Things Always Look Better in the Morning

A quick update on our travel woes –Things are looking up today. Nothing is firm yet, but Shawnna and Myron at Golden Rule Travel are working to get us home in a reasonable time frame. More to follow when we know for sure what we’re doing. A good night’s sleep and a little in-country meltdown have really helped to improve our perspective. Even if they can’t get us out of here as soon as we’d like, at least we are in comfortable surroundings, in a nice apartment, are eating very well and are with one of our kids, and, most importantly, we aren’t being bombed while we wait to get a flight.

Today we saw LM have his first meltdown - must be something in the air here. When we arrived they were just getting his breakfast ready so I sat down to feed him. He was his usual happy self to see us, but a couple of bites into his breakfast he became inconsolable and kept trying to kick the tray off his highchair. One of the caretakers decided to try feeding him and didn’t have any better luck. By the time she finished taking his temperature he had settled down and he was laughing and smiling while we changed his clothes to take him outside. We never did figure out what was wrong; maybe he just wanted to play more than eat. It’s definitely gotten warmer here the last few days. We dressed him in a onesie today with long pants and a long sleeve shirt and a jacket and a hat today since we thought that was the approved dress. When we got outside we saw that the toddlers had come out in shorts and short sleeves so we stuffed the warm clothes back in the bag and let him get a little sun and fresh air. The big kids were outside again today, but we noticed that after a few minutes they took them to the smaller side playground to play. Hope that wasn’t because we played with them too much yesterday.

We met a nice couple from Kentucky today. They just arrived in Astana yesterday and have an adorable 6 month old son. It’s funny, of the 4 families that are in the process of adopting boys in the last few weeks, the other 3 have all named their boys the same thing. We are hoping to take them to a couple of our favorite restaurants before we leave.

We went back to the President’s Museum this afternoon to do the majority of our souvenir shopping. As if the exchange rate wasn’t bad enough already, when we went to change money for our shopping expedition we discovered that between yesterday and today it has dropped almost 1 tenge/dollar again.

That’s about it for today unless you consider reading, napping and cleaning out email files to be exciting activities.