day 12 - floor play, giggles, and angry natives

ok, so friday and saturday at the baby home kinda blend together in my mind, but i'm pretty sure that the highlight from Friday was having the space all to ourselves and doing a lot of crawling around and playing wtih Babes. we found a little musical car that actually still had its battery on the shelf in the baby room, and Babes was quite interested in it (as he is in anything that makes sounds when you press on it.) if you press on the back of it it propels itself forward, so we had a good sending that back and forth, and it got him moving a bit more than he has so far. (you must understand that we have Mr. Compliant; he's probably be content to sit on one of our laps the entire two weeks and play with whatever we place in front of him; and although that feels really good, we do want to get him moving a bit more than that ;-p).

since this was going well, we decided to play ball again, and we introduced the concept of crawling and racing to get the ball before the other person. he didn't totally catch on to the whole get-to-the-ball-before-mommy-and-daddy-do, but he sure did like watching us race to get it, and he did much more crawling than we've done before.  i'm sure it's just not that common for adults to be down on the floor playing with these kids. i'm not even sure how many of the rooms have carpet in them, although the area we were playing in did.

at one point i crawled right over top of him, and he just loved it! i'm sure that was the first time anyone did that. i wish we had some video or photos of this, but we were too busy just having fun with him today to bother with photos (other than our one obligatory daily photo for the judge) we ended up the time kinda tickling and rolling around with him, and he was really liking it. we felt great about the visit b/c it felt like this was the most free he'd been to move around and enjoy himself, and definitely the most comfortable with us.

he's still quite happy to return to his room though, especially as this is always right at lunchtime. :-) we hear this is the case with all the kids- they are happily like "OK that was nice now on to my room to the next thing." they love routine, and they love what's familiar to them. just like us, i suppose. ;-p

 this afternoon rob and i ran over to Daniel where we put together a little "Best of Ust" gift basket for our friends, the Coles, who are celebrating their 4th wedding anniversary today. we had a blast picking out weird stuff we thought might intrigue them, since they are such food connoisseurs: dried calamari strips, caviar potato chips, random vodka (this city is full of it!). we also included a few things we knew they would enjoy: cookies, coffee, tea, and chocolate...

ended the day with another dinner with the gang at the Chinese Restaurant to celebrate Karen's b-day, which was yesterday. the fleggetts even bought a beautiful cake for the occasion.

at one point, being loud, casual and fun-loving americans in a country of reserved, private people, we were laughing and apparently getting a little loud for the natives; an angry kazakh at a table across the room turned and yelled at us "can you quiet down?! there are a lot of other people around you!"  olga was with us and translated it for us, though she was not happy with the man. none of us gals even heard it, but apparently he was looking right at mitch when he said it; poor guy still hasn't gotten over it.

it's true, we are loud. and we probably need to remember that that's not "the way it's done" around here; but it's so hard to be different than what's normal to you. and quite honestly, a lot of times when i look around, it just doesn't seem like folks here aren't having any fun and i just wanna say LOOSEN UP! but then, this is not my country, nor is it my right. :-l

i think at this point, we're all a little weary of being here.  i'm still uber-thankful to be here, and Babes makes all of this worth it, but it will be nice to go back home where we know the rules and they make sense to us. ;-)