Masha is here!!!!

Our little Masha is here!! Only I guess I really can't say little since she is 2 inches taller than I am! (Not hard to do I know but tall for being 11 years old). Most of you know why Masha is here but a few of you may not so here it is in a nutshell. We decided after seeing a booth at church one day that we wanted to host a child from Belarus for the summer. Belarus is a small country bordering the Ukraine by Russia. This tiny country took 70% of the radiation fall out from Chernobyl in 1986. They live with constant radiation exposure so they have weaker immune systems and shorter life spans. It has been scientifically proven that if these children are removed from the contaminated area for just 6 weeks it gives their immune systems enough time to "reboot" and can add 5-10 years to their lives. Masha comes from a very small poor farming village called Vezney. We are hosting her through a group called For the Children of the World. It is not church affiliated but the president of it goes to our church and had a booth set up one Sunday. So we signed up got approved gave them the money and here we are. She is our mission trip in reverse.


Meeting for the first time at the airport


This is by far the most life changing and rewarding thing we have done besides becoming parents! She fits in with our family just perfect. When she got here last Thursday June 19th she spoke no English only Russian. If you would have talked to me or gotten in my head those first few hours you would have heard, "Oh my this is way harder than I expected." But within hours of being home she was playing with the kids and feeling comfortable. The first day hour by hour it just got better and better. By day 3 she is just one of the family. She can understand a lot and speak a good amount of English now especially No No Nixon. Hmmm wonder where she got that from?? When she doesn't understand something we have an online translation site and also a dictionary we can refer to. We also have 6 translators that came over with the 80 kids in our group that we can call anytime.


First trip to an American grocery store

We had to take her to a medical screening which went well. Her vision is perfect, no scoliosis, they did an ultrasound on her thyroid and said it was within normal range (thyroid cancer is common because of the radiation) and she had a blood test that we are still waiting results for. They also looked at her teeth and did x-rays and told us 2 possibly 3 teeth needed to be extracted. But we took her to our kids dentist who agreed to see her pro-bono and do any work needed and he said no they didn't need to come out but 5 teeth needed fillings.


Masha's 1st dentist appointment (we had a second one today and hopefully for her sake only 1 more).


Everyone had an appointment except Nixon but at the end he hopped up in the chair and put the glasses on so for fun she took a peek at his teeth. Hope this is a good sign since his first official appointment is in 6 months.



Swinging at a small park in our neighborhood




Playing Bad Mitten in our back yard



Eating lunch at a park by Paige and Simon's school



Our 4 kiddos! I love this picture!

I know this is a long post but so many of you have helped us bring Masha here and provide for her and covered us with prayer, so I just want to put as much down so you can experience it with us. August 3rd is going to be a very very sad day at our house. That's when she returns home. We feel so blessed already that if she were to go home tomorrow we would feel blessed beyond measure and will love her forever. Hopefully we can have her back next summer.

So I will continue to update this blog with pictures and happenings while she is here with us. We kind of tried to keep it slow for this first week but this weekend we are going to take her out to see some sites! Space Needle and probably Pikes Place Market. I will end this post on a funny note. The third day she was here her Mama called (she speaks only Russian also) so I handed Masha the phone. She is standing in our living room talking to her Mama on a cordless phone while playing Wii bowling on a big screen TV. Tim and I stood in the kitchen just giggling because how much more modern can you get?