Meeting Our Baby Boy

Hi! I hope you rec'd my entry from 8/7 while in almaty. Here goes.. Today was the day, we finally met our baby boy. I will get to the details of the travel later, most importantly, Caleb. We were led down a long aisle in a old, concrete Baby Hospital to a back room by his doctor, Dr. Victoria, the translator and a lady from the Ministry of Education. There in a room was a crib with this smiling little boy lying on his belly looking at us.

I immediately picked him up and he was all smiles. He grabbed my hair and looked me straight in the eyes and had a big grin, like he had known me for months. Ethan held him and the first thing Caleb did was put his little hands on Ethans face. We only had 15 minutes with him today, so the entire time Ethan and I passed him back and forth and talked to him. He seemed perfectly happy with us, looking at us, out the window and all around. We shot some video footage as well as pictures which we will try to get out tomorrow as we need to go to an internet cafe to do that. After 15 minutes, the "people" came back and they asked us if we wanted to adopt him, we of course said YES, and then we signed some papers and were instructed to be back in the morning at 10 am for a 2 hour visit. Bring clothes, light weight jacket to go outside in, and 8 diapers. Now, as to how he looked since I don't have pictures, he is not as big (tall) as I expected, about the weight I expected, and he has dirty blond hair with a tint of red, and hazel eyes. They are brown on the inside near the pupil and blue all around, I was surprised, I thought they were going to be deep brown. He has about 1/2 inch of hair. He rolled over, no problem today and was able to sit up with no assistance and put pressure on his legs firmly while standing. I asked the caregivers to tell me about him, they said that he is very loved. He likes to be held, loves people, laughs a lot, makes funny noises, BUT has a little temper if he gets upset. They told me he had a nice bath today in anticipation of meeting his mama and daddy. It was hard to say the least to leave him. But as Ethan said, this is only temporary, he will be going home with us soon. Sorry there are no pictures, we will try our best to get them tomorrow.

As to the other details of our day, we flew on the Yak 70-40 from Almaty to Kokshetau. I am glad I was mentally prepared for this. There are really no words to describe the plane, we took video footage b/c of this. It was loud, crammed with people, our luggage was in the back of the airplane, there were fleece blankets laying randomly around b/c it gets so cold in there when it has been in flight for a while. It was really just "gross" but we survived it, I read and prayed a little. By then I was getting so excited about meeting him that I didn't care if I had to ride to Kokshetau in a hanglider. We were picked up by our translator Inna and our driver. We were taken to the hotel were it looks like we will be staying. It is very nice, a big 2 room suite, clean and DSL internet accesss. We paid for 2 weeks, we may move to an apartment after court, but I doubt it. Breakfast here is free, and there is a lady who does your laundry for 2 USD per lb. Plus you can get an hour massage here for 15 USD. We ate dinner here at the Hotel Kokshetau restaurant. Ethan had a lovely soup that was chopped up spam, cucumbers, tofu and potatoes in a cold milk substance. His main course was mixed meat steak looking thing (likely horse). I had ravioli soup, which was basically little bitty ravioli in a big huge bowl of broth. I was scared to eat it after I realized that the ravioli may have little pieces of horse mixed in, so I mostly just had the bread. I don't think we will be cooking any Kaz meals for you guys when we come home. Oh and also we met with the Minister of Education prior to meeting Caleb. He just asked us a bunch of questions like why we wanted to adopt, how much money we make, how old our parents are?? He was nice and ended up telling us he was going to have a horse milk party so we (Ethan and I) could try it. I hope that is not true. Alright, we are off to try to get some sleep after a long fun day.