day 4: signing, smiles, and sweet eats

the internet wasn't working well this afternoon, so there was no blogging for me; it's 10 p.m. now so i'm gonna have to make this a short one.

today was day four of bonding, and we were served our papers! yep, the first set was paperwork signing that we'd been presented with all the medical information. one of the translators just kinda stuck it in front of our faces during bonding and said "here, you have to sign these" and then began rattling off the medical info that we'd been told the day before. i joked and said, "oh, so these aren't the papers ha?" she laughed and said "no!" and almost immediately stuck another set of papers in front of Rob's face for him to sign, with no explanation of what they were. no, apparently THESE were THE papers! we just laughed, we were ready; we got down to business right there on the baby room floor. :-)

so today when they brought Little R in he screamed bloody murder. literally. if we doubted that this calm little child had lungs and pipes, we doubt it no more; in fact our friends said "was that him? we heard him all the way downstairs!" ;-p it was also the first time we've seen him resist anything, as he did when we gave him his tigger ball and he pushed it away. it was actually good to see him exert his will, as he's been so compliant till now.

it took him a little longer to cool down from his crying than the other days, but once he was settled, he was settled. i have this theory that it's the transitions that he doesn't handle well. we had people going in and out of the room the whole time today, the window blew open three times because of the fierce wind, and various other noise going on; none of this phased him. so i think it's leaving one room or one activity and being taken to an unknown destination with weird people looking at him that throws him off. poor little guy.

i thought we might be off to a bad start after all that, but actually we had our best visit yet. we got the biggest smiles we've seen so far playing with one of the little musical toys we brought and also when playing ball again. we even got to see his teeth a little bit (apparently he has 16 of them, so we are told by his doctor ;-p-- till today i don't think we had seen them yet! ) he had some great moments and some smiles interacting with rob and he is just so irresistibly cute. he's still verrrrrry tentative, but i think we made some progress.

we had a different translator again today, and i have a whole bunch of new horribly difficult kazakh phrases recorded on my mp3 player to learn tomorrow, things like "come here", "sit down", "do you want to play", "are you hungry/tired" and "ready". i won't remember these forever, but i figure the more easy phrases we know, the better for Little Guy when we break him out of there in a couple months.

each day i get some new ideas of what he might like and today gave me some new angles. i think he gave us more eye contact, so i think tomorrow maybe i'll try to move on to a little more direct interaction with fingers, toes, head to head - that sorta thing. try to make him laugh a little more. all this a safe time distance from his initial crying when he first comes in, of course. at the end of the visit we tried some shoes on him, and he was perfectly compliant about it- i was really glad. i was hoping he wouldn't be scared about that sorta thing. eventually we'll try on one of the outfits we brought along for him, but no need to rush that.

this afternoon the coordinator came to the hotel to get all the official paperwork from all of us families. we gave her our official name for him (no, kim not yet; you just have to wait a little longer!) and paid her copious amounts of money we came prepared with - and that was that; it's all official now, she'll get our paperwork going, and she's going to try to get us a court day a few days early. so maybe we'll be back in the States for Christmas; not getting our hopes up too high though, as i think it might be hard to get flights out.

we ate at a great little russian place tonight, right downstairs from the pancake house (Mazlenitze) that we ate at last night; they're owned by the same group and have been by far the best two places so far. so yummy.
for your viewing pleasure:

 pigs in a blanket type thing (delicious!) and blinis with sweetened condensed milk. pea soup is in the background, although we could hardly find the peas in it. :-)

don't really know what this was, something with cherry and coconut, but it was reeeeeally good. sometimes ignorance IS bliss.

rob, the proud owner of a bag of size 4 diapers.

ok, well i was unable to post this last night, but it looks like i can get it done this morning. hopefully will have better luck with the internet today. if not, think of us as we enjoy a Kaz team hockey game tonight! :-)