dealt with this before when visiting sasha, but it is still a tough pill to swallow. I keep trying to reminding myself this is much more difficult for her than it is for us. I think we missed some visual cues last time that might have helped us make her feel more comfortable.

We are not able to visit on Sundays and we both feel like we need to better communicate our story to prepare her for Samatha's return. When we adopted Sasha, Samantha made a memory book that told the story of our family and her future trip. It showed pictures of us, our house, our pets and our extended family. We would flip through it and tell her what the pictures were about. This time we forgot to bring one so I created a slideshow we can put on the phone or tablet when we go. I decided to include pictures of Sasha when we had visited her in the orphanage. On our next visit we will try showing her the pictures and watching her more closely for any cues we need to change things up a little.