Bonding day 6 of 15

This morning, Lincoln seemed to feel a bit better. His nose is still stuffy and he now has a cough. He was more playful and more talkative. Christy & Zahria left for Almaty today. We are sad to see them go but are thrilled for them that they will be heading back to the states very soon. Zahria decided to donate her walker to the play room in the baby house. Let me tell you, Lincoln did not care that it was pretty much totally pink. Eric put him in it and he took off. Nothing was stopping him. He scooted over blankets, toys anything that got into his way. He would bump into a chair or table and he’d turn himself around. Thankfully, Gabriel was not on the floor during all of this. We have another walker in the play room but that one he could only go backwards and sideways at a very slow pace. We have a little girl in our play room with us, Maria; she is probably around two years old. Her new Mommy and Daddy walk her all over the playroom for pretty much the whole visit. Lincoln sits and watches and you can just tell he is thinking “Hmm wonder if I can do that?” It was really cute, Lincoln was in the walker running around and I got out his cottage cheese and called his name. He looked at me and I showed him his spoon and cottage cheese and he came over to me mouth open ready to eat. He is always ready to eat and most times cries when the food is gone. I do not believe he knows his name I think he just knows my voice. They have been telling us that it usually takes the kids 3 weeks before they recognize their new names.

Between visits today we got dropped off at our hotel. We decided to be brave and walk back to the super market that we went to yesterday. We knew they had a deli counter with pre-made foods. Once we got to the cashier Eric says to me “this is all cold”. We thought it was going to be warm and ready to eat. So then we were questioning if it was actually cooked or not. We called Aina (translator) to ask her if we should eat it or not. Not seeing what we bought she couldn’t tell us for sure but she thought we would probably be okay if we ate it. Not too reassuring but we went ahead and ate some of it anyway. We figured we probably would be able to tell if it wasn’t cooked. It was pretty good, not the best that we have had. It was probably the first true Kazakh food that we have had. If it was warmed up and if we knew exactly what we were eating it probably would have been better. They eat horse meat here as often as Americans eat beef. As far as we know we have not eaten any horse yet but we may have today. When living here you just have to have an open mind and not get wigged out if you eat something you would not normally eat.

Our afternoon visit went well. We changed Lincoln into a new outfit. His new tights fit him perfectly. We did a good job picking them out by just eyeing them. The clothes we brought from home that fit him the best are size 6 to 9 months. The slippers we brought from home don’t seem to fit him, unfortunately. They are really warm so this is a bummer. They might fit him if he didn’t have two pair of socks and tights on. We will have to try them sometime with just one pair of socks. I hope the little boots we brought for him fit. After Lincoln drank his yogurt/milk this afternoon he got really tired. We did manage to keep him awake this time. Eric blew bubbles for both Lincoln and Gabriel. They like them but not as much as I would have thought. An hour after Lincoln eats his milk stuff he can have a juice. After I feed him his juice he decided to throw up all over himself and me. That was lovely. I think he just doesn’t like having clean clothes on. But after that he perked up again. It is getting harder to hand him off to his Nannies at the end of our visits. He has one particular Nanny that he just loves the others that I have seen he goes with them happily but it is not the same. At the end of the visit we did get in trouble for changing his clothes. Ooops. Apparently if we change them in the AM we don’t get in trouble but if we change them in the afternoon we do get in trouble. It all depends on which Nannies are working. Since we never know who is working it is all a gamble if we will get in trouble or not. The fear that some of the nanny’s have is they think the play room is too cold and that they get sicker when we undress them in that room.

This evening we are just hanging out in our hotel room. We walked over to a different super market and bought more bottle water. We quickly learned to do all our grocery shopping during the day. The store is packed in the evening. Tomorrow in between our visits we are going to go see an apartment that we might move to if we like it. We have seen several apartments now and have not really like any except the one that Gen and Joel moved into today. The reasons why we want to move to an apartment is we are hoping to get a washing machine, a faster internet connection, a kitchen would be nice and the extra room so one of us could be sleeping if the other doesn’t want too. Plus an apartment will probably be cheaper. We are going through money faster than we planned on. The negative reasons for moving at this point; we loose our free breakfast which is really good, the maid service is nice and we now know how to walk to several places that we enjoy going too. The apartment is going to most likely be too far to walk to these places. I’ll let you know tomorrow what happens with this. I dread having to pack all up again to move.