Thursday, February 21, 2008

The ring toys and beach ball he high-jacked them from Maria's blanket. I think he is getting tired of playing with the same toys everyday. I know Eric and I wished we had something new for him to play with. We do have a few toys we have not given him yet but we are trying to hold out on them for a little bit longer. His little blank look was because he was so tired today.

Day 1 of waiting to get a court hearing to adopt, Lincoln

Yesterday’s snow was fun to get. Today’s snow is miserable! The wind is just whipping outside and huge snow drifts everywhere. It is really hard to tell if we got yet more snow over night or if the stuff that fell yesterday is just blowing all around. It is nasty outside, very hard to walk around between the mounds of snow everywhere and the wind. Today by far is the worst weather we have had. We have had other very cold days but today with the wind it is just horrible.

Our drive into the baby house this morning was interesting. Again cars were stuck all over the place we saw many accidents. Some of the side streets are so full of snow drifts you could not even drive down them. We know of four different roads that lead back to where the baby house is. The first road is the one we normally always take. It was completely snow drifted in, Ceric didn’t even attempt to drive down it. The second one Ceric turned on to the road but in front of us a big van was stuck and there was no way we were getting past him. So we backed up and drove to the next road. At the next road there was another truck stuck in the middle of the road. At this point, we did not think we would make it to the baby house. Ceric drove around the block to the fourth entrance and it had huge snow drifts too but he plowed through them and we made it without getting stuck! Rock on, Ceric!! His car does not have four wheel drive, we were shocked he made it through that snow.

Lincoln was one tired little boy today. He yawned through our whole two hour visit. He did muster up a few smiles for us but for the most part he wasn’t too happy today. Our translator wasn’t around today so I wasn’t able to find out why he was so tired. He did sit and play a little bit. He ate his yogurt like a good boy and had some cheerios. He was mostly cranky and couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted us to hold him or if he wanted to be on the floor.

After our visit we had to go to the notary office to sign off on more papers for the court. Our car got stuck in the snow outside of the baby house. Ceric was able to rock it out of the snow drift and got us on the road again. It is just a mess outside today. They definitely do not have the resources to keep up with how fast the snow is blowing around. When we turned onto the road where the notary office is there were two cars stuck and blocking the road. We ended up getting out and walking the rest of the way to the notary office. Once we were done the cars that were stuck were gone and Ceric was waiting outside the office for us. He then drove us back to our apartments. We got a call about 1:00pm telling us that our afternoon visit was canceled for the day. We were also informed that we would not be going out to dinner tonight like we had been planning on.

The city of Aktobe is requesting people stay off the roads unless it is an emergency since the weather is so bad.

We are really bummed we will not see Lincoln again today but since he was so tired hopefully he will get plenty of rest so he is awake and happy tomorrow for our visits.

We have been having a quiet afternoon at the apartment. Boy the days seem to last forever when we don’t get to see Lincoln twice. Eric’s been playing his computer game and I watch a DVD. Our brand new internet card was not working so we ventured out in the blizzard to get another one. Tomorrow hopefully one of our translators can get us a refund for the card that is not working or get the card to work for us. Either way we will be happy. Since we were out we went to the super market. That place was packed! We had to buy more water and we picked up more food for Lincoln. We are constantly buying bottle water. We buy them in 5 liter containers and we find that it only lasts us a little over a day. This is the biggest reason why we go to the market so often. We have been considering using the tap water when we boil pasta or the ravioli’s but I am so fearful of getting sick from it. We use bottle water for everything including brushing our teeth. We of course wash our dishes with the tap water so I am sure it would be fine to boil pasta in it. Maybe this week we will get brave and use it. It would be nice to stop buying the water every other day.

Thankfully we never lost power today. Hopefully tomorrow this storm will be over. We will be so sad if we miss more visits with Lincoln. We imagine he was wondering where we were this afternoon.