Dancing at Church

Since our daughter has been home for a week, she has been doing so well, and it's our first functioning Sunday we thought we would try going to church and see what would happen. I'd love to tell you how wonderful it went, but it wasn't quite a victory.

My expectations for church today were low because I wasn't really sure what our daughter would think of everything, especially all of the people, but what caused her anxiety was not what I anticipated. Our plan was to drop off all of the older kids in their Sunday School classes and then take our new daughter with us to "big church." We figured we'd have her sit with us in the back of the sanctuary or maybe even in the hallway. Before we even got to the sanctuary she began to panic. Honestly, I'm not totally positive what "set her off", but I think she either thought we were putting all of her siblings in Groupas in some sort of American orphanage or she just plain did not know what to do without her siblings. We tried having someone who speaks Russian ask her what was wrong, but she wasn't talking--that's how foul she was.

We tried the route of taking our oldest daughter out of her Sunday School and keeping her with us also, but that didn't seem to give our new daughter any comfort. Frankly, our new daughter never really relaxed in this new situation. We stayed through the singing and a little bit in the hallway through the sermon, but I could quickly see that this concept of being without her siblings was not settling with her so I decided to head home early today. I have to take her to her first doctor appointment this upcoming week and don't plan on taking her siblings so she's going to eventually have to get used to the idea of going places independent of them. I figure that maybe next week for church I'll have our Russian speaking friend explain to her about what is going to happen (maybe that was our mistake of not talking her through it previous) and try to have her stay longer than this week. My thought is that if I continue to take her each week and stay just a bit longer each week that it will eventually work out.

Here we go again...the dance steps begin. One forward and one back.

1 Samuel 1:27 "I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him.