May 26, 2008 (Monday)

I love great days…they make all the bad ones seem insignificant. My day started off quite humorous. My roommate Mary thought she new a shortcut to the orphanage. In actuality it took us the direct opposite way from the orphanage. I was the first one to speak up and say that I didn’t think we were going the right way. However, it took everyone a while to listen to me because my sense of direction isn’t always right on. For once in my life it was! I was so excited…we turned around and went the other way. We were cracking up.

When we got to the orphanage I helped Whitney finish her Brigance test on her kids. Then we played with the children. I had fun trying to teach Valentina to jump. I would hold her hands and jump and she would laugh and laugh. She doesn’t quite understand the concept of jumping. She keeps her legs stiff when I try and pull her hands up to show her the motion of jumping, but she’ll get it by the end of the semester. Then she pulled my hair again today…not a surprise. She does it about every day. Most of the kids love to pull hair because it gets an automatic reaction and lucky me I have the longest hair out of the group. Haha…

Andrei was a delight today. He was much mellower than Friday. He makes me feel so good. Every time I walk into the room he runs directly to me. It doesn’t matter who I’m with or who is around I’m the first person he comes to. It’s funny how his adorable little smile makes my year! When I was helping Whitney Scott do a Brigance Test on one of her kids in a little room Andrei waited outside the door for me. There was a little window in the door and he kept waving at me through the door. Then when Andrei and I were playing my headband came off and he picked it up and put it on his head and did his little smile sequence. I was laughing so hard. Andrei is adorable, but with adorableness comes stinkerness. Today he tried to get my attention and he yanked my ponytail hard. The worker helped me put him in time out. It’s funny that even though he hurt me I felt bad for punishing him. I still wanted to pick him up and cuddle him when he was upset in time out - even though he had hurt me. Maybe that’s the way parents feel when they have to punish their children for something they do wrong.

All the kids in the orphanage had runny noses today. I guess if one gets sick they all get sick. It was so weird because Friday they all seemed healthy – then when I walked in today there were snot and boogers all over the place. Disgusting – sadly I’m getting used to it…but I’m still not a big fan of it.

After the orphanage we went and bought food! It was so great…I got all the staples and fruit. At the piata this particular food stand tried to rip me off when I went to buy a watermelon. I caught them. I was proud of myself. They took a watermelon weighed it and said it was 33 lei. I almost had a heart attack. I thought they had said 3 lei. I was way off. Then they tried to shove it into my hands, and I said that I didn’t want it because it was too expensive. Then they got another watermelon and gave me a smaller portion at a reasonable price. I’m starting to be able to figure out when I’m getting gypped.

When we walked out of the piata there was the cutest little boy playing his recorder with a puppy in his lap. Some of these street beggar children know how to work it. There was no way I would be able to walk by without putting something in… they are too stinking cute.

The hospital was great. The Lord has blessed us so much by softening the hearts and minds of the people involved with the mace incident. I saw Alex and his friend Andrei. Alex was so excited to see us. They were waiting for us at the top of the stairs when we arrived. The two boys tried teaching Annie and I a card game in Romanian. It was hard to figure out the rules of the game with the language barrier so we attempted to figure out the rules by patterns, but we didn’t succeed real well…The two boys were laughing the entire time at us. Oh well…I’m getting real used to being laughed at around here.

Poor Alex. After we left the hospital I found out that the other girls had brought McDonalds to some kids on the same floor as Alex’s and he thought they were bringing food for him. The girls said his eyes got all big and excited and then when he realized it wasn’t for him they said he was so disappointed. Poor thing. We are going to bring him McDonalds sometime later this week. McDonalds is a big deal around here…Then to make things worse I didn’t bring my laptop to watch movies because MacKenzie and I had planned to do that with him the week before, but we couldn’t because of the incident. Then today wasn’t her day to go to the hospital so we decided to bring it tomorrow. Poor kid – no McDonalds and no laptop. He didn’t complain at all though. We’ll make it up to him somehow.

Today Alex told me that the lady who visited him was his grandma – which would explain why she looked so old and wrinkly. However, I keep getting different stories from everyone. Alex’s little friend Andrei said that Alex doesn’t have a mom or dad but that his grandma and grandpa take care of him. His grandma lives far away so she never gets to visit him because she doesn’t have the money. Then he also said that Alex doesn’t have any brothers and sisters. I wonder if I will ever get to the bottom of the story.

The nurses were watching us very, very closely because of the mace incident today. I felt like a criminal. They kept peeping their head in to check on us. It got kind of annoying, but I can understand to a certain extent why they were acting the way they were. Then we got kicked out of the hospital early. I hope it’s not going to be like this from now on. Maybe everyone will relax over the next couple of weeks.

For dinner we had homemade Macaroni and Cheese. Poor Annie was not happy because the cheese cooked weird. The sauce was a bit different – but still very good…I can tell Annie likes everything to be perfect while cooking. She kept apologizing that the sauce wasn’t the way it normally is when she cooks it at home. We kept telling her it was fine, but I could tell she was still worried about it.

Another Monday night means another FHE. When we got there we were divided up into teams, were given a Book of Mormon story, and then we each had to act it out. Our group was given the story of Ammon when he protected the king’s flock. I quickly volunteered to be the sheep. I must say that my “baaing” was excellent. We were laughing pretty hard – good times. Then we played the game when you have two people draw on the board an image and your team members have to guess. There were some interesting drawings. The funniest one was when Ionut (he’s about 28-years-old and he has some sort of disability) drew a squirrel that looked like a cow with udders. Apparently he is always yelling dirty comments in church, but we don’t understand any of them so they are funny to us. Mindy and I were dying when we saw the drawing. Mindy made the comment that the first thing he drew was the head and the second thing was the nipples. That boys mind is something else.

On the way home we had another speed walking contest. It’s amazing how fast that puts everyone into hysterics. I’m excited because we got it on video tape too…some of the girls were cheaters…but I won’t go into that. Haha.

After FHE we went to the mall and got a couple of movies for Alex to watch in Romanian. We got Cars and Spiderman 3. I’m pretty sure he will be really excited about our choice of movie. Hopefully we will make up for his disappointments from today. It breaks my heart that his feelings were hurt.

P.S. One of the counselors nailed me for a talk in a couple of weeks…nice…