We received news today that our court date is being moved up! Our new court date is Thursday, July 22nd. It's only moved up by a day, but we'll take it! That's six days from now, so we are making preparations and drafting our speeches for court (which have to be memorized, by the way). I'm sure it will be pretty intense, but we are hopeful that the judge will rule in our favor. Right now we want nothing more than to bring Michael into our family!
We've also finally secured flights back home, thank goodness. It wasn't easy, though - we're having to take more flights in order to make it home, as we're having to be re-routed through a different city. All other available flights were totally booked. Apparently, the end of July is a very busy time for travel! Not surprising since most people also go on holiday during the month of August. We just hope all the flights we have to take to get from Karaganda back to Houston (4 flights in a row) will go fairly well, especially with James in tow!
Our visits are still going well. Every morning, James insists on being the one to greet Michael in his crib. All three of us get huge smiles from him when we arrive. We finally got the equivalent of Baby Orajel at the pharmacy, and Sean was able to put it on Michael's gums after feeding him his lunch yesterday. He was in a much better mood after that. He's still doing his favorite things - pulling up and cruising. It's so funny because he becomes so much more vocal when he's active. He also has a lot of tickle buttons, too! I just love to hear him laugh.
Well, so far on this trip I've managed to read 3 novels and 2 non-fiction books. Sean has read a couple of non-fiction books, as well as watched a few movies. We've finished watching Seasons 1 and 2 of "The Big Bang Theory," completed Season 6 of "24," "24: Redemption." We are now in the middle of watching Season 7 of "24" which, I must admit, is moving faster than Season 6 and will probably be finished by tomorrow. We've also spent a lot of time watching the regular cable TV and are actually able to catch one show in English on BBC every once in a while, since even BBC is dubbed over in Russian most of the time. I've watched a couple of cooking shows, which have been very interesting. I think I've even found the Russian equivalent of Paula Deen! She sure was cooking with a whole lot of masla (butter). We've also come to the conclusion that they show a lot of music videos here! There are actually two stations here that show music videos regularly in Russian (and some in English) - I thought there was only one station before. In addition, one of the national Kazakh TV stations shows music videos in the evening, including music videos of Kazakh boy bands that I find so entertaining. Also, almost every restaurant we've been to has a flat-screen TV, usually playing music videos, too. So, it really should be no surprise that we can sing along (at least part of the refrain) to some of the music videos, even the ones in Russian. So, yeah - we've been here a little while.
So, that concludes our post for today. Hope you enjoy the pictures!
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