And the star of the hour...

Jen's first bottle!! I was SO proud after making it. But then when we tried to feed it to the boy he spit it right out. Apparently he's used to drinking whole milk now, not formula. After several days of failing with the snacks, mom has decided to forego nutrition for a while. Today he gets milk with a little bit of sugar and some cookies. I'm not messing around anymore!

As it turns out, the kid laughs, too! We got our first laughs yesterday. They were quiet and tentative. Actually, I wonder if he has laughed much at all in his life. The laugh was a low, quiet "hee hee hee hee". It was very sweet. It's only a matter of time before he's screaming with laughter with the houseful of toys we have at home!

He ate the cracker, but he didn't like the cracker. I had to eat three of them to get him to continue crunching on his. I could see his point; they are very bland crackers! Today, cook-ays!

Look! Family photo! But Evan's too busy checking out the mayhem...

This one's for Sue Jones! Man, as I said in last night's drunken post, yesterday was a rough day. After the car broke down we had our visit with Evan, but we were late and so the visit was cut short. Makabat (our lovely translator, pictured) hired us a taxi to take us back to Kokshetau after the visit. Thank god she came with us because this guy was a piece of work. The car was more comfortable than Yergeldi's broken one, but this driver was literally the reason deodorant was invented. I literally had my hand up against my nose for most of the trip, trying to smell instead whatever lotion I had last used. It was awful! Brian has said I'm not allowed to post other details about this car ride home for fear that his mother will have a heart attack. Let's just say we got there QUICKLY!

So after all of this, Makabat, the Douglasses and us all went out to dinner. It was great, and as previously mentioned, there was a LOT of vodka! We are recovering today, though are doing surprisingly well. We're sitting here trying to figure out how many shots of vodka we each had. We are surprised to determine that it seems that I had more than Brian. He can count 5-6 shots, and I can count 7-8. That walk home was fun, I must say (honestly). Vodka really did, in this case, make a hard end of the day seem like no problem.

Sue, we tried to get Makabat in on the picture joke, but apparently she needs more than 8 shots of vodka to be into it. That's ok, we've got another 6 weeks to get her hammered and in on the game!

Jen