Because our life wasn't complex enough...

...we're adding a new teenager to the household temporarily.

Note: this post revised from its original version and greatly extended.

Natasha was one of the Kazakh kids we managed to bring to America for the summer a couple of years ago, and she was adopted by an American family. Unfortunately -- and this happens sometimes -- she was a terrible fit in some ways, and even though everybody has tried hard to make it work, everybody is more or less miserable more or less 24/7. So she's going to come live with us for a couple of months while everybody takes a breather and destresses and regains some decision-making ability; and then she and her parents can try to decide whether there's a good permanent solution to their conflicts, and if so, what that might be.

But it's not that big a deal because Kasia's off spending a semester with her grandmother; so it just means we're back to eight kids a little sooner than we expected...

It does, however, mean that the following picture, which I finally managed to load onto my computer only yesterday even though we took it a couple of months ago, is temporarily out of date already.

Back row: Me, Sean, Rusty, Kegan, Dessie
On my lap: Sally
Front row: Merry, Anya, Kinya, Kasia

Natasha knows us pretty well already, though, especially me. She and I spent a very long day together back when she first came to America. In fact we toured the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland together, she and I. She was a last-minute addition to a group of Kazakh kids we were bringing to America for the summer, and I couldn't get her onto the same plane I'd put Aigul (our twenty-one-year-old escort) and the other six kids on. So I switched my ticket to a different flight that connected through Cleveland rather than through Atlanta...and then on the day we were all flying, Continental's entire computer system went down, and they lost track of where all their planes were and who was supposed to be connecting were, and the ripple effect pretty much brought all American air traffic to its knees. Natasha and I made it to Cleveland on our original flight, and then we got lucky and managed to get seats on a flight that left only five hours later. But that gave us five hours to sit in Cleveland's airport; and although the Cleveland airport is a hoppin' place -- people route themselves through Cleveland and get intentionally long layovers just because the airport is so much fun to hang out in, I think somebody once told me -- we decided we'd still rather go see the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. (Note to persons who have never made a living as a 250,000-mile-per-year consultant and therefore are not familiar with every major airport in the country and most of the minor ones: the Cleveland airport is not really a tourist destination.)

But Aigulya and the other six kids? They weren't as lucky. They didn't get to leave the Atlanta airport at all -- no Hall of Fame for them, no walking along the shore of Lake Erie. And it took them a lot longer to get rebooked. In the end the host families and I met them at the San Antonio airport at two in the morning -- about twelve hours late. So their day really sucked. But mine turned out to be a whole bunch of fun, because Natasha was great company and we wound up having a ball.

Natasha will be eighteen in December. Since she's only in tenth grade, however, we now have "twin" sophomores (Natasha and the Princess) as well as "triplet" eighth-graders (Kegan and Kinya and Sean). Anya's delighted because she knows and likes Natasha (the two of them will now be sharing a room). But the person whose life has been instantly improved the most by Natasha's arrival (though said person doesn't yet realize it) is not really a person at all. Natasha is a card-carrying animal lover; so whatever else happens while Natasha's here, the dog at least will never lack for love and attention.

Update note: In my original post, dashed off hastily, I made it sound as though Natasha was leaving her family's house for good. It's important to make it clear that that is not the case; she may in the end not go back, but we certainly don't know that for sure yet. So I rewrote the post to correct that impression.