Day 16...

October 19, 2006
Oh, Yesterday we took some gold fish crackers for Alex, we think he is getting bored with the puffs! So Jerry put the gold fish cracker in Alex’s mouth… he chewed or mashed it around a little bit and then made a yucky faced and out came the goldfish cracker! Jerry was so offended! He can’t believe our kid doesn’t like gold fish crackers! We laughed pretty hard!! Ryleigh will have to teach him a few things when we get home.

So Phillipich picked us up this morning, in his car! He said it was the battery. I don’t know why the radiator “blew up” yesterday, if it was only the battery. But whatever. Alex was fun today, he still says da da da da at me when I get him! It is so cute. He loves us! We gave him the vitamins and his little snack. Then we went straight to playing with these wonderful plastic cubes, rectangles, balls and cones. He has finally discovered the joy of knocking things over. We would stack them as high as we could and he would crawl as fast as he could and knock them over! He was hilarious! It was fun… we played with those most of the time. Once this morning when I caught him crawling away, you know when I “get” him, and he laughs and squeals da da da da, well not only did he squeal the da da stuff, but gave me 4 open mouth, slobbery, baby kisses, right on my mouth! I couldn’t believe it! It was so sweet. At first I thought he was going to bite me, again, but no… just sort of kisses, I guess! At least I like to think of them as kisses! We kiss him enough, he should know how to kiss by now! It was grand!

So after our morning visit, we had lunch with our friends and then came home to meet with Olga and Aliya to go over pre-court for tomorrow. It won’t be too bad, I don’t think. We have to dress up, bring our passports, and our pictures from home and the babyhouse visits. They will ask us questions and we are to make sure that we speak to the judge, not the interpreter when answering the judge’s questions. Then we discussed the cribs we are hoping to purchase for the babyhouse… they are going to look at some more tomorrow. I guess the ones that they said would be ok, are not that high of quality, so we are trying to find higher quality cribs so they will last longer. We really don’t want to buy the babyhouse junk!

When we went out to meet Phillipich to take us over to the babyhouse, he wasn’t there… we finally realized that the other guy Phillipich found to drive us was there instead. I guess Phillipich’s car was having problems again. Poor guy! These guys over here baby their cars! Any where you go you will see guys wiping their cars down with rags or washing them off at the spigots on the side of the streets. I have only seen a couple of women driving here. The cars have a lot of miles on them, Phillipich’s Mercedes has about 280,000, miles or so, but is in very good condition, and drives well. (except for today) The guy today that picked us up had about 190,000 miles on it, a VW Jetta, it doesn’t look very old though, it is in perfect condition! They love the Toyota Land Cruisers! It is funny... there are quite a few of them. Yesterday, I actually saw a Sequoia, same color as mine! I was excited, but it reminded me that I miss, my non-rattling, leather-seated, “luxury” truck. All of the vehicles rattle pretty bad, the roads are awful bumpy though, if our roads were this bumpy, our cars would rattle too. Olga went with us, I guess to talk to the babyhouse director or something.

Natasha met us there. Alex was a disaster today… we played with those plastic blocks again. He walked up and down the chairs a bunch today too. We are trying to encourage the walking… his legs are really (!!) wobbly. It cute though. We also introduced him to the tape measure… we bought a Russian tape measure at the market. So we took it today to measure the length of his feet, to see if we can buy him some shoes here. We should just get him slippers, I mean what does a baby need shoes for? He won’t be walking around outside or anything! I know, I know… they look cute! :) Anyways he had fun with the tape measure, and his feet with the tights and socks on are 11 centimeters long! So hopefully we can locate a pair of shoes that will work! In about the last 10 minutes, Alex was relentless in wanting to crawl toward Natasha, he wanted her to take him back to eat! He was a mess… he crawled over and held onto her, she finally picked him up and he immediately laid his head down on her shoulder, and gave her the puppy dog eyes! We couldn’t believe it! That little actor! Ah! He was trying to get her to take him to get food… so he did that for a couple minutes and then we took him away and distracted him for a while. Until it was time to go! Then his favorite caregiver came for him and he went nuts with happiness! Someday soon that will change!

So tonight we went to the Pushkin Hotel, the couple who flew in with us, also have pre-court tomorrow. So I gave Josh and Jerry haircuts so they will be presentable for the judge tomorrow! Haha! I used my scrapbook scissors! My pink ones!! :) they made a home cooked meal in their room for us, all 6 of us. We had bread, broccoli, rice-a-roni and peirogis. It was really yummy! I guess we are kind of tired of eating out, but it is so much easier than cooking in the apartments, since there really is no prepackaged foods, in our language anyways. We are going to get some pierogis though… :) We took a taxi back and it was about $1.50 from the Pushkin to the Atrium.

Tomorrow is Pre-court!!!!!!! We will find out our final court date tomorrow!!! Yeah!!!!