Jungle Ball Anyone!?!?

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - Got to the orphanage at about 2:30 today. The kids were in with their music teacher Sergei playing the flute and just hanging out. Sergei is really good to these kids and we enjoyed talking to him. Come to find out, he has the key to the Gymnasium upstairs so he let us play basketball. It was fun to play with the boys and their gym teacher showed up and played with us as well. We had the height advantage and I believe Lucinda and Arri surprised them as to how well the Amerikanski women can play!

Then, they had a soccer tournament between the classes. The older class seemed to beat the others with our Artem as a defensive player. Sasha didn't play with his class but we sat out in the cold rain (after sweating in the basketball gym) watching a couple of the games. We finally got too cold and went inside and had some really good laughs with the boys (thanks to Natalie our translator being there).

We showed the boys the good ol' fashioned leg wrestles and they had fun with those. I think Sasha and Artem got a little tied up at one point and thank goodness Artem didnt have the need to relieve himself!

Then, since Austin Milne still had the key to the gym, we went up and played volleyball. We decided the boys could learn quite a bit about basketball and volleyball and they could teach us a lot about soccer. We also noticed that Artem and Sasha argue all the time whenever they're competitive or have to share something. I guess that's normal and something we'll work on.

We also had a good talk with the twins today for Julie Harris. Julie, just email Arri at arrirogers@comcast.net and she'll give you more details (she doesn't have your email address).

More rain but another good day with the boys.