Day 5--October 30, 2008

Day 5—October 30, 2008

Today was a big day for us!!!! We finally saw Aydar (pronounced “I-dar”, rolling the “r” on the end). He was absolutely adorable. He was shy at first, of course, and we stayed in an office for a while until we asked if they had a playroom. The playroom was small, but had huge stuffed animals (like from a carnival) and some baby toys, and a car, which he enjoyed playing with for a while. He loved John’s camera, and was excited to see a picture of Karis on the carousal. He smiled and said “Aht!” (sp) for “horse” . They have a horse statue made of wire on the grounds, so he was familiar with it. We showed him several pictures of Karis, telling him “sistah” (sp) for “sister”. He will definitely know who she is when he meets her. The biggest toy of all for Aydar: John’s camera! When John showed him pictures of Karis and Boo, he started pressing all kinds of buttons. John’s phone is a PDA phone, so it started gong haywire with all of the different functions Aydar was selecting J. We took pictures while we were there, and showed him the pictures on the camera. He got a kick out of that. We bought two photo albums—one to fill and leave with him when we go back to the U.S. (the orphanage said that children are sad when the adopting families leave), and one to fill and take to court with us (and, of course, to take home to show everyone). For those of you with boys, you will be happy to know that we got a taste of what you’ve been telling us—he had a stuffed caterpillar, and started banging it on the stuffed dog. He’s all boy! We wish we had brought toys with us. We mistakenly thought that the orphanage would have toys, but they didn’t have any that were age appropriate in the room where we played. There is one toy store nearby, but most of what they had were hard plastic toys—difficult to take back and forth. We found a couple of other stores with a small selection of toys. We searched for a ball, to no avail, believe it or not. John bought a couple of Matchbox cars, and we’ll walk further tomorrow to shop to see if we have better luck. We’ll upload pictures from the nearby café that has free WiFi. I’m sure it will take a while. We hope to take him to a Western doctor soon and get a physical to confirm his health. We will visit him again tomorrow (and every day until we leave), so we’ll send another update.