Day 14—November 8, 2008

Day 14—November 8, 2008

Yesterday, John received his first kiss from Aidar, and today, he received countless kisses. John was showing Aidar how to put together a puzzle, and Aidar just leaned in and kissed John on his cheek. John gave him a kiss back, and Aidar kissed him again. They went back and forth and back and forth—I didn’t know who would stop first! It’s getting harder and harder to find a place to play with Aidar; there are three families (including us) that we know of who are visiting children, but only one playroom. One of the children is a baby (8 months), so she can’t do much on the playground. It had rained overnight, so we didn’t play outside. We ended up in the waiting room again. I think it will make the next week difficult.

Aidar wasn’t as interested in the puzzle as we thought he would be, but it had quite a few pieces, and would be difficult for any small child (it was the smallest we could find). He enjoys coloring with the markers. He actually made a little bit of back and forth sweeping motion when coloring instead of making just lines. Unfortunately, we were kind of scolded by the staff because he had ink on his hands yesterday, so they wanted us to wash them before we brought him back today. We’ll have to look harder for crayons.

Our afternoon time with Aidar was inside as well because it was raining. The care takers at the orphanage said that Aidar was not feeling that well. (at least that is what we think they were saying) He did seem a little sluggish but he warmed up after a little bit. We split our time in the playroom with another family. We tried the puzzle again and he still was not very interested. We took an economical lego type building set today and he enjoyed that. We also took a counting book , (1-10) It has the little beads you slide as you go through the different numbers. He did pretty well considering he probably know the Kazakh words for the numbers. We thought these new items would help with the inside time.

We wondered yesterday how much more bureaucracy they could throw at us before this was over, and it wasn’t even two hours before we were told that Almaty (the city we’re in) wants three copies of our marriage certificate. We’re not sure why. We had already had one certificate apostilled, and we have more copies, but our copies are with us here in Almaty, and the others must be apostilled in NC. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just hand them over while we’re here? It would cost too much money to send them back from Kazakhstan, so our process will be delayed another week so that we can handle this when we get back to the U.S. If we weren’t waiting on another document, we would incur the cost, but it wouldn’t make sense to pay the price if we’re just going to be waiting anyway.

That’s what is happening here. We hate that we’re going to miss Karis’s and Alexa’s party tomorrow. We know that they will have so much fun. Thank you again to everyone who is helping with it. We can’t wait to come home and see everyone. We will have to reschedule our flight, since the orphanage is not counting our first day as part of the required 14 day bonding period. We will try to make reservations for Friday, but we still have a few more days to go in the bonding period, so we want to make sure that no one gets sick before now and then.