Day 13--November 7, 2008

Day 13—November 7, 2008

Today, John received his first kiss from Aidar! Again, it makes everything all worth while, doesn’t it? We gave our coordinator Aidar’s new name: Kai Aidar Stuart Hale. We will eventually call him Kai. It seems to fit him best. We’re curious to know what “Aidar” means. We couldn’t find anything under what we thought was the original spelling (“Aydar”).

Marianne saved the day with her goodie bag for Aidar. She had balloons, stickers (he took all of them at once), a ball, and bubbles. The big thing, though, was that she had a bubble blower that was the kind you put in your mouth; Aidar put it in his mouth, and actually blew a bubble! He put it behind his teeth, whereas we put it just in our lips, and he blew a bubble! He then promptly mocked me, saying “You did it!” ;-) We gave him some markers today and a coloring book. He kind of knew how to hold the markers, but had a hard time coloring. He didn’t go back & forth—only one direction. Maybe crayons will be better for him.

John and I thought that we might be able to speed up the process of our gov’t application by going to the U.S. Embassy and getting fingerprinted there, instead of waiting until we got back to the U.S. We had been digitally fingerprinted before, but they are more than 15 months old, so they wouldn’t accept them as current. We read on the Kazakhstan U.S. Embassy website that they do electronic fingerprints for visas, so we called. The Adoption Dept. only does ink fingerprints. After we had the ink cards sent to the U.S., we were later told by our U.S. contact that they will only use digital fingerprints in the U.S. to process the application. We don’t get it. Our fingerprints from 2 years ago are still our fingerprints. The ones we had today were from the U.S. Embassy. It’s not like if there’s a murder, and the FBI gets fingerprints from the crime scene, that they say “Sorry, we don’t have a match within the past 15 months, so we can’t use these.” We wonder just how much bureaucracy can they throw at us before this process is over.

We’re still waiting on one more document before our dossier is complete and up to date. It looks like our coordinator won’t apply for a court hearing until all documents are received, and we’re told it could take a month until the hearing is scheduled, so we will most likely be home next weekend. We will miss Aidar terribly, just as we miss Karis terribly now. We both have to be present for the court hearing, and then they have a 14 day appeal window before the court finalizes the decision. We both also have to be present for that, but we’re hoping that they will waive the appeal period, and we can do everything at the hearing. We will ask that pictures of his cleft be submitted, and emphasize the urgency in getting him immediate medical help. Aidar does not speak clearly at all—you have to know him to know what he is saying (like when he is mocking us!). He is still very quiet, but we know he would love to be understood.