The stockings were hung . . .

. . . on the coat rack with care, for fear that on Christmas we’ll still be here.



Happy Black Friday everyone! We weren’t able to indulge in any Black Friday sales, but we did do the traditional day after Thanksgiving Christmas decorating. The Ramstore has been jam-packed with Christmas items for a couple of weeks now, so a couple of days ago I indulged in a little impulse Christmas decoration shopping. The kids were already in bed so I hid the bags in the hall closet and today after naptime we decorated. It’s not much and took all of 10 minutes, but it sure made Tim happy. He was so excited – taking the items out of the bags and showing each one to Mike. I bought a tiny little pre-decorated table-top tree that we put on top of the television flanked by a Santa and an angel candles. Tim thinks our tree is beautiful. That wouldn’t exactly be my description, but if it makes him happy that’s all that matters. I even bought a package of miniature ornaments and when Hope is able to visit at the apartment we will all decorate the tree together. I got the kids Santa hats that light up, but apparently only when the mood strikes them to work. I got 3 little stockings, one with a reindeer for Tim, a Santa for Matt and a bear for Hope. We were trying to figure out where to put them and realized that they looked pretty good on the coat rack. I also picked up a pillow with Santa on it that says “HO-HO-HO-Merry Christmas”. That was kind of for Tim since he has a Santa that my parents gave him that plays songs when you press it and I was going to bring it and forgot.

At the baby house today we were joined by another family a short while into our visit. They have only been here a couple of days and are adopting a 7 month old girl. They also brought along their 7 year old son and 4 year old daughter. It’s funny; Tim had a grand time with the boy, but was not much interested in the girl that is his own age. It was bedlam in the playroom for the hour and a half we were all in there. Hope got very shy when the new family came in and was very quiet, just sitting back and watching most of the time. Tim and the other boy were jumping off the climber into the ball pit, throwing balls at each other between the ball pit and Jump-o-lene and generally being boys. She did eventually wander over to where the boys were playing and sat on the edge of the ball pit during a calm moment when they weren’t running and diving into the ball pit. It will be interesting to see how she reacts tomorrow. It was nice to talk to another family a bit, but it is a little difficult to visit and interact with Hope when there are 5 kids, toys everywhere, plus all the “stuff” each family came with. We even forgot to take Matt with us when we brought Hope back to her group because we didn’t notice him in the midst of everything. I thought Mike had him and he thought I had him. When we went back to the room he was sitting on the other family’s blanket and the little girl was wondering why we left our baby. Oops! Matt, however, seemed happy as a clam.

There’s not much else to report. We’ve modified our court speeches from this summer for Monday and given everything to Zhanara to print out and translate for herself for Monday. Our quest for a baby sitter for the kids continues. Since we don’t ever see the other American families and haven’t gotten to know them we couldn’t ask any of them. It looks like we may have Zhanara’s sister baby sit since she speaks enough English to get by, should be reliable and the kids should be napping most of the time that we are at court anyway. I think that covers it for today. Hopefully we can get through our next few days visiting at the baby house without Tim breaking any body parts since its a little rough in there with another big kid to play with. We’re all for discovering more about Kazakh culture, but neither of us is interested in exploring the Kazakh hospital system.