C-Attica / Ceniza's Life Goes Bad

"And for your birthday, I'll bring a cake with a file hidden inside"

Same cats that go over an 8' concrete wall to get to the neighbors' dogs, birds, yards, cats, plants, children...

Moo's Life Goes Bad

Meet some family members. Here are Grandma-to-be (and Baby-Usurpee-to-be) in the nursery.

What baby?

Intro to Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan was a mostly-nomadic country until its next-door neighbor Russia came calling about 200 years ago. The country changed drastically in the 20th century as it became the USSR's chosen location for nuclear testing, for space launches, and for hundreds of thousands of political prisoners sent to work in the coal mines of the Soviet Gulag.
It has been an independent country since 1993.

• The population numbers 15 million.
• It is the 9th largest country in the world.
• Ethnically, the population is about half Kazakh and a third Russian.
• Religious loyalties lie fairly evenly split between Sunni Islam and Russian Orthodox Christianity.
• It has been independent from the USSR since December 16, 1991.
• It shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and Tukmenistan.
• It has great reserves of oil and iron.
• Nearly half of its exports go to its neighbors and trading partners, China and Russia.

It might be inauspicious to start a baby book by quoting the CIA, I suppose. But check out their World Factbook - here, specifically for Kazakhstan: what the CIA says about Kazakhstan.

More country information is available from the Kazakh Embassy in the US

And a daily feed of Kazakhstan news in English can be obtained from KazInform

Den Hartog "Stork"?

We tell kids, these days, the biological truth about where babies come from. And, biologically speaking, it is accurate. But not all our kids come to us via our own bodies. And so we need a different story for describing the non-biological process that makes a small person into a child of a family, and a grown ups into parents.

For an easily recognizable metaphor, I like revisiting the stork story. I started thinking one day, while waiting inside an airplane. I was just glad to be _probably_ going where I meant to go, and _probably_ getting there when I expected to get there, and _probably_ going to have all the luggage I originally gave the airline.

Because, as all travelers know (or anyone who even visits a grocery store), things don't always go as expected. One spring, in my monthly flights to Lincoln, Nebraska, storm conditions forced the airplane to land 50 miles east, in Omaha instead.

After this happened two months in a row, I decided to save $150 in airfare and just deliberately buy myself a ticket to Omaha the next time. After all, it seemed like I was going to have to drive to Lincoln from Omaha no matter what my ticket said.

On that flight, the plane was diverted to Des Moines.

So the best-laid plans of mice and men and all the rest of us don't always go as planned. And I figured what if a story-book stork, while delivering its mythical cargo, got caught in the same conditions. Where would it land and what would happen to the baby or babies in the bundle? What kind of story would this make? What if it got caught in a snowstorm, or the knot on the bundle came loose and it had to land before it was at its intended destination?

And I decided that that is as good an analogy as I can get, to why babies are born to people who can't or won't be parents, and why parents sometimes don't produce their own children biologically. Those of you who insist on the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth are welcome to come up with a story that equally demonstrates how innocent the child is of the whole event, and is equally swallowable. (or storkable. I guess)

So in the summer of 2004, I decided that yes I did want a child and that that child was somewhere out in the world and that I needed to go find him or her.

I decided it was time for me to go see where our stork had landed.