Wednesday

It's Wednesday evening and I have only two more days left with my babies. With 37 babies it's hard to choose each day which babies to bring out to play with. Mostly I've been grabbing the ones who are crying and trying to make sure that I bring each kid out at some point over the week. It's hard to keep track though. I am bringing the three little ones who were in the isolation room the last few weeks out every day because I think they need some extra attention.

This Morning I started out with Abel, Ramona, and both the Mihaelas planing to go fetch a few more after little Mihaela finished her bottle. Well, that took much longer than I expected. First of all she kept falling asleep every few minutes so I had to keep rousing her to suck on the bottle. After a while it became apparent that nothing was coming out of the nipple anymore even though she was sucking away. I switched nipples with Abel who had already finished and this one was working better at first, but after a few minutes it stopped working too. This was a clear nipple so I could see that it was clogged with some kind of lump. I'm pretty sure Mihaela's bottle contained formula (not the vegetable smoothie substance the bigger babies get) so I'm not sure what these lumps were but sure enough every few minutes another one would come along and clog up the nipple. So we carried on with me checking the nipple every few minutes and squeezing out any lumps that clogged it up and in this way she finally finished her bottle. It was about 9:40 when she started her bottle and by the time we finished -between the faulty nipple, lumps and her falling asleep- it was 11:00. I'm not kidding. This is the longest any of them has ever taken to finish a bottle. Normally I would have given up long before that and assumed that she wasn't hungry, but she was so little and I knew they were only feeding her every four hours so I didn't want her to miss her only chance at eating until afternoon.

So nearly the entire morning was spent with both Mihaela's on my lap. The little one eating and the big one playing with my knee and getting fussy if I didn't bounce her about and tickle her every so often. She's an egocentric little thing and doesn't want to get the idea that she is not at all times the center of your focus. Anyway, by 11:00 when we were finally done with feeding, I went to bring some more kids into the playroom but most of them were asleep. I brought in Alex and Daniella but didn't want to wake the others.

In the afternoon, while the other babies slept, I spent some time with little Ana Maria who is just back from the hospital in Birlad and must stay in the isolation room for two weeks. After that I went into one of the toddler bedrooms as they were the only ones awake. In this room were Mihaela, Abel, Andreea, Lillianna, and Maia. We played in there for a while and had a delightful time. I wished I had brought my video camera in with me becasue they were all so funny. We played a game where I would tickle them and they'd run away and they all laughed so hard. We also made silly faces and Lillianna was quite good at imitating me and would wiggle her mouth around in the funniest way. I'll have to see if I can get her to do it again for the video camera. After a while we moved out to the front room and were joined by Dumi, Octavian, Iona and Denisa. 8 babies is not to hard but 8 toddlers is a different story. They all went crazy. They all wanted to see out the window and everyone wanted to be held at once. I was constantly telling someone "NU! NU!" Octavian and Dumi are the worst -always climbing on things and getting into to things. They are going to be quite a handful for their new mama. At one point Octavian pushed Denisa off a chair and she hit her face pretty hard on the floor. she calmed down eventually but was pretty upset. I have even greater respect for their preschool teacher. They are certainly not your average preschoolers -they are like preschoolers on steroids. I my god, they have so much energy. They definitely wore me out by the end of the afternoon. I think I do better with them in small groups. I could spend every afternoon with the 5 in their bedroom but not all of them in that front room (which could really be set up better, it's a small space and it just invites trouble). What I'd really love to do is take them outside but I think it's still just a bit too cold for the aides to let them outside since we do not have all the necessary layers to keep them overheated. Soon though it will warm up. Hopefully the next team will be able to take them outside to play.

Anyway, it's getting late and I've got to go. I'll write more soon.

La Revedere.