First full day free!

My laptop hasn't switched to Bulgaria time, which means I can very simply (without doing any math!) see what time it is for all of you reading. ;) So, even though many of you aren't even awake yet, I can give you the update on how much of our Tuesday has gone so far.

First of all, sleep last night was pretty good. It takes Krassi a while to fall asleep. He makes little noises and plays with the fabric on the sides of the cot. We've noticed that he doesn't appear to have any common institutional self-soothing habits (rocking, scratching/biting himself, etc) and the only thing we've seen is once when he was awake during the night (HUGE crack of thunder!) Dondi glanced and saw him stroking his hair - his baba has said that she does this and he likes it, and our best guess is he duplicates it himself when she's not there. But that's the only time we've seen it, and its very gentle.
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Well, many hours later I'm going to try to finish this post. I was so wiped out that I had to lay down instead of post while Krassi was resting this afternoon! So here we go again.

This morning we got to sleep until we weren't tired, waking up around 7:30 for all of us. We quickly got a little bit fixed up (not out of jammies, but not obviously bed-headed anymore!) and headed down for breakfast. Since Krassi didn't eat a lot yesterday, nor have anything straight up liquid to drink, we wanted to get down and start the day with food sooner rather than later. We started with the peach baby food that had been so successful the day before, and had terrific success. He was happy when I mixed it half and half with yogurt, and I even got three little bites of soft scrambled eggs into him! We tried a bit of juice on the spoon, with less success, and are just taking comfort in the fact that he still seems to be wetting his diapers. That baby food has a fair amount of liquid in it. Anyway, we were all very pleased that we were able to get food into him and that we were able to get some variety.

At 9:30 Martin and Dani picked me and Krassi up to go back to the clinic for his blood draw. Dani is used to being the "bad guy" so when it was time to stick him she sat right down in the chair and reached for him so I didn't have to hold him during the owie part, but just got to do the snuggling afterwards. He is still pretty resistant to snuggles, partly because his CP makes it difficult for him to snuggle up and relax while being held, but also partly because the whole idea of snuggling is a pretty foreign thing. But of all the blood draws I've had to do with my children, this was by far the easiest. By far. Reuben is such a hard poke - often, even at the hospital, he will need the needle stuck in two or three times before they actually find a spot that works. This was so much easier. In, done, and out.

Then we were free for the day! We decided to take a walk - Dondi gave us the stroller she used for her son Caleb when he was younger. It's essentially an umbrella stroller, but much sturdier, and with much better support straps - clearly made for an older child. I am LOVING having Dondi along. Besides the fact that it's nice to have another adult around to help with choices (should I try some more water or just leave him be?) her years of experience with CP have been invaluable. She just *knows* what's normal for a kid with CP where I would be worried or wondering. She's not afraid to manuever him, and thinks of things like after we've been walking for a while to alter his position just slightly so he doesn't have any "hot spots" that could get sore. So many things that I could probably figure out eventually through trial and error are just second nature to her. I can't explain how grateful I am to have her along! (Thank you, Jared, if you're reading this!)

Navigating the city with a stroller is an adventure. ;) Here is a photo of a middle of the road sidewalk. Not the best, but BY FAR not the worst. Most of the corners don't have ramps, so we bump Krassi up and down.

And how about this? Some of the busier streets in the center of the city have underground crossings - you go down a flight of stairs and under the street, and there are little shops along the tunnel - they're rather pleasant places - and then a flight up. This isn't a problem, because they have handicap accessible options...

...or something like that. Can you imagine trying to come down this in a wheelchair? This is how we did it with a stroller:

It worked okay, but I was very glad to have Owen there to guide and support the front wheels. Those ramps are STEEP!

And this was the best ramp we found. Dondi and I were both very touched when we came to another crossing that had metal tracks - one side was fine for the wheels, but the other track was too narrow for the double tire. We tried, the three of us, to guide him down, and had just started when a man came over, and with very little English said that some of these crossings had elevators, but he didn't know of one here when we asked where. He offered instead to carry Krassi down for us, and proceeded to scoop him up just like you would cradle a baby, and stroller and all carried him down the stairs for us. Dondi and I were both tearing up - it was so neat to have a complete stranger see our predicament, recognize that the infrastructure doesn't cater to someone like Krassi, and just step in and fix the situation.

Many times, too, especially on shorter flights of stairs, Dondi would pass her camera to Owen, and she and I would each take a side of the chair and up or down we'd go. Nice that he's a little man!

Me and Krassi in a lovely plaza near the important government buildings in the center of the city.

On our way back to the hotel we stopped at a little pizza window shop very like the one that Matt and I ate lunch at every day in Pleven. For 3 leva we can get three nice big slices of pizza - one for each of us. It's surprisingly satisfying, and not overly greasy, and since a lev is worth slightly less than a dollar, it's a very inexpensive lunch. We followed it up with an orange at the hotel, and it's a great meal. We had also stopped this time around at a larger grocery since the small market Dondi and Owen ran to while Krassi and I were at the clinic didn't have any fruity baby food! Even at the larger market we couldn't find peach (oh no!) but grabbed a variety of other similar ones, based purely on the photos on the front. Peach/banana/rice and prune, and apricot/pear...we think...as well as a vanilla pudding. Basically, we're looking for anything that will taste good so he will eat it!

When we got back to the hotel, it was a little later than he usually eats, so we decided to use the sauce of hunger to try the chicken/carrots from last night again. This time we didn't heat it up at all, and I mixed it with a bit of the peach that we still had left over, and...success!! He finished off the whole small size jar of chicken/carrots, as well as the half of a small jar of peaches, and in the last bit of the peaches I added about a tablespoon of water and fed him runny peaches, and in that way got that much more water into him! Once again he had a nicely wet diaper, so we're still having success at keeping fluids moving through that boy's system. Toward the end of the meal he started getting agitated, and quickly escalated to full tears and loud, painful sounding cries like we hadn't heard since leaving the orphanage. Oh, so sad! So hard to hear! And no idea what was wrong. Is he constipated? Does he want more food? Less food? Different food? Is he simply too overstimulated suddenly? Is there pain elsewhere?? We quickly took him out of the stroller and laid him on the bed where he continued to cry, and I tried to soothe him (but not too much in case intense personal interaction was what was triggering the outbreak) and he let out two small burps, and slowly was able to calm down with me stroking his hair. Poor boy.

After that, we changed him and laid him down for the afternoon nap he supposedly takes every day. He did not sleep. He lay quietly, whimpering here and there, for nearly two hours. He was never upset, but never slept, either. I started thinking about our son Reuben, who, although developmentally is around 18 months old, is actually over four, and is starting to not need his nap every day. I'm thinking its very possible that this nine year old boy, although developmentally very young, is physically old enough that he doesn't need a nap. It's very possible that he "naps" every day by simply laying in his crib whimpering softly to himself. Regardless, we decided that maintaining some routine is a good thing this week, and since too much face time with us does seem to get to be too much, it gave him some mid-day relief from that, and sure enough, when we got him up (Owen came and woke me saying he thought Krassi sounded ready to get up!) he was seeming more ready for our company.

In the afternoon we took another walk, knowing that the weather is not going to be good for that Wednesday or Thursday. We took a slightly different route so I could show off more of the city to Dondi and Owen, and stopped to give Krassi his afternoon snack near the huge cathedral.

Once again, he ate like a champ. We had packed some prunes this time, figuring if he just wouldn't take them we'd have supper sooner rather than later, but that wasn't an issue. Again, I added some water to the prunes, and in that way managed to get not only some food but also water into him.

We did a little bit of fun shopping this afternoon, with both Dondi and me finding some neat things to bring home to our girls. ;) And then back to the grocery to make a deli stop for supper things (and Owen opted for another piece of pizza for his supper!)

After supper we spent some time all hanging around on the bed again. Owen takes such pleasure out of being with his new brother. We brought out the singing telephone, and it was a relative hit.

We also decided this was a good time for Krassi to "open" his birthday present from Leah. She picked this out and paid for it herself back in June, and asked me to bring it along when I went to pick him up.

Lucky boy got his own set of four snoopy toothbrushes, AND the bonus of paper to crumple. She remembered how much he liked the feel and sound of paper when Matt and I were there in March, and she's been insistent that the wrapping paper is going to be a good toy to bring on the airplane. And we definitely will. We also had a funny moment when I was talking to him about his new name, jokingly using the way that the Bulgarians pronounce it and spell it in the Cyrillic: "Glue." (In all fairness, we are often "Glue" or "Gluey" in the States, too, because only people who are familiar with the name know that it's pronounced, "Glevee" rhyming with "heavy.") When I said his name out loud, he smiled. Hm. This was kind of a surprise to me! So I said it again, and he grinned! And I said my full name, and he grinned again! As I talked with Matt (thank you, Jared, for giving Matt some hints on using facetime! I don't have an iPhone, but Dondi does...) this evening (afternoon for him) he said his first thought was that Krassi's baba must have been talking with him about us, so the name was familiar to him. Is that not an incredibly beautiful thing? She did her job well of preparing that boy as best she could for the huge changes he's going through this week.

Then, while Owen took a bath, I changed Krassi and with some guidance from Dondi, used some lotion and massaged Krassi's legs. He was so happy about this! Huge smiles and sounds of pleasure and delight! I told him that this is a little bit of what it's like to have a mommy and to be loved - to have someone who cares about your sore muscles and gently works some of the tension out of them when you're not able to do it on your own. He was an incredibly happy boy.

And, apparently, a pretty relaxed one, too, because I don't think it took more than three minutes after laying him down in his cot for him to be sound asleep.

Tomorrow we have a quiet rainy day ahead of us. No appointments, no where to go. But I'm guessing I'll still have photos and stories to share tomorrow night. If nothing else, *I* want them so when these days are gone I can still remember some of these precious first times.