Day 1: Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Arrival at Shekinah

Faith and John playing in the tree house

I’ve already gone into some details about meeting John-John and our arrival at the orphanage, as well as a detailed description of the orphanage itself.  So this will be a brief entry about our life together as we closed out the day we met John-John.

Sadiri took Faith, John and I to our cottage after lunch.  John went down for his nap with no trouble.  We had learned his schedule in theory, but had not been through it yet.  This is what we understood to be typical…

• 5:30AM – John wakes up, gets his shower
• 6:30AM – Breakfast
• 11:30AM – Lunch
• 1:00PM – Nap for 90 minutes or so
• 6:30PM – Dinner
• 7:30PM – Evening routine: Potty time (#2), shower, brush teeth
• 8:00PM – Bedtime

So, we put John down for his nap.  While he slept, Faith prepared the gifts we’d brought for the house parents and social worker at the orphanage, and then read.  I took a shower.  It would become my custom to take multiple showers a day and still sweat myself to death.

John took a long time to come out of sleep mode.  We have since learned that he is quite slow to wake up when he doesn’t wake up on his own.  And sometimes he can be grumpy.  This was one of those days.  He was pretty withdrawn when we woke him up.  Faith pulled him back into a better disposition by letting him play with our camera.  He subsequently took a bunch of pictures that are actually pretty funny.  I plan to wrap the best of these up into an album and publish to FB when I get around to it.

We had sent a pack of matchbox cars to the orphanage in a care package about a month ahead of our arrival.  They had packaged them up in a plastic grocery bag (along with the other stuff we’d sent), and had them waiting in our cottage when we arrived.  We thought John might want to play with the cars, but instead he dumped them out of the floor and played with the plastic bag (and our camera) the bulk of the afternoon.

We went back over to the main building for dinner at around 6PM.  We returned to the cottage about 7PM, and started getting John ready for bed.  We had never done this before, so we didn’t realize that it would go as fast as it did.  We were also pretty pumped that John dove into his night time routine very enthusiastically.  He was particularly excited about getting naked and playing in the shower.  I found his approach to #2 potty of particular interest, because he had learned to do so without the benefit of children’s toilet seats, etc.  So, he shed his clothes, straddled the toilet, and did his duty.  (I’m so going to get killed for these posts when he’s old enough to find and read them.)  Faith and I were extremely impressed that he is fully potty trained, enthusiastic about showers, very clean, and very compliant.

After potty and shower, we got him dressed – daddy laid out his clothes while mommy got him showered, which has become our custom.  Then, we had him brush his teeth (also something he’s able to do on his own), and hop into bed.  I had spent a bit of time selecting Bible stories to read to him before bed, since I had not brought a children’s Bible with us.  Tonight’s story was the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke 2:1-20.  John wasn’t disobedient, but I could tell right away that he’s totally not into books and reading, which actually bummed me out a bit.  I hope that doesn’t impede his education.  He’s a very tactile learner (also something we observed quickly), so now Faith is busily about trying to find homeschooling curricula based on that style.

After our story time, we said our prayers (something we also always do before meals), kissed him goodnight, and went back to our room.  Faith and I then prayed together, talked for a little while about the day, and hit the sack.