wheels 

school day 

Mid-June

June 5
We’ve been together as a new family (in Kazakhstan and America) for nearly ¼ of a year now. Time really flies when you’re too busy to remember what day it is!

We’ve hit some major milestones in the past 4-5 weeks. The biggest was putting Jack and Julia in school. We got good, but conflicting advice from qualified professionals on both sides of this issue, but the kids really want to get on with the process of assimilating into America and kept asking to go to school. We decided that we could go ahead and give them the experience of school for a few weeks without the pressure of having to worry about grades. We told them that our goal for this year was for them to figure out how American school worked, make some friends and get comfortable for next year. Jack was a little intimidated (as was I) when we went to register at his 950 student Jr. High, but we started off with half days to ease him into the process. When I went to pick him up on the second day, I heard some kids around the corner call out “Hey Jack! Whazzup Dog?” Luckily, he got the essence of that question without me having to explain the slang behind it. (Yes, actually it can be a good thing when friends call you a ‘dog’, but you don’t want to call other people ‘dogs’ unless they call you a ‘dog ‘ first).
Jack has a few kids in his school whose parents emigrated from Russia, so they’re American kids who speak pretty good Russian. It’s been great.
Julia doesn’t have any Russian speakers in her school, but her teachers and the other kids really help her out. It’s pretty cute—they call each other up for these 30 second phone conversations. It doesn’t amount to much information exchange, but it makes her happy.
Next year Jack and Julia will be taking the school bus. Dropping off and picking up at three schools is quite a logistical challenge.

English is coming along OK. We met some folks locally who have adopted Russian speaking kids (twice—a brother and sister both times) from the Ukraine, and they have helped immeasurably be giving us some idea of what to expect and how this all will look in a year or so. The first kids they adopted in 2003 at 8 and 11 now have nearly accent free English and, surprisingly, speak Russian so sparingly that they have forgotten much of it. Even though we know not to expect too much English too soon, we wouldn’t turn down a miracle visit from the “ English language fairy”. The kids watched one of the “Air Bud” movies last night and Julia just cried and cried. There was obviously more to this than a sad part in the movie, but the language barrier was too high to get to the root of the issue. All I could do was sit with her and give her a hug.

We went to the Denver Zoo this weekend, and everybody had a great time. The Kaz kids were very impressed and the natives had a great time showing off “our” zoo. Overall, it was a good weekend.