Happy 10th Birthday...again!

We've been a little behind in putting up a few posts, so bear with us. Saturday was Kim's 10th birthday... again.

As we mentioned in a previous post, she was 10 when we arrived in Russia for court and we thought her birthday was in May. The morning of our first court hearing they had located her birthrecord and her birthday was not in May, it was December 20th. She was officially 9 again.

So... we had her first American birthday only 1 week after arriving home. We were planning on having more time (and more English) before birthdays. Only having a week and having very limited language and socialization made it clear that we were not yet ready for the big, invite all neighborhood kids, party.
We had a small, family only celebration instead... then we took the kids to Chuck-E-Cheese's... talk about insanity... it's crazy enough when you speak the same language. The kids all had a great time and played forever. The Russian kids are not very used to making choices, so at first, Kim could not decide which games to play. She used maybe 3 tokens in the first 25 - 30 minutes. After that, she settled in and was on pace with her American siblings before long. Note: If you are going to Chuck-E-Cheese's, sign-up for their mailing list. The coupons are TWICE as good as you will find in the newspaper or online.

The "big" gift that she wanted was an MP3 player. These were a VERY BIG status symbol in the orphanage. The kids who had them mostly had old cell phones (no phone service) that doubled as players. We bought Kim an inexpensive player (not ready to invest in an iPod for her quite yet). She spent several days listening to the sample music on it and to the radio before she realized that I could download songs to it. She hasn't learned how yet, so I get to choose her music options... if only that could last. The kids watched A LOT of music videos in Russia and they have both been known to burst out singing things like Brittney Spears "Womanizer"... not exactly what we approve of as music for elementary school children. Kim enjoyed her cake. She wanted Lisa to make one instead of buying one. We put those "self re-lighting" candles on it and the gag was a huge success.