Thursday

Hi Everyone! Today was cold again, 20 degrees and cloudy. Somehow I’ve managed to lose my gloves and hat but will buy some new ones tomorrow. Regardless, with our continued visits with Aidan, nothing can dampen our spirits!

For some reason I am still struggling with getting onto Kazakh time. I woke up at 2:00 a.m. as if it was mid-morning! I dozed a little but finally gave in and got up to work on the blog at 5:30 a.m. I am bound and determined to stay awake without naps until 10:00 p.m. tonight, or else I think I’ll never get back on track! Scott’s doing some better, and is sleeping at least 6 hours at night. Hopefully in the next few days we’ll be back to normal! It’s strange, but we also keep forgetting that it’s Christmastime without the barrage of commercials, Christmas music and holiday shoppers that we have at home. It’s nice to be a little low key about the holidays, but I do plan on playing a few Christmas tunes on the ipod tomorrow.

Around 6 a.m. Scott got up and helped to post yesterday’s pictures of the cutest boy in the world to our website. It’s so much fun to go through the pictures we’d taken the previous day. We laugh over what a joy this kid is. He’s really awesome.

Our frig is almost empty from our initial trip to the grocery a few days ago, so we had a granola bar and some bread and water for breakfast and then headed over to the baby house for our morning visit. Aidan was feeling good and didn’t have a fever today so we were able to visit with him downstairs in the playroom. He is all energy and today was no exception, so it was hard to get some good shots of him that weren’t blurry!
We brought a change of clothes and put him in his new sleeper complete with matching dinosaur bib, and again he thought it was the coolest thing in the world to have no clothes on! He likes to play with his feet, of course, while we try to change his clothes. It’s like fighting the happy wiggle worm to put on his onesie and outfit. Once we have one of his arms in, somehow the other arm disappears out of his sleeve. I should mention that Aidan’s hand and feet are just huge! We are pretty sure he’ll be a lot taller than mom and dad someday.

Today we brought a blow up Pooh beach ball for Aidan to play with. He loved hitting it and pushing it and bopping it off of his, and our, hands, arms, and head. His motor skills seem really good, and that combined with the aforementioned large hands, we’re pretty sure he’ll be a globetrotter or painter or something as important someday. As you may have noticed in some of the pictures, though, his very favorite thing is “the Lobster.” It’s a cool crustacean teether, and it must feel really good on his gums because he doesn’t like to put it down. He likes to gnaw on it and make “ooh ahh mmmm ummm uhhhh” sounds. Sounds pretty tasty to us.

At lunchtime we headed with our travel partners to the self-service grocery store. It is a lot like a bigger 7-11, with many of the usual bread, soda and milk necessities but with much less stock than what we’re used to at home. That was ok, though, because we found some good things for lunch and snacks, including a coconut cream puff and some sausage wrap things that looked like pigs in a blanket. We also bought some shortbread tea cookies that are just delicious. I think they cost something like 50 cents for a bag of 4 dozen. Food here is incredibly inexpensive. Our whole bill amounted to 15 dollars or something, which included breakfast and lunch and snacks for at least a week.

We went back to our hotel to eat our lunch and post new pictures to the website. I wanted to take a nap but Scott made me stay awake! We did notice before we left for the baby house that we didn’t have any running water in the hotel room. Looks like we’re having a little water shortage, which isn’t uncommon here. Hopefully things will be up and running shortly.

Our afternoon visit with Aidan was good. We’ve noticed this week that he tends to be slightly fussy after lunch. He wants to play with us and all of his toys, but we can tell he’s tired. He’ll play with everything in sight and then lay on our shoulder for maybe 30 seconds, and then pop back up as if he doesn’t want to miss any of the excitement. We rock and cuddle him but he is just a ball of energy and won’t sit still for long. I’m sure the more we visit the more he feel able to rest, knowing that we’ll be back to see him very soon. The hour long visits fly by so quickly!

After the baby house we dropped off our laundry at a local service. For 4 kilograms of laundry, it cost us $8. We’ll get it back washed, dried and folded in three days. A pretty good deal, particularly considering our Woolite broke on the way over and jeans take forever to line dry. Once we left the laundry, Assia, our interpreter, took us to see a different hotel called the Pushkin. The Chagala, the hotel we visited yesterday, has only a few rooms available and she had heard that this hotel was very nice and a good price. We were glad she suggested it because it is just gorgeous. New, bright, and gleaming, the apartment rooms have separate living areas and bedrooms and a full little kitchenette and it is the same price as the hotel we are staying in now, plus breakfast is free and laundry is free. We and Ann and Kris and Dan will be moving there on Saturday. They are holding the rooms for us and I think it will be very nice there for the rest of our time in Uralsk.

For dinner, we all decided to eat in our current hotel’s dining room and had beef stroganoff and French fries. We really enjoy our travel partners and feel lucky that we’ve had such good company. By the way, stroganoff and fries is not a bad combination, for those of you who are interested in getting out of the chicken/lasagna/taco rut!

After dinner, we headed back to our room and put on some “Alias” DVD’s while we finish the blog and get ready for our day tomorrow.

Thanks again for all the great posts. We read them all and love your messages.

Until tomorrow!