Monday's Post

Happy Monday, our last Monday here in Uralsk. We’ve really enjoyed our time here. Today is the last day of the Independence Day holiday, and rainy and foggy.

Aidan was in high spirits today, his usually smiley self and happy to play with us during the morning visit. He likes his baby photo albums, and we were again showing him all the pictures of his grandparents and cousins and, this time he really seemed to focus on each of the photographs for a little while. Before he started chewing on them, that is. He also really likes to practice walking. Shaylen is older and is very good at holding on to little chairs in the music room and walking around; he watches her closely and often likes to try himself. He’s not ready yet, of course, but he becomes really proud of himself when he takes some steps with our help! Of course at the end of each visit, it has become very hard to say goodbye. We wave and say “bye bye” about 20 times; usually he watches over the caregivers shoulder as she walks him back to his crib room.

Today after our morning visit with the babies, we all met with Olga and Assia to discuss pre-court tomorrow. Basically, pre-court is like a trial run for court. We know that the judge and the representatives from the baby house and department of education will be there; everyone but the prosecutor. We feel pretty comfortable with how everything will go and the questions that are likely to be asked, and we aren’t too anxious. Official court will be held on Wednesday and we’ll be glad once it’s all over and Aidan is legally ours.
We also talked to Assia about ordering a cake for the caregivers for our final tea party on Thursday, when we’ll be able to pick up the kids. What an exciting week!

We ate a light lunch (granola bars!) and headed back to the baby house for our last afternoon visit! Pre-court and court are in the afternoon, so we’ll only see the babies in the mornings or the next two days. We were able to take a mini-video of Aidan today as we came to pick him up for the visit. We wanted to capture how excited he gets when we arrive. As usual, he squealed and motored over to us in his walker, going backwards at one point, getting stuck on another stroller at another, and finally making it over to the doorway for me to pick him up. He’s really something.

During our afternoon visit, we noticed a new development – Aidan has started to shake his head back and forth, like when saying “no.” It doesn’t really have a context yet, but he definitely is deliberately shaking his head like mom and dad do. It’s so cool to see how quickly they pick up on things, and that he imitates us. We noticed that he also makes some deliberate movements to music – his first “dancing.” He’s developed so much in just the two weeks we’ve been with him. It’s amazing at this age how much they learn.

This evening we went back to the hotel to put our gift bags together for the caregivers, Assia, Olga, our driver and the baby house director. We’ll give them their gifts on Thursday, our final day in Uralsk. We leave for Almaty on Friday morning!

THANKS again for all of the great emails and posts that we’ve been receiving from so many of you during our stay. We read all of them, and are so appreciative for everyone’s updates and well wishes. We really hope that all of you are enjoying the holiday season! Christmas is next weekend already!!
See you tomorrow