It's Official (We Think)

Today marked the end of the 15-day appeal period and, as far as we know, it passed without incident. Tomorrow morning Irina and Zhanara will go to the court to pick up the adoption decree and associated court paperwork. Then they will pick us up and we'll go to the baby house, deliver all the gifts, dress Hope in her non-baby house clothes, say our good-byes and bring her back to the apartment. It should be quite a monumental, and bittersweet, day for all involved.

Her visits have continued to go well and she adjusted to staying through dinner without too much trouble. The mere mention of sleeping here though still brings on lots of tears and screaming. We are trying to prepare ourselves for the next few days (or weeks) of sleepless nights for all of us. Other than sleeping, she's doing great. She's really working hard at picking up English and she's trying to teach me Kazakh. She's a good and patient teacher. We look at her Russian-Kazakh-English picture books and point to objects. She says their name in Kazakh and I say it in English. She repeats the English and I the Kazakh. A few times she's figured out that I was having trouble with the pronunciation so she slowly sounded out the word, syllable by syllable so that I could repeat it. When I say the word correctly she tells me "very good", just like I tell her. It's very cute. She also takes out the English alphabet puzzle almost every day and wants to practice the letters and putting the letter with the correct picture.

She apparently has also grown more attached to us than even we had realized. She tells us when she leaves the apartment now, "Good-bye. I will come tomorrow". Some time in the last few days, Mike brought her back to the baby house and was doling out the usual round of hugs, kisses and pats on the head to the other kids in her group that come out to greet us while Hope was changing her clothes. One of the caretakers told us tonight that she stood there that day watching and quietly saying, "Stop that. That's my daddy."

Sunday was a beautiful day here and since we didn't have Hope with us we took a long walk - left the house a little after 11 AM and returned a little before 4 PM. We went to the President's musueum for some Kazakh souveniers for Hope to bring home. One big goal of the walk was to head to the stationary store to pick up art supplies and educational items for the children - the gift the caretakers suggested for our orphanage donation/group gift. We had a good time picking things out for them. After our shopping expedition we went to lunch at Chelsea Pub - a nice English pub with an English menu and very good food (that I didn't have to cook). Tim must really be getting bored here because Saturday he asked Mike how come we hadn't been to church since we've been here (because the English mass is in the evening and it's too cold to take the kids out then) and could we go. Since it was such beautiful weather, Tim and I headed out to church Sunday night and then he rolled around in the snow in a park on the way home. Good thing it was dark - I'm sure the passing babushka's would have disapproved!

Tonight we took Hope back early and had Zhanara babysit the boys so we could finish the group shopping and make a trip to Pucha where we heard that we might be able to let Santa know of a couple of small gifts he could deliver to the kids while we are in Kazakhstan so they don't have to wait until they get back to the States to get any of their presents. After that, we headed back to Chelsea Pub for dinner and a couple of beers. It was a very nice evening and the first one (and probably last one) without the kids in quite a while. After that it was home to relieve Zhanara and get the gifts for the group, caretakers, doctors and director wrapped. Good thing we had most of our shopping done because it was quite a surprise to find out that we were going to be able to bring Hope home tomorrow.

More lights around town