Heeeeerrrrreeeee's Dimitry!!!!

He's finally here!  Dimitry arrived yesterday around 6:45 and was completely exhausted!  Now, many of you may be thinking, "Wasn't he supposed to get here close to midnight Thursday?"  Yes he was.  Dimitry (and MANY other host children) were delayed in Poland due to some mechanical issues on the plane.  Once they fixed the problem, the plan left 5 hours after its scheduled departure.  As a result, families around Denver, Chicago, D.C., and Charlotte had to wait one more day for their host child.

The picture above was taken shortly after he met us, so I'm sure he was more than a little overwhelmed at the time.  He was very quiet on the way home, despite our best intentions to engage him.  We've also quickly seen how imperfect Google Translator is as we've shown him a translated sentence or question, only to get a quizzical stare as a reply.  Fortunately, we have seen him smile a few times.  Once we got home, we showed him around and introduced him to Luna and Merlin.  This produced smile number 1!  He enjoyed petting them, and we're pretty sure he'll like playing with Merlin.  Once we showed him his room (which produced another small grin), we had an ice cream sundae celebration!  This brought another big smile!

While we were having ice cream, we played Yikers, a game we picked up to play with him.  Basically, you have 10 magnets and the goal is to play all of your magnets first.  The tricky part is that if the magnets come together, you have to pick them up and place them back in your hand.  Dimitry picked up the concept pretty quickly, but we're not sure how much he likes it.

After ice cream, Dimitry was ready to get cleaned up and rest after all his travels.  King gave him a brief orientation of American bathroom procedures and how to work the shower.  Once he got cleaned up, he was ready for bed.  We prayed with him and said goodnight at around 9 PM.

We're not completely sure what's in store for today, but we are planning on going to the farmer's market and possibly a park with his soccer ball!

Please keep praying; one of our concerns at the moment is that we don't have other children to engage him.  Kids have a way of getting other kids to let their guards down when they are otherwise intimidated by adults.  Also, because we don't have other kids all attention is on him.  We're working on not putting him on the spot too much, but aren't sure we're succeeding.  We have been praying about this (and trying not to stress about it).   If you are in the area with children and would like to meet up, let us know!  =)

Thanks for praying.