Rose Alaimo came home from Russia on Sunday. Well, all of her except several pieces of her heart. They got left behind with several of the Russian orphans she met in orphanages, a hospital and a summer camp in Yaroslavl, Russia.

In her last two e-mails before heading home, Rose sounded happy and sad, energized and tired, and also frustrated.

Happy because she made some children in difficult circumstances laugh and smile, if only for a few short weeks. Like a little boy named Slava, who, she says "just walks around by himself on the... more

The potato crop is in and it is a beaut. Some easy digging into the hills turned up delicious Yukon Golds, Red Bliss and Purple Peruvians. And if you are wondering why they are not pictured here, the answer is simple: The entire 7-pound harvest was eaten before I could remember to get the camera down from the shelf.

Now I'm sure that those of you who live on farms or grew up on them are laughing hysterically over somebody making a fuss over a 7-pound harvest. But given that this was my big attempt to grow the foods that my two Russia-born boys... more

Apologies, folks, I've got some catching up to do. Turns out, the Internet, wired or wireless, has not arrived in the great north woods. So several things that I had brought along on my laptop to post never made it off the hard drive. I guess somebody was trying to tell me that sometimes vacation should just be vacation.

First up is a story from The New York Times last week. It seems that... more

Where is it? Tyumen Oblast is located in central Russia. The Novosibirsk region is its immediate neighbor to the east. It is two hours ahead of Moscow in the Yekaterinburg time zone. Sverdlovsk Oblast is on its southwestern border.

What's the biggest city? Tyumen, whose population includes 511,000 of the region's 3.3 million people, according to the 2002 census. The next two largest cities are Surgut (population 272 300) and Nizhnevartovsk,... more

This morning, I took a look at toilet training in Russia's orphanages. Now I need to talk about what happens when there are problems with bathroom behavior, and most specifically about a problem called encopresis.

What's that? It is, in essence, what happens when constipation gets out of control. In slightly starker terms, stool gets so backed up in the large intestine that it begins to leak out into a child's underpants and clothing. The Cincinnati Children's... more

There was one part of Rose Alaimo's latest reports from Russia that I didn't share with you the other day: What she learned about toilet training in a Russian orphanage.

As those of you who have brought home toddlers already know, children are potty trained very early in Russian orphanages. Almost as soon as they can sit, they are made to sit on a potty after meals. Nature takes its course and the kids get into a bathroom routine fairly quickly. It is not... more

I've heard from Rose Alaimo again, the graduate school student who is volunteering in Yaroslavl, Russia this summer.

Her e-mails are helping me to see how easy it would be to improve the lives of the children in Russia's orphanages, and how hard it can be to do what should be the easy things in life.

Easy things, like helping kids to laugh and sing when the only song the multinational corps of volunteers has in common is "Row, Row, Row Your Boat".

Easy things,... more

Where is it? Tver Oblast is located in northwestern Russia. The Moscow region is its immediate neighbor to the east, so it is in the Moscow time zone. On its other borders are the regions of Smolensk, Novgorod and Vogograd. The Volga River flows through the region and its main city.

What's the biggest city? Tver, whose population includes 408,903 of the region's 1,471,459 million people, according to the 2002 census. From 1931 to 1990, the... more

Sakhalin Island was hit by a strong earthquake on Thursday morning, killing two people and leaving two people dead and several dozen others injured. Reports on the quake differed on its magnitude, with some accounts putting the first shock at 6.4 and others at 6.6 or 6.8. Nevelsk, on the southwestern side of the island, was closest to the epicenter, but the quake was also felt in Kholmsk and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. According to the Itar-Tass... more

Late last evening, I got hit with that question that no adoptive mother wants to hear from a medical professional: "Does he have a history of …..?"

It felt so ridiculously helpless to say "I don’t know". The doctor is looking for answers as to how we wound up in the emergency room, and all I could manage was "I don't know".

Last year, my little guy got stung by a bee. It made a welt on his leg that was uncomfortable for a few days, but that was it. Yesterday, just after we returned home from a great Chinese dinner, he got stung again. One welt... more