Papa is "da man" - well, sorta

With Kelly being under the weather, I headed over to the orphanage on my own. He was quite concerned that Mama wasn't there, but he figured out she was ill.

I gotta admit that the dynamic with Daniel is different when it's just me with him instead of the pair of us. Kelly, of course, is more nurturing and has a seemingly inexhaustible amount of ideas of what to do with our boy. I winged it the best I could and was pretty successful.

Our "clinic-mates" (http://www.czeropski.blogspot.com/) gave me a mini-soccer ball (how nice!) and we spent quite a bit of time kicking it back and forth. Kelly and I have been trying to tell if Daniel is right- or left-handed as he colors with both hands, etc. For about a half-hour tonight, we tossed the ball and he is WAY more accurate with his right hand. Also, he definitely defers to his right foot when kicking so we're leaning that way.

Big news of the day (okay, not that big) - I found out what makes him more focused than when he sees a stray cat or dog... While we were outside playing, it started to slightly drizzle. Daniel was oblivious since he was more interested in throwing the ball and watching Papa go after it. When I pointed out to him that it was, in fact, raining, he IMMEDIATELY called out, "Groupa" and took off for the inside. He even passed within about 10 feet of a stray cat and didn't give it a second look. Folks here, understandably, are very, very concerned about illnesses. Obviously, they've impressed upon the children that they must immediately get out of the rain.

Another thing about the boy - he takes after his dad when he was Daniel's age in that he loves toy armymen. We gave him a set of cowboys and Indians to play with and he loves them. He doesn't quite get the idea of the cowboys actually fighting the Indians - it's a free-for-all where his favorites (the yellow-shirted cowboy and the blue-pantsed Indian with a tomahawk and knife) always seem to win. He's in for a real surprise when he inherits all of my toy armymen (about 1000 of them) from when I was a kid!

I was hoping that we'd be able to see a soccer game while we were in town (there's a semi-pro team in the city), but there's no games scheduled in the immediate future. There's a chance we're going to see some college volleyball on Tuesday, though. Perhaps when we head back to Kiev, we'll be able to see one.

Otherwise, we're trying to keep busy. We have watched a couple of movies with the Czeropski's. Last night was "Death Race" and tonight we watched the first episode of "Band of Brothers". We're also doing our Bible studies, of course. Kelly is doing a Beth Moore study and I'm working on my Discipleship Curriculum. We've also done a 1000 piece puzzle and are getting ready to tackle a 2000 piece.

I noticed on the map that we're fairly closed to Moldova. I checked Geocaching.com and there are 4 caches in that country. I plugged them into my GPS this afternoon and, unfortunately, the nearest one is over 100 miles from us so we won't be able to add another country to our list of finds.

Anyhow, Kelly is getting better. She slept all afternoon which helped her out. We'll see in the morning if she's up to going to church or not.

We hope that everyone is doing well at home. We truly miss everyone. Thanks for keeping us in your prayers and thoughts!

Oh yeah - Go Cards in the Big East Championship game!