Jump Back to our first day together

Now that things are going well and we have the benefit of hindsight I wanted to share the experiences of our first meeting in some more detail and with the photos that the folks at the orphanage had taken. What a day. It is amazing to look back at these photos now...

 The carers had taken Waad (Olivia) and Boat (Janus) out the front of the orphanage to await our arrival. Janus now lives in Skandeborg just 15 min south of Aarhus so we will catch up again with Janus and his parents, Henrik and Dorthe soon...

This is our first photo together. When we drove up the kids were brought over and they said to Olivia "this is your Mum and Dad...". This is not Hollywood and there were no violins playing...

We were actually pretty anxious ourselves and we could see that Olivia was not keen to have contact with us. We tried to respect her space, but we also had to try and come in closer.

We basically got the cold shoulder... knowing her as we do now I think that it is "Mission Impossible" to get this type of meeting to go well.

Khun Toy took charge and tried to get things to roll...

We went inside and looked at the wall of all the kids that have been adopted abroad. I guess they talk to the kids about that these children have found new parents and they put her and Janus' photo there to impress upon them that they are also going to do this along with all the other kids...

Not sure if she really could understand this rather abstract reasoning though. "Especially with those two weirdos still following me. Who are they again?"

We had sent a pillow to her that had arrived some days earlier. It had a photo of us and a photo of Olivia on it and Khun Toy and the staff had been talking to her about this.

At this point Olivia is still not 100% convinced that this whole "Mum and Dad thing" is a good idea.

Then we were escorted into a little office to get to know one another on weird and stressful terms. Even I was uncomfortable, she must have been wanting to run out and get back to her friends...

We gave her a doll as a gift but this was not a hit. In fact she has never played with a doll or stuffed toy in the time we have known her. She is scared of them. Not sure if this is because of this experience now I think about it...

We have a little fluffy dog and a Mexican horse down in the bedroom that we have put in the far corner because she runs screaming from them.

Here her little body is shaking with fear and Rikke and I feel like we are doing more harm than good, but there is an expectation that we try...

So we left her finally in peace to have some lunch and have her nap. We were given a tour of the orphanage. It really is incredible what they do for the kids there.

Look who we ran into on the tour around! Olivia was very interested in us looking over and horsing about a bit.

But when we came closer she became shy again...

However, as we were leaving she kept looking out the door at us until we were gone.

The next day was tears as soon as we arrived. We thought that we might just have to get over the barrier so Aaron just picked her up and we went for a walk out into the courtyard... and Olivia screamed "mei, mei, mei" (No, no, no) and cried for about 15 min until Nook, her main carer, came and took her up.

Here a picture of Waad (Olivia) and Nook.

It was finally decided we would just "make a run for it" and we sat in the car and Nook passed our little girl into Aaron in the car. She screamed again and then after only 30 seconds or so she reached out for Rikke and came over to her. Another minute and she was quiet for the rest of the trip home... we pick up the story in the previous blog post


... and things have steadily been improving since!