More days!

October 24, 2006
When we got there this morning the German families where in the room playing with their kids, as the kids were getting ready to leave we noticed they were all dressed up, they had had a performance that morning, maybe in honor of the holiday tomorrow. They looked so cute! Alex dug through the bag for a while, first this morning… maybe he was looking for the crazy bottle. He always starts smacking his lips when he thinks food is close by! Funny baby! We gave him his bottle and instead of just taking the bottle away as soon as it is empty, we let him hold it in his mouth for a while, until HE realized it was empty, then he pulled on the nipple for a while and soon he was smiling up at me instead of crying! Yeah!! I don’t like it when he cries, and he hasn’t even full on cried yet! We haven’t even seen actual tears yet! The older kids had left a hat in the room from the performance so we tried it on Alex, it was a little big, but looked so cute!!! We put his shoes on again, and let him try to crawl around in them for a while. Then Aliya called about the paintings and Jerry let Alex “talk” to her on Natasha’s cell phone, which he hung up. So Aliya had to call back. Ha!

Today we picked up our paintings! They are amazing!!! This guy is unbelievably good! We also bought a couple more paintings from him and he had done 2 of Alex, even though we thought he was only doing one. It was awesome! Now we just have to make sure they are dry enough to roll up and bring home! After picking those up we headed to the Bazaar with Aliya, Kristy, Richard, Suzanne and Lee. Jerry wanted to get one of those old fashioned fur hats, and we needed to get Alex a snowsuit! These kids over here are so bundled up when they go out, that they can not move, literally!! I will try to get some pictures of babies out and about, they just sit there with their arms straight out to the sides, since they won’t go down. It is funny!


October 25, 2006
When we arrived at the baby house, and our interpreter went in to give the caregiver Alex’s clothes for the day, she came out and said he was in there crying, he is waiting for us today! By the time he came out he was smiling… but his eyes were red… so maybe he knows! Plus, he was instantly ready for his bottle. He went to the bag and was looking for it!! Then when we get it out to mix it up he starts fussing and trying to grab it, like we are just teasing him with it, and not really going to give it to him… We think maybe some other babies in his group still get a bottle, and he does not anymore. So he is afraid he will not get it. He gets really upset!! Something is going on there! So today, I held him and he was a lot more relaxed than he has ever been with us feeding him the bottle. I think he is starting to realize that we ARE going to feed him. He actually almost fell to sleep. If we had a full size bottle, I think he would have. He held on to my wrist with both of his little hands! He was sad when it was empty, but he recovered fairly quickly today. The plastic blocks are gone now, so we played with the same old boring toys today! :) haha! We got to play with him for about 2 hours today, because our friends Bill and Robin are not allowed to visit, today. It is a holiday, and their agency is funny about stuff. Today is Republic Day. Not exactly sure what it all means, but it is a Holiday and lots of businesses are closed, I guess. Well about three quarters of the way through our visit, he spotted the bottle in the bag! Big mistake! Remember how upset he gets! Oh dear! It took about 5 minutes before he forgot about it, in baby time that is forever!! He still tries the fake crying, to get what he wants… as long as we ignore it, he stops and is just fine. Like today, he did not want us to put his shoes on him (we are practicing for tomorrow) so he started to “cry” I checked to make sure there really wasn’t a problem, and then tried again, he started again… so I just told him was fine and kept putting the shoe on, as soon as he realized that didn’t work, he chilled out and let me put it on! He is not quite sure what to do with the shoes on… He doesn’t like to take steps with them on… I think they weigh his feet down; we will keep working at it though! He did a few more chin-ups today, and of course tried to bang on the TV screen and get the camera! He was getting very hungry by the time his caregiver came, he still laughs! Rascal!

We also got tickets to the Drama Theatre in town, it is in Kazakh, so our interpreter can’t really tell what it is about, but we don’t care. Kazakh is a very hard language to speak and write, so not very many people can read and write it. I guess only about 85% of the people who speak it can read or write it! So hopefully all our friends can go with us tonight, because we bought 10 tickets! They were only 200 tenge! About $1.50! We hope that we will be able to get the story line with out understanding what they are saying!
We also have to get mostly packed up tonight, since tomorrow we get the baby!!!!!!!! We will not want to have to do much packing tomorrow night! We leave Friday morning for Astana, and then Almaty. We can’t believe our time in Uralsk is almost over! It went so fast!!! We are going to miss this place, even though we want to go home! We made sure that the babyhouse knows that should Alex have a biological sibling come into the system that we want to be called first, so maybe we will be back sometime. Either way when Alex is older we will bring him back so he can see where he came from originally!