(Maureen's Post)
First, let me just backtrack a little bit to cover our journey to Karaganda. Vitalli picked us up from our apartment in Almaty yesterday afternoon and drove us to the airport for our evening flight. On the way to the airport we passed a cycling team (one group of three and later a group of two), all wearing "Team Astana" jerseys, apparently training - maybe for next month's Tour de France. Sean and I recognized the jerseys right away and were like, "way cool!" For those who may not know, Team Astana was the cycling team that Lance Armstrong rode with when he rode in the Tour de France in 2009. I was surprised that the cyclists weren't being chaperoned by a car so that they would kind of be protected from the traffic, but it didn't look like they were, or at least I didn't see a car trailing them. They were right in the mix of the traffic which made me a little bit nervous for them (and if you've gone through fast traffic in Kazakhstan before, you know why - some of the drivers here are worse than NYC taxicab drivers). However, that didn't seem to faze the cyclists, even at one point when a city bus was right up behind them.
We eventually arrived at the airport and met up with the Chinns. There were also three Belgian couples on our flight that are also adopting from Karaganda with our agency's facilitators. So, including us, the Chinns, the Kaplans and their son Jadyn (also adopted from Kokshetau, like James), and the three Belgian couples make a total of six families who are adopting from Karaganda all at the same time. It's my understanding this is the first time this many families have been to Karaganda at one given time for our coordinator, so we will be having to share our drivers and interpreters with each other. Thankfully, it is summertime and we should be able to get around more on our own without a driver. Plus, we do know a little bit of Russian, at least enough to get by with what we would need, so we wouldn't always need an interpreter other the Baby House visits, court, or any other official adoption proceedings. Coincidentally, when we were in Kokshetau in 2007 there were also many families there at the same time (six families), which was unusual. There, too, we also had to share our driver/interpreter and had to go out on our own a few times. That turned out fine, so we don't have any worries about doing some things on our own here.
The flight to Karaganda on Air Astana in a Fokker-50 prop plane was definitely an upgrade compared to our previous flight to Kokshetau on Air Kokshetau in a Yakovlov-40 (YAK) jet plane back in 2007. Even though our Air Astana flight was only 2-hrs. long we still got a meal and beverage service, along with hard candies for take-off and landing (to suck on to help with the cabin pressure change). We also had a very smooth flight, and I wasn't as nervous with this plane as I was back then on the YAK, wishing for a vodka shot - haha!
We finally landed in Karaganda at about 11PM, collected our baggage and met with Natasha, our coordinator, and the two interpreters, Juliya, and Lusy (who also happens to be Natasha's daughter). By the time we made it to the apartment it was midnight, and we were exhausted as we were still trying to get adjusted to the time change as well as needing to catch up on sleep. However, we wanted to just go ahead and unpack so we could get settled, and that took about an hour and a half. Plus we had to be ready for pick-up by 8AM for our first visit day and didn't want to be scrambling for things at the last minute. We were finally able to get to sleep about 2AM.
So, we awoke early and got ready to finally go to the Baby House this morning. Once there we met up with the Kaplans (had arrived a day earlier), the Chinns, and one of the Belgian families. Then after some waiting we were taken to the Baby House Director's office, where we took care of some official business, then chit-chatted a bit before they brought some children into the room. And then we saw him - there was an adorable little boy who we would like to name Michael. He looked as if he wasn't sure of what was going on. He sure was fascinated with James, though! We decided we wanted to start vists with him and made our wishes known. Then we went to the play room for Group 4, which is his group.
Michael has a very sweet disposition and enjoys being cuddled. He's got blond hair (so Sean has a "Mini-Me" - ha!) but it still may darken over time. He has long eyelashes and beautiful eyes which appear to be grey in color. He's 9 1/2 months old and is mobile; yep - we've got a crawler! He also likes to suck on his fingers/hand/fist after eating. Speaking of eating, my first duty was to feed Michael a bowl of rice porridge with some sort of mashed meat with meat powder mixed in, followed by warmed juice (remember, they don't believe in giving babies anything cold here). Man, I could not feed this child fast enough! A few times he tried to grab the spoon from me (and succeeded, too), almost as if to say, "I could eat faster if I did it myself!" Apparently I didn't burp him too well afterwards, as it didn't take long for me to be re-inducted into the Spit-Up Club. He also has the cutest laugh and gave us some wonderful smiles today, even though we couldn't catch them all on camera. We got to take Michael outside a little bit today. This is the first time since arriving at the Baby House that he has ever been outdoors, so when the wind kicked up a little bit today he wasn't sure if he liked it blowing in his face. It started to become clear that he didn't like it, and he looked annoyed and proceeded to blow raspberries (as a counter-measure, I guess).
Our visiting schedule with Michael will be two visits from 10AM-12PM and 2PM-4PM Mondays through Saturdays, and one visit from 10AM-12PM on Sundays. On most days, the plan will be for all three of us (Sean, myself, and James) to go to the Baby House for the morning visits, and then have either myself or Sean return for the afternoon visit at the Baby House while the other parent stays at the apartment with James so he can get his afternoon nap. Sean and I will take turns visiting Michael in the afternoons.
James has been doing surprisingly well in his interaction with Michael. I thought James would be more jealous since he loves being the center of attention, but it hasn't been too much of an issue so far. He's fine as long as he gets his share of hugs and kisses from us and his rough-housing time with Daddy. Of course, this is just the first day, so it will be interesting to see how he reacts over the next few days. Michael is really fascinated by James, watching his every move. In fact, all the babies in the room are. After bringing over several toys for Michael to play with, James proceeded to do cartwheels he learned from his tumbling class all around the Group 4 playroom, and the babies were captivated. Of course, James didn't mind having an audience. He doesn't mind the attention he gets from the Baby House director and staff, either. When we were in the director's office in the morning James was in one of his usual chatty moods asking lots of questions, and she remarked that he seemed to be is doing very well (at least, that's what I interpreted since she kept saying "harasho" which is Russian for "well" - of course, it may also be that I'm biased since I'm his mother).
So, that is our post for today. We apologize for not posting sooner, but we were not able to get set up to do our posts from Almaty, and it took us a while to get internet access in Karaganda. Today we had lunch at Assorti restaurant at City Mall which also has free wi-fi, but our laptop wouldn't connect. The plan is to try out the Cosmonaut Hotel restaurant for lunch in-between visits tomorrow so we can again attempt to connect to the internet via their free wi-fi. So, if you are reading this post after Tuesday morning (June 22) then that means it worked! Unfortunately, our apartment does not have internet access because of the configuration of the telephone system, so we will be checking email and uploading our posts from an internet cafe, hopefully at least once daily or every other day. We use Homestead for our website which is nice since it allows us to work on the updates offline, then upload the completed updates once we have internet access. We will still update daily, but hope you all will understand if the uploads are more sporadic - we may have to upload a few days' worth of updates at a time. Hopefully we can find someplace with free wi-fi or an internet cafe within walking distance from our apartment.
That's all for today! Enjoy our pics below and we'll catch up with you tomorrow!
