Our Kazakhstan Journey

Welcome! Gary and I want to share our experiences as we travel to Kazakhstan for or child(ren).

Name:
Location: South Florida, United States

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Our Routine

Thurs. Aug. 10- We have sort of gotten into a routine now. We wake up around 9 AM and hang around the flat until we get picked up by the driver and translator at 12:30 PM. Then we are driven over to the baby house to visit with Kristen for two hours. Her normal lunch time is at 2 PM and nap time is at 4 PM. Thus, the routine is to attempt to feed her, play with her and then they take her from us to put her to sleep. According to her caretaker she is a very good eater...unfortunately that's not the case with us. I think she is very smart and has figured out that we are rookies. They give her quite a lot of food more than double what my niece Tori would normally eat and it seems as if they expect us to feed it all to her. We've only managed to feed her about half of the food and a half of that is wiped up from off the floor, off our clothes, her clothes...you get the picture.

Fortunately, we did receive the medical information today. I checked the charts that I took with me and her development seems to be normal (length-70 cm, head-44 cm and chest-42 cm), she is just slightly underweight (7.1 kg or 15.6 lbs). The fact that she is underweight isn't a concern since that's pretty normal in an institutional setting. We figure once we get her home we'll fatten her up with some cornmeal dumplings, yam and banana. :-) Galina promised me that she would translate the full medical and fax it to the doctors in the US.

I think that Gary will be able to survive now that the cable is fixed and there are actually English-speaking channels. Now that I can access the internet I feel a lot better. The internet cafe is a ten minute walk. The only problem is that the connection is extremely slow and all the normal commands(cut, paste, browse, copy, etc.) are all in Russian..how's that for being additionally technologically challenged? The people here are very friendly though and for that we are extremely thankful. We are also very centrally located and are getting familiar with our surroundings.

Thank you all for your words of encouragement. We miss you all and are looking forward to bringing our daughter home to meet you all in person.

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