Waiting for our court hearing – day 10

~ Happy Spring ~

It is the first day of spring here in Aktobe, Kazakhstan. It is a nice sunny day out at 28 degrees F. There is no wind today so it does actually feel really nice out. It is a beautiful first day of spring. We are told that the snow should be totally

gone by the end of March. For the next few weeks we will get the chance to watch the snow melt. It has been melting for the last few days and there are ponds all over the place. We suspect things will be getting really muddy soon. That should make walking around more of an adventure. We are looking forward to having some nicer days. We want to walk around and take pictures of all the statues in town and other sights.

Our morning visit with Lincoln was good today. We feed him a puree of apples & bananas which he enjoyed. At the very beginning of our visit he wanted to just walk all over the playroom but then after a while he was content with just playing on the floor. Toward the end of our visit he started to get a bit cranky so I carried him around the room and that made him happy. The Nanny came in to get him 20 minutes early today. We were not very happy about this. They told us they were taking him early because he woke up early this morning and they wanted to put him down for an early nap. First time we have heard that excuse. They actually also took two other babies early with the same excuse. We find it a little unrealistic that all three of them woke up much too early this morning.

In between visits today the lady that owns our apartment stopped over. When we got up this morning our refrigerator was leaking water all over the floor. So we asked them to come over to look at it. We knew the door didn’t close properly but as it turns out the door is not attached correctly. We are not sure if once they fix the door if that will fix why it was leaking water or not. But I guess we will have to wait to see. Since it is Saturday they won’t come to fix it till Monday. Until then we have a piece of cardboard stuck in it to help it stayed closed correctly. The woman also asked for our space heater back. We told her we wanted to keep it in case it got really cool again and she said she wanted to take it. OK, so we gave it to her. She came back a half hour later with a brand new one for us. We have no idea why this exchange took place.

For entertainment this afternoon I downloaded some software to resize our pictures. I am going through all of our pictures and will upload a bunch in the next few days. THANK YOU to everyone that emailed and commented on software to use. I wish I would have asked sooner.

We had a nice afternoon visit with Lincoln. He was in a good mood so he must have gotten a good nap like the Nannies hoped for. We had him practice his walking pushing the walker. He is really doing a good job at it and seems to be so proud of himself. He has huge smiles and laughs at himself. Once he gets a little more stable on his feet we will practice having him walk a couple steps between us. We played with him a lot this afternoon. Eric and Lincoln took a few flights around the room. They hadn’t done that in awhile. Lincoln still loves it. Eric was sitting on the floor playing with Lincoln and Lincoln was trying to play with Alexander’s toys. Which is fine but he is not allowed to put Alex’s toys in his mouth. Alex’s Mom does not appreciate Lincoln’s slobber. So this is always as struggle. Eric grabs the rattle toy that Lincoln is trying to eat and starts shaking it and circling it around his body. Lincoln wants the toy so bad that he crawls in circles around Eric’s body trying to catch it. It was really cute. Lincoln made four circles around Eric chasing the toy before he gave up and crawled off. Usually he is a pretty smart kid but he fell for that trick.

I asked today how many Nanny’s Lincoln has. There are two that we see all the time then every once in awhile we will see someone different. We were told he has six all together and four of them are actual nurses and the other two are Nannies. I have no idea who is who or what their names are. That is next on our agenda to figure out. The one Nanny that Lincoln goes crazy for asked us today, finally what we would be calling him. So we told her Lincoln and when she left the room she kept repeating it to herself. We are hoping she starts to use it with him to help reinforces to him that it is his new name. We suspect she will continue to call him Bekzat. I would imagine it would be hard for her to suddenly change the name she calls him after the last 10 months.

We had a really nice relaxing evening tonight. Usually we go out to a fancy dinner on Saturday nights but that honestly was getting exhausting. We told them today that we just want to go to the business center for pizza. We just ate pizza last night at the bowling alley but the pizza at the business center is so delicious. I think they were surprised we didn’t want to go anywhere else but we really just wanted to relax have a couple beers and chat. Eric & I and Gen & Joel were the only ones that went tonight. We thought Karla & Ben might stop over but we didn’t see them. They may very well have taken them up on the fancy dinner out as that is what we usually do. They are new in town so I would imagine they probably did go out.

** Lots of people have been asking what happens after court…I will post that on Tuesday’s blog. When we are in court on Tuesday morning it will be 1:00AM EST so happy dreams for us, please!!