Day Eleven

Day Eleven (Thursday, September 14 2006)

Day Eleven went well, with new challenges. The weather has turned cold, down to the 40s F in the daytime, and rainy, and the sniffles have come to visit.
Mitch is prepared. Note the surgical mask and big pack of tissues. And the pained look. He is a trooper. I am just drugged.














Marie Aigerim has the sniffles too. The germ is making the rounds with the babies and doubtless the rest of the families will soon have red noses. We all play in one large room – about seven families. It is a tremendously special time. Each family plays with its own baby, but walk and run through the areas and say hello and push a toy through. The rain means that no one can go walk around the grounds. The bigger kids love the ball pit and the indoor swing and slide, and the little kids are riveted by the noisy toys that the bigger kids can use.

Marie Aigerim is a very tolerant, goodnatured baby. Only a few times has she raised an alarm and those have been due to parental botchups that were quickly resolved one way or another. Today she tried to be happy, and managed it almost all the time. The hardest part is when she gets sleepy and we can’t walk outside – the carrier and the rhythm let her relax and fall asleep. In the room with all the families, there is far too much to watch and listen for and not a chance of the sleepy girl falling asleep. We tried the carrier and pacing in the room for a while. The carrier tends to block out some of the stimulation, cocooning her, so it helps her to shut down.

Mitch took a lot of photos and then told me that what he was photographing was the wonky way her legs were sticking out of the carrier.

Nugget drifted a little while, but happily popped up to see who had opened the door to the room, what squeaking toy had just gone by, or the toddler and his mother who had gone by, each with his and her own toy train on the “tracks” made by the patterns in the carpet. I do not know how we are going to keep this level of stimulation for her, where we are going to find other families and children to watch. Probably never at this density again. Everyone is very nice and kind.



Yes, I DO hold my baby! But I can only run my camera when I am not holding my baby, so most of the photos are of Mitch and Marie. Mitch is a gem with her and she lights him up too.










Here is a very unrepresentative photo of Marie. The moment was here and gone before we knew it, her head back up and her little self ready to climb and rock and vocalize some more. But she was hurting a bit and every once in a while her head would go down.

She does seem to give me a bit of preferential treatment, looking to me to see if something new is ok, or looking to see where I am, and so far, comforted when I hold her. She is a dear baby, what a great personality. We play long-distance peek a boo: one adult holds her, the other walks away with great drama. Then the distant one turns, meets Marie Aigerim’s eyes, makes a great show of recognition and play-runs back to her with a big noisy kiss and greeting. She squeaks and jumps and lights up with a grin and some sounds.

We found some more indoor games yesterday. I played “dip” with her, lowering her head and bringing her back up with big eyes and exclamations. Mitch made a bigger game of “dip”, bringing her in from a short distance, down and to me for a noisy kiss and big theatrics. We play with socks, toes, fingers, the tag on the blanket; the most interesting items are of course used tissues, any camera, and Mitch’s eyeglasses.

In addition to sniffles, she has moderate drool. No teeth yet, but she chomps hard on my finger and sometimes likes to have her gums massaged. Poor bug. The Albertsons grocery store teething cloth has been one of her favorites, though until yesterday she didn’t use it much for teething.

On Wednesday, Olga gave me a list of items needed for Aigerim’s trip to Almaty when I return to Kazakhstan to retrieve her. Here is the list just FYI.

List of clothing/gear to provide for her escort to Almaty:
1) 1 warm outfit
2) 1 light outfit
3) bibs(2)
4) diapers (10-12), wipes
5) diaper bag
6) snowsuit
7) socks(2 one light pair one heavy pair)
8) tights(2)
9) hat, scarf
10) body suit (2, longsleeved)
11) t-shirt (2)
12) bottle, toys
13) shoes if snowsuit doesn’t have pockets for feet.

We went shopping at Mickey House, a series of individual countertop shops specializing in baby gear. Quite a girly selection, no?! Mitch was very tolerant of our shopping, and helpful considering he couldn’t look downward without his nose running. He actually felt much better by then and we went to Tsum store to get a new internet card and to print some more photos, this time for the caregivers. I tried several more booths to find a hat that tied under the chin and a scarf that all went with the new pink snowbagsuit. Mitch decided to wait on the internet card because he decided that the booth selling the internet card also did other things and that the person in queue ahead of him was applying for a home loan.

So we went to queue upstairs at “Bravo” the Express Bar, see-the-food-before-you-buy it lunch place. We had the usual tourist chagrin at figuring out whether or not we were actually in line, which line we were in, what we could and could not get in this line once we were at the counter, and so on and so forth. The man behind us was quite taken with us and looked at us when he thought we weren’t looking. We are a curiosity, come to think of it, we haven’t run into any other foreigners in our outings (as far as I know) and people watch because we’re different. No big deal. While waiting, I saw a cup of tea go by that wasn’t made with water – it had been made with milk. I wanted that. Before we could work up the nerve to try “what is that called in Russian?” the customer had taken it away. We are not ready to talk about abstract items in Russian yet, so without the concrete example, what could we do. We knew the word for milk and the word for tea. The man behind us was still interested but didn’t speak up. We looked at all the meat and vegetable and bread items in the first case, the salad (any vegetable dish, basically) and fried chicken and mashed potatoes in the second case and Mitch did a good job of pointing to what we wanted. My big language lessons for yesterday: one (adeen) and two (dvah) and to actually use da and nyet to guide the clerks in our purchasing hunts. I could explain that we wanted one coca cola (easy to order) and one “milk tea”. The clerk looked at me and changed the word order and possibly the word endings and probably asked what size we wanted. A big cup came out. A man ahead of us reached to his order of meat pie, and past the small cup of milk tea next to it to the big cup of milk tea the clerk had just put out. She watched him in surprise, and then looked at us. She turned to her colleague and laughed in disbelief while saying “man” and some other things. We all laughed and shrugged. The other clerk went after the man to bring back the big mug (he did) and take the size that he had ordered.

The milk tea was nice. We saw some men at the next table having a meal of bread and beer – or rather, white-label Karaganda beer bottles – now we know those are nonalcoholic! A lady with a stroller asked us in Russian to please move so she could get through the aisle – there is no presumption that we are English speakers, very little English spoken at all. We read the tea bag tag (we read lots of labels these days), one side in English and one in Russian, and I couldn’t pronounce one of the words. Mitch could. A clerk came to clear our table, and I whipped out the phrase that had finally returned “how do you say this in Russian”? and the busgirl looked like that was a question a baby could answer. Well, a Russian baby probably could.

She said something, and I didn’t get it and so I kept asking her to say the word in Russian and Mitch finally said to me “She is saying it.” Oh. We smiled and bobbed and said thank you and she took the dishes away and said “Bye bye”.

Mitch tried again at the booth for an internet card, and it happened to be just across from the first booth we’ve seen that actually has “souvenirs” according to tourist expectations. Things that actually say “Kazakhstan” and “Karaganda”. I got a wooden plate that says “Karanganda” (Russian spelling) and has the coal miners’ statue painted on it. I like that statue, it sort of represents the heart and heritage of Karaganda, and this is the first item I’ve seen anything other than the postcards with it. This was only the second shop in which we’d seen the postcards of Karaganda as well.

Of the ten-pack or whatever of postcards, at least four are of the shopping area around Tsum. No Lenin statue. Modern buildings like hotels, circus and some vividly painted children’s park.

The souvenir shop had an interesting figurine, the winged panther figure with a man standing atop it, the man wearing a conical hat and carrying an eagle or falcon on his right arm. This is apparently a monument in Almaty. I wish I knew what it was. And what the winged animals are called. We’ve seen winged horned things on the Afghanistan War Monument, and winged big cats on the Kazakhstan 2030 logo and I like winged mammals. (Ok maybe megafauna, not bats.) I could have owned a plaque of this monument for 160USD but it seems like I should at least know what I am buying before I do that.

Speaking of knowing what one is doing while shopping - do you see the snowsuit bag on the back of the chair? It was the smallest size available and we could put two of her in there with room to spare. I would like to get a hat and scarf to go with it, those are about the last of the items needed after yesterday’s shopping blitz. We have another week to get prepared.

Speaking of getting prepared, anytime now I could have the Ministry of Education interview. I am not exactly sure what this involves but apparently the MoE is the final word on adoptions in Kazakhstan so it is quite important.