This "building a family" business can be a tricky affair.
Most of the time it is quite a joyous and uproarious escapade. Case in point: A few nights ago K had his two younger "brothers" spending the night. We watched some World Cup action over pizza and soda. Good times. Because they were a little hyped on sugar we walked around old Riga to burn up some of that energy. As we are walking around, K and his crew are practicing their "parkour" moves (you'll have to look it up on the web) and a very large, inebriated Latvian guy decides he would like to try it. K explains what he must do and the guy proceeds to run into the side of a building at full gallop rather than jump and scale the side of the building! What a sight!
Later on that evening, as we are making our way back to the apartment, I spy a young woman standing in the street from about three quarters of a block away. Odd, but all she is doing is watching people pass by her and occasionally talking with a few men who pass by her. Maybe she's had one too many. About halfway down the block I can get a faint whiff of her perfume - a scent that only gets more pronounced the closer we get to her. I get what's going on here! As we pass her one of the youngsters overhears her talking to a potential patron; after we have a reasonable distance between us and her, he turns to me and says "Hey Phil! That lady is a prostitute!" Oh boy!
Today, Daniela came to visit with baby Harry in tow. We started off with paying lots of attention to Harry and even got K to hold him. Harry would not take his eyes off of K for most of the visit. K and Daniela started horsing around like they were siblings - K trying to video Daniela and trying to take her picture and Daniela resisting those attempts. Daniela does not like having her picture taken and at some point there was a good-natured tussle between them. This ended up with Daniela flipping K to the floor and sitting on him until her promised "no more pictures". The visit ended with some facetime with Peter. Peter was so happy to see Daniela and K. As we said our good byes to Daniela, K gave her a hug and she gave each of us a really long, firm hug back!! This is the big deal part of family building. Patience, unfailing love and consistency pay off in the end. We know this; we have the proof in the hugs from the teen who would not give us hugs last summer! She knows she is loved ... really loved.
Several people have expressed to us that K doesn't like to follow the rules all the time. Sometimes he will test the boundaries. Generally, our experience so far has been that he abides by the rules. But today he also tested exactly where that boundary was. The details are not important except that it involved cleaning up a small mess he made. He was asked to clean it up several times and consequences were clearly delineated. The end result was we went back home early (as promised). He was not happy. This is not a big deal. He'll work through it and we'll talk about it tomorrow (he went straight to bed - his choice) and we will go over the need for respect among family and that we love him and forgive him. We'll learn from this and move on.
We look forward to spending the next few days here in Riga with some friends and his "brothers" sleeping over for two days. Then we head to camp with K. More adventures and good times ahead - sans the ladies of the evening.
Family ... it's a big deal, a very big deal!
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