Good Bye Aktobe, HELLO Almaty

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Lincoln did pretty well today for such a hectic day with so many new things for him. He was very reserved acting today. Didn’t really say much or even smile, he just looked around and took it all in. He was a bit fussy here and there through out the day but this I feel was mostly because his feeding schedule was off by a lot. Hopefully when we come home we can look at our schedule and make a plan before we leave on how to keep him happy, food and nap wise during the flights home.

He was a champ on the plane. He slept for over an hour and half and the flight. It was only two hours and ten minutes long. The landing was very rough and that of course woke him up. I was hoping he would stay asleep till we got checked into our hotel but once he woke up all the new sights kept him awake. Lincoln really enjoyed looking out the window before we took off but when the excitement of that wore off he mainly just wanted to get down and explore. He of course needed to just stay on or laps and that did not make him too happy.

Even though he did great on this flight, I still think we will be in for an interesting day when we come home. Our entire trip home will take more than 24 hours to do it but according to the clock it won’t take us this long because we will be time traveling backwards.

Svetlana, our coordinator, picked us up at the airport and drove us to our hotel. It was nice to finally meet her. She played a huge roll on us actually getting our invitation to come here for the adoption. As she drove us to our hotel, poor Lincoln had about enough by then. He started crying and was just not happy that I would not put him down. I ended up giving him a bottle of juice and he was then somewhat happier. We are staying at the Hotel Almaty (Alma-Ata). Our room is more expensive than we planned on but it is a nice size. It is basically a tiny apartment. We have 4 small rooms – bedroom, bathroom, tv room and sitting area. Lincoln was having a so much fun crawling all around and exploring when we first checked in. The best part, they gave us a crib and Lincoln loves it. Phew, I was so worried he wouldn’t want to sleep in it after last week of just sleeping on some blankets in the corner of the room. In our room we have a fridge but no microwave. Lincoln is use to having his formula, cereal, and veggies warmed up but he hopefully will eat them all at room temperature as we have no way to heat it.

Once we got settled in a bit we changed Lincoln and feed him a small lunch. Then we ventured outside for a short walk. Weather wise it is really nice here, not sure of the exact temp but I believe it was low 60s felt great to us. Lincoln seemed to enjoy our walk around even though he was a little fussy because his schedule changes. We also walked around the inside of our hotel figuring out where stuff was located. We stopped at a small café on our floor and Lincoln exploded. More stuff came out of that kid than he had even eaten today. It was awful it when all over me, the table, the floor and himself. The guy at the next table was eating and looked over and got up and left the café. That part was really funny but it was hard to ask for a mop to clean up with when we can’t speak the language here. You should have been there to see Eric act that out. Instead of just acting out mopping, he started by pointing at Lincoln then making a throwing up face, then he finally did the mopping motion. I am sitting there covered in vomit, watching Eric do charades and poor Lincoln was starring at me with this look of what the heck just happened to me? I could just tell he was trying to decide if he should cry or not. Oh my goodness it was so funny. We can now add projectile vomiting to our list of firsts. Sorry for being so graphic. We are assuming this was just his way of dealing with a big day of changes. Maybe we should wear slickers the day we come home.

SORRY no pictures, the internet connection in our room is too slow to upload them. We are working on finding faster service then we will add pictures.