The trip to the Santa Barbara Zoo was lovely. We picked up a friend on the way and Anya got to see the ocean for the first time from the car window. She had her hands on the door where it meets the window and her head was turned studiously toward the sea.
A soft, slow and reverent "Woooooow!" was heard from the backseat, followed by, "It's beautiful." Then after a seeing more of the coast, she added. "Manoega, (many/much) manoega, manoega water."
The weather was incredibly wonderful and the zoo itself is beautifully landscaped. Anya liked looking around at the animals (my father had taken her to the Living Desert Zoo already) and she especially loved the Capybaras (a yucky large 100 pound rodent, at least in my opinion), the monkeys, the vultures, the baby otters, the elephants and the giraffes. The video we have is of her feeding the giraffe and of her mimicking the monkeys grooming each other. After a few hours of meandering around, we left and had a nice lunch on State Street in Santa Barbara.
monkey video
giraffe video
I also have Anya talking about how bolshoy (big) the elephants are and I posted it here so you could see what I put up with every day. Note the part about how wide they are, that's what I'm talkin' about. She tells me at least daily how bolshoy my thighs, backside, stomach and chest are...and she does it just the way she does on the video. Dave has told me to consider her vantage point, but that helps little. So, if I look depressed, it is due to a loss of self-esteem, brought on by 12 year old bullying.
The elephants
I try not to tell her to smile, since she does this with her mouth. Actually, I just noticed these aren't too bad, it used to be a super
stretched out pursing of the lips. Getting better every day!
Her favorite animal by far. Yes, her favorite at the zoo, the dog statue.
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Imagine our surprise several weeks ago when we discovered that Anya didn't know she was a dwarf. Man, more grief to deal with. We were adamantly told, "I will sleep and I will get bolshoy."
What?! Uh, who told her that? Knowing her, she may have made it up in her head. She was in the orphanage with another Achondroplasia Dwarf, but apparently, Anya thought all this time that she would sleep and get bigger and probably thought the same about the other girl too.
How do you delicately tell someone that what they thought they were, they aren't? She was pretty stubborn about accepting our suggestions that she may have little arms and legs, so we upped the strategy. Knowing that Anya respects doctors, we finally told her that the doctors in Russia and in America said her bones were small.
After some very sad conversations ("The doctors said I'm little, it's bad,") and clarification about people not being bad because of differences from the norm, she has accepted that she is a Little Person. But then we realized that we needed to show her what her future holds for her physically as a woman. Several people told us about a local family that is a little couple and they have a 12 year old daughter that is little too!! We did get together with them and Anya loved them. I was concerned that she would act disgusted, as she had before when seeing dwarfs, but we have gotten together twice and Anya adores them all. Yes!
Good try sweetheart.
~Monica
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