Adventures with Maia

An update on Clarissa:  She’s home from the icu!!  It got bad enough that it was a fight for her life (her larynx was permanently damaged when she was born which has led to all kinds of eating and breathing problems and made her being sick much worse).  Her parents had a big scare, but everything’s ok.  Thank You, God!

And since I’m in a rambling mood again, guess what Maia did while my friend Krystyna was watching her?  She found a pen and wrote alllllll over our tan couch.  I mean all over it.  Krystyna was probably out on the balcony having a smoke (she’s newly saved but hasn’t felt the Holy Spirit leading her to give that up yet. .  Apparently Maia asked Krystyna not to tell me about it and Krystyna agreed and covered it up with pillows.  Great.  Maybe we should think about a new caregiver until various Biblical truths sink in.  Meanwhile, any advice on how to get pen out?  Keep in mind it’s a lot of pen.  Luckily the couch cushion covers are removable and washable (our couches are from Ikea and I highly recommend them for families with children).  

Maia has always been…let’s say.. a difficult child.  I first realized it when she was about 4 months old and I understood that she was actually throwing an angry fit.  We’ve had lots and lots of those since then.  And combined with her frightening temper, she’s also always getting into something.  Like when she was 18 months old and during a five-minute phone conversation (literally five minutes) she managed to climb from the toilet to the sink to the bathroom cabinet in order to drink some of Ben’s aftershave (not much luckily since it probably didn’t taste as good as she thought it would);  from there she went to the kitchen where she climbed and found the black shoe polish (the fluid kind) and poured it all over the floor;  when the floor was sufficiently black, she got into Mikaela’s craft drawer and used the glue sticks to draw a mural on the living room floor.  When I got off the phone she was content as she could be, happily hiccupping aftershave.  And she hasn’t outgrown these shenanigans either.  Just last month she climbed up on the kitchen counter and got the window cleaner (a super-size bottle).  No, she didn’t drink it – thankfully she’s past that stage now.  But she did empty the almost full bottle all over the kitchen floor.  The floor was pretty dirty; she probably thought she was helping me out.  The problem is that Maia is a climber.  There is no such thing as putting things away high enough.   And we’ve been continually shocked by her mischievous prowess because of the contrast with our older daughter.  Mikaela wouldn’t dream of climbing on anything – she’s very cautious.  It’s great now that Maia is old enough to play on the playground with Kaela because Maia really challenges Mikaela to do things like slides and monkey bars that she wouldn’t normally try.

On the other hand, Maia can be so sweet.  Like when she climbed in bed with me at 5 this morning and hugged me and patted my face and told me that she ‘really love me.’  And now that she’s able to communicate better (she talks really well now!) she’s much less frustrated and better behaved.  And even when she’s being naughty, she’s about the cutest kid you’ve ever seen – all that curly brown hair, and her big blue eyes.  Like when she told me last night, “Mama, Maia not bein naughty anymore.  I not put the paper in the dvd now.”  Which meant that although she had just crammed pieces of paper into the dvd player and shut it, she was turning over a new leaf and wasn’t going to try that again.   See, isn’t that cute? 

How about you guys?  Anybody have adventures like we have with Maia?

Pray for Clarissa

Our friends’ little girl Clarissa is in the hospital with pneumonia in Krakow.  I have to tell you, this is the thing that strikes terror into my heart – the possibility of my kids having to be put in a hospital here.  The only experiences we’ve ever had with the public hospitals are bad.  It seems like once they’re in, the hospital director doesn’t want to let them out (the longer the patient is in, the more $ he gets from the government, pardon my cynicism).  Kids stay in the hospital for pneumonia for a month or more.  Maybe it’s necessary, I don’t know, but they seem to get sicker while they’re there.  Another friend, seeing her daughter was not getting better, tried to take her child out but the doctors wouldn’t let her.  They literally would not let her take her own child to another hospital.  For those head in the clouds people that think socialized medicine would be a great idea, I wish they’d come and actually experience it.  A person who’s been to their GP and probably has cancer can actually end up waiting six months to get into a specialist.  The specialist is paid by the government to see, let’s say, eight patients a day.  He has time to see more than that, of course, but since he’s only paid to see that many that’s all he does.  Or if he’s not totally unambitious, he schedules to see people under the condition that they pay out of pocket.  The number of people that can afford that is ridiculously small even when they’re faced with cancer.  If they can scrape up the money, or can wait six months of more to see him and he determines they have cancer, it’s back into the public system for all the treatments (and a long waiting list for all of those too).  The list is made up of most serious, youngest cases first.  So if you find out you have cancer later in life and your health is already bad, you may be out of luck.  The other crazy thing is that the government allots a certain amount of money for each medical department each year.  If they use up their money before the end of the year, they’re out of luck too.  So guess what happened to my friend Krystyna who got sick last November.  I took her to the hospital and they actually said – We’re not taking any more patients in this department until the first of the year. !!!  I was shocked and didn’t think I’d heard right, but, yes, she ended up having to wait until February.  And she was in horrible pain all the time (she has some kind of a stomach growth that they say is non-cancerous but inoperable.  ???)  They prescribed her pain medicine, but she couldn’t afford it.  We have many more options open to us since we have more money than the average Pole.  And in the back of my mind there’s the thought that if things ever get really bad we could alway fly home or to Germany or something (although Ben’s sister Katie experienced a little of that while Jack was stationed there and I don’t know if it’s much better).  But what about the people here?  They’re stuck with the system.  And people in the States spout idiocy about superior socialized health care.  Whew – nice tirade, Sarah.  Anyway, please pray for our friends in Krakow.  I’m sure they’ll need strength.  Clarissa is about 2 and a half.

I’m just rambling…

Not that I have anything interesting to write or any great recent pictures of the girls at hand; I’m just bored with this really old post.  What’s with the Johnson sisters?  It takes us like a month on average to write something new.  What a crazy day it’s been – no the whole week really.  Well, maybe just life in general.  I have a ladies’ bible study to prepare for Thursday and tomorrow’s – shock – Wednesday already.  So why’m I sitting here blogging?  Good question.  The days fly by unbelievably fast.  And I have so little to show for them.  My house looks like a tornado hit – permanently.  And I count a total of 45 minutes that I spent with my daughter Mikaela today.  No lie.  We had to go into Warsaw as soon as we dropped her off for kindergarten to do more interviewing for our application to temporarily reside here.  We waited in line for 2 hours (luckily Maia was feeling almost nice today   and then an hour more during the interview.  Very uninteresting and yes, more documents are required.  Never mind the 2 solid inches of paperwork that he had on his desk for EACH of us already.  (That’s not an exaggeration)  Hopped in the car, raced through trafficky Warsaw and read through my notes and Ben’s all the 1 and a half hours home, picked Kaela up from a friend’s house, ran into the house, changed quickly and jumped back in the car to head to the most hilarious church volleyball outing I’ve ever been to!  My friend Nadiya has a good heart, but she’s the craziest volleyball player I’ve ever seen.  I was CRYING, it was so funny.  Man I’m going to miss her.  She and her husband have been our coworkers for the last almost 3 years and they’re moving this month.  I can’t even think about it.  She’s the only person around here with whom I’ve felt able to really share what’s in my heart.  Not that we always understand one another, she’s Ukranian and we both speak in not very pretty Polish.  But we try.  And she’s so funny!  Not that she tries to be.  She just has these hilarious old Ukranian wives tales that she totally believes.  Like when you have a stuffy nose, hang upside down and pour a mixture of onion juice  and honey up your nose.  Yeah, that’d do it!!  Ben has been collecting Nadiya’s bits of advice and writes them all in his leather journal.  Maybe I’ll post them sometime.   Kaela asked me while we were in the car on our way out to volleyball what a cigarette is.  The Johnson in me caused me to go into a lot of detail – as much as I knew – about cigarettes.  She decided that people that grow tobacco don’t understand how dangerous it is, and if they do, then they must only want the bad guys to smoke it.  She seemed disturbed and said that she just hadn’t KNOWN that cigarettes were bad.  Then she asked me if there are a lot of other bad things in the world that she doesn’t know about yet.  She said she thought a lot of people don’t know that cigarettes are dangerous and that we should tell everyone.  And on the way home from volleyball, she asked me to tell her a ‘real’ story that really happened and she said she’d tell me one too.  She wanted to go first so she told me the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.  I love that kid so much it makes my heart hurt.