Day 7--November 1, 2008

Day 7—November 1, 2008

Today we visited Aydar and found that he prefers technology to anything else. We finally found a ball, and he played with it for only a short time. Instead, he took about 50 pictures of John with the digital camera. We also flipped the video screen around to video tape him, and, trust me, we have some VERY close up shots of Aydar! He loves to put the lens cover on the video camera, something that he needs to squeeze and center before it will stay on--impressive for a four year old! He has an excellent arm when it comes to throwing the ball. He threw it to John every time (except when I was trying to catch it on tape), and caught it really well. It truly looks like his fine motor skills are superb.

We also taught him some sign language—he now knows the sign for “mama” and “papa”. We really think sign language is going to be key for him, because he literally does not make a sound unless we are tickling him, and then he laughs out loud. When we arrived today, he was dressed very warmly—a T-shirt, heavy sweater, and long johns under his jeans. And it is HOT everywhere. I blew down the front and back of his shirt, and he just stood still, transfixed like the greatest thing has just happened to him. We opened the windows in the playroom, and were questioned about it, but not told to close them.

We also found a number of stores that sold toys today. Anything American (e.g. Lego’s) is very expensive. A Barbie doll is $80. We stopped in a store that had some toys in the window, but the store turned out to be a shoe store with just a couple of toys. The shoes in the store that we looked at that would have been cute for Karis were $245! Yikes! We found some other toys elsewhere that were more affordable, and passed on the shoes.

The photo developer was closed tonight when we went to have pictures developed. I hope it won’t be a problem tomorrow. I’m sure it closed early because it is Saturday, even though the sign on the door only had one set of hours (9:00 – 7:00). We’re going to have to make sure we get pictures developed after our morning visit to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

We found our “Harris Teeter” of Almaty, that is very clean, bright, and has an excellent selection of food. I am still leery of buying meat—I don’t want to end up with something like horse intestines and think that it’s hot dogs. Instead, we had fish sticks, corn and bread with olive oil. Unfortunately, we have only one pan to cook in for a month. Oh yes, one more thing: they have the market on desserts. Everything is fabulous.

We discovered that we can’t have a court hearing until our 14 day bonding period is complete. And I don’t believe that they can even set it up before we have completed the bonding period, so we don’t have a clue when we will be coming home. Please take good care of Karis and yourselves for us.