April 11, 2009

All night long we were awakened by pouring rain (and Sasha, the little boy who lives in the apartment above us-he is quite active running around at night). Surely, there wouldn’t be any when we woke up. It was wet outside when we left but the sun was trying to poke through the clouds. All morning, it looked like it was going to rain but it didn’t.

When we arrived to the baby house, of course Nate was awake and waiting for us to pick him up. As always, he’s very excited to see us and get fed by us. This morning, many of the babies were crying in their cribs for whatever reason but not our Nate! It looked like he was trying to strip the sheets in his crib. After a nice breakfast, he did some walking in his walker and then played on the blanket for the rest of the morning. Today a man came to take passport pictures of the babies who are being adopted. The first baby, who is also from Nathaniel’s room, did not like the experience at all. He cried and screamed for quite some time. We decided to let Nate go while everyone tried to calm the other baby down. Nate was quite content to sit on the table by himself, smile at the photographer, and get his picture taken. He is such an easy going child and is pretty much game for anything.

We went to Ankara for lunch again today. Kev’s not feeling well again so it was a diet of rice and water for him. Laura had a beef dish, Julia had pizza, and of course Irina had “hot dog” and fries. The girls ate some very nice looking desserts. (You can tell when Kevin writes the blog entries because you get a full description of what everyone ate.) We told the English class we’d be there for lunch and were thinking they weren’t going to show up when two of them appeared. One of them, Asele, asked Kevin to help her with her anti-virus. But her computer wouldn’t connect to the internet there so Kev couldn’t do anything for her. There is an American who we met at Ankara and Kev spoke with him the other day. In their conversation, Kev found out the American (with a Russian name he can’t remember) was a computer guy. So on the way out, Kev asked the guy to give the girls a hand trying to get connected to the Internet. The problem for Kevin was the girls computer font’s were in Russian and Kazakh and their English comprehension wasn’t strong enough to communicate what they wanted. Nor did they understand that Asele’s computer wouldn’t connect. Hopefully we’ll find out tomorrow that the Russian-American was able to help. He seems like a nice guy. Kev seems to think that there were too many people (using the bandwidth) in Ankara because when we left almost every table had someone with a laptop. Izad, another girl who was there told us it wasn’t going to rain today. It was hard for us all to communicate, as their English is very limited, though not as limited as our Russian. About 5 minutes after she said that, the sky opened up and down came the rain. It rained heavily for about 20 minutes. When we left Ankara for the car, it was sprinkling. When we got in the car, we noticed our translator Julia was soaked. That’s too bad because she’s always dressed nicely. But even she said it wouldn’t rain today.

Nate seemed to be one of the first babies awake this afternoon and seemed to be a little tired by the end of our afternoon visit. He was rubbing his eyes and yawning. It is so cute when he rubs his eyes with his little hands. He had his nails trimmed a bit. Well, Laura tried to smooth them out a bit. The caregivers use scissors to cut their nails straight across and they are quite chopped up and sharp (at least Nate’s are). We got the break-down on the caregiver situation-there are 6 caregiver (who are like teachers), 2 nannies (they do not have training like the teachers), 2 nurses, and 3 doctors for the room (one who is the general doctor, one who prescribes the medicines, and one who gives the medicines). The nannies wear blue outfits that resemble scrubs and we noticed that they are the ones who mop the floors). Nate is so close to crawling but he hasn’t really crawled besides the one time a few days ago. He gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth so he’s ready and just needs to start moving. He was inching around on the blanket and Laura was video-taping him. He is very calm and happy and then up comes much of his breakfast. It was quite gross but very funny to watch on the video, at least to Irina. She asks to watch it over and over and laughs so hard! You can’t help but laugh along with her because her laugh is so contagious.

The crazy guy was outside our apartment this afternoon. He used to clean the apartment buildings and likes to follow a lady who lives in the building next to ours. We suspect he was spoken to as he didn’t even look in our direction when we arrived. After dinner we went for a walk and did some shopping at the local grocery store. We have been doing our best to sample all of the desserts they sell. The individual slices of cakes and the locally packaged cookies (yum!) that they sell are so very cheap but the fresh fruit is unbelievably expensive. We will be hitting the Sunday market next week In Mons to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables!

This evening we have to begin memorizing our speeches for court. We found out today that we will go visit Irina’s baby house on Tuesday after our afternoon session with Nathaniel. That will be exciting for all of us. Irina has been eager to go see her baby house. We made a scrapbook of Irina through the years to bring and show the ladies so that they will know she has a good life.