Yesterday Olia and I went to the craft store to purchase a new scrapbook for her.  She has so many pictures, awards, etc that are just shoved into her old scrapbook.  She chose a shiny blue scrapbook and purchased some stickers and page inserts.  I should say I PURCHASED, she just chose the items.  I feel like I am making a baby book for her because I didn't have her when she was a baby.  I really want her to have happy memories and remembrances from her childhood.  We only have one baby photo of her, she looks about age 2 in the photo.  I am so glad we have that photo because we need it for the fifth grade school yearbook.  All of the kids submit baby photos with their fifth grade school photo.  Olia spent a few hours working on her scrapbook last night.  She loves to talk about the photos and she writes a caption under each one in the book.
     Today Olia had a two hour early dismissal from school.  The teachers had an afternoon in-service to attend.  Olia's friend Marissa came home with her.  Dan was supposed to pick the girls up at 1:30.  He remembered that he had to pick them up, but he had never changed his clocks for daylight savings time.  All of a sudden he realized he was thirty minutes late and went to get them. they were with the principal. Now they are upstairs doing a dance routine and talking to friends online.  Olia got her computer back today. She had not been permitted to  use it for the past three days because she had a fresh mouth when she answered me for the last few days.  I still am wondering when she is going to realize that there are consequences for poor behavior.  She begged me to let her use the computer yesterday and she carried on but I held firm. 
    Olia and Dan went for haircuts on Sunday.  The beautician kept telling Dan how beautiful Olia is.  She thought Olia's features were striking.  We know Olia is beautiful on the outside, we just want to keep her beautiful on the inside.  She will be twelve this summer.  I remember middle school being a difficult time in raising girls.  There is so much peer pressure to be "cool."  I keep telling Olia that it is more important to be nice.
    Our friends in Ukraine are hoping they get permission to adopt Dasha.  The city government says that her bio brother has to go to court and say that he will allow her to be adopted. He has already told the parents that he does not want to leave Ukraine and that he has no objections to Dasha being adopted.  So I think things will be fine for them.  They will not adopt her bio brother so they will come home empty-handed if they are told they also have to adopt him. Dan says he would probably take the bio brother because he wouldn't want to split up a sister and a brother.  But I think it would be difficult to adopt a 16, almost 17 year old boy that a family hadn't met or spent time with.
   Dan started painting the ceiling in our guest room...soon to be Olya's room if we adopt her.  New blinds were delivered today for Olia's room. Olia wanted mini blinds because she wanted to be able to open them and let some light in without lifting them all the way up.  Now mini blinds and fabric blinds can be ordered so that one can just gently push on the bottom of them or pull on the bottomof them to lift or lower the blinds.  It's so nice not to have to finagle the cords.  She wanted Dan to stop painting and hang her new blinds, but he told her that she would have to wait until the weekend.