Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Bonding day 7 of 15

This is his sleepy look when we first get him each morning.







Daddy feeding him his afternoon juice. He had pear juice today.








Yes we were teasing him a bit in this picture. He seems to be pretty good at balancing stuff on his head.








Mommy feeding him his yogurt/milk concoction. Since he gets two bottles in the afternoon we take turns feeding him.










He drops all his toys and clenches his fists like this while we feed him. Sometimes he will grab a hold of our shirt with the arm closest to us but usually he just makes little fists.

Our morning visit went well today. Lincoln is still sick but is becoming a little more playful. His cough is getting worse so we harped on our translator to speak to the Nanny’s about what medicine he is getting. We have been asking for several days now. The doctor is now hopefully going to come in to see him in between our visits. We are hoping we can go to the pharmacy and buy him something to help him feel better. We put him in the walker again, he loves zooming around the room. During another burst of energy, he took off crawling. In the play room we believe he has more open space than he is use to. He loves to get over to Gabriel’s blanket and play with his toys. Even though Gabe has pretty much the same toys he has. Gabriel was eating a teething biscuit and Lincoln was trying to get it from him. He is a piggy. He burst into tears when his yogurt was gone this morning. We wish we could feed him more but we are not allowed to. We do give him a few cheerios but he doesn’t seem to care for them much.

We were dropped off at our hotel again today between visits. We ordered room service. We both got a salad and soup. It was pretty good but expensive. I think there might have been horse meat in my ravioli’s. Not sure, it wasn’t bad but it tasted different. Eric tried it and didn’t like it. The salads are made primarily with mayonnaise. They put ketchup or mayonnaise on everything. Of course, neither Eric nor I care for mayonnaise or ketchup much. They look at you strange when you refuse wanting both of them.

· Update I checked with Biyanna, our translator, I asked about the ravioli’s she said it was most likely pork if I didn’t think it was beef. Phew….glad I didn’t eat horse.

Our afternoon visit was really fun. Lincoln is still coughing and runny nose but he was feeling a lot better. The doctor listened to his lungs and said they were clear. He is getting vitamins and cough medicine. First he crawled all over the playroom then we put him in the walker and he zoomed all over the place. Then we took him out and tried to walk him while he held our fingers. He normally does not understand what we are trying to get him to do. But today, he walked, holding our fingers of course. We are not sure if his legs are just getting stronger from us playing with him or if he is watching Maria and learning from her. I guess it could be a combination of both. It is kind of funny to see him trying to walk because he is so tiny. I keep telling him he is too little to walk but we can tell he really wants too. He can pull himself up onto anything that is sturdy enough. They have some small wooden kid chairs in the playroom and today he crawled over, pulled himself up to standing then crawled into the chair, then stood up on the chair. I was of course, holding the chair in place the whole time he was acting like a monkey. The 3 kids (Lincoln, Gabe & Maria) all really like music. We have two pianos in the room, when someone plays the piano they all start to dance or if Biyanna turns on her music they start dancing and rocking. Today we brought in our ipod and speakers to see if they would dance but they didn’t really care for the music that Eric played. He was playing Spanish dance music. The baby’s didn’t care. I am really not sure why that was what Eric picked to play I think if he would have played some hip hop they all would have really liked it. The parents to Maria liked it as they are from Spain. We are hoping to buy a Kazakh hip hop type CD for Lincoln to have. He gets so excited when they talk to him in Kazakh.

We only got to see Lincoln for one and half hours this afternoon instead of two hours because the Nanny’s were not ready to bring him when we arrived so we waited an extra 20 minutes for him then they took him away from us 10 minutes early. We were still feeding him his afternoon juice when they came to get him. We were sad but we just keep telling ourselves that in another month to five weeks he will be ours forever.

Tonight after our visit Biyanna took us to a local Kazakh restaurant where we had the traditional meal, Bismarck. It was so GOOD. Bismarck means five fingers and traditionally the meal gets eaten by using your hands, hence five fingers but we ate it with a fork, American style. Eric had Vodka the most popular alcohol of choice here and Gen and I shared a bottle of chardonnay. Our bottle of chardonnay was 900 tenge which is less than $9 American dollars. The alcohol here is pretty darn cheap in general. Another interesting fact, pretty much everyone here smokes cigarettes. We noticed in the super market that cigarettes cost less and one American dollar a pack. More like 75 cents a pack. I guess a smoker would be in heaven here as for us we choke and gag if we stay out too late in a restaurant, then we have to hang our clothes outside to air out. Oh and our dinner including drinks tonight was only about $50 for all five of us. Rock on, we are eating there again.

The apartment they were supposed to show us today was not available yet to look at. They said maybe in the next couple days we can go look at it. I think we will be stuck in this hotel for the entire time.

Starting tomorrow our afternoon visits will be changing by a half hour to earlier. We will visit now from 3 to 5:00. This will actually be better for us because the time between visits will be slightly shorter and we will have more time in the evenings to walk someplace for dinner and get back to the hotel before it gets dark out. We are advised not to walk anywhere after it gets dark outside. Hopefully this time change in our visits does not negatively affect the baby’s scheduled.