Leigh Ann, break out that champagne!

So, wow. Wow. wow. wow. We met our son today! Though I think that if he had his way he would be left alone by us and allowed to continue upon his merry way without us. Boy, can this kid scream! He was NOT into us at ALL!!! I thought I might be able to win him over at first when I gave him a Gerber baby cracker; unfortunately he spit it out immediately into his hand, looked at it with an insulted and unbelieving face, looked at me and then screamed some more. This situation was not helped by the fact that it was rather late in his day, he was tired, hungry AND sick.

So I'm getting ahead of myself... let me explain. We arrived in Almaty one and a half days early due to the flights being much cheaper (like $3K cheaper). We had requested an earlier than planned meeting with the infamous "sisters" (the wonderful ladies that run this operation), but we were told that it was unlikely to happen before Tuesday, and that we would not travel to Shchuchinsk until Wednesday at the earliest. Well, we let Jim know that we were coming early and that if it was possible we would love to meet earlier than Wednesday. Lo and behold, we TOTALLY lucked out when they scheduled our meeting AND our travel for Monday!

The meeting with the "sisters", or in our case the "sister", Gulzanu (?) went extremely well. The whole event was rather unexpected, actually. Their office was very nice and modern and Gulzanu was extremely friendly and welcoming (not to mention beautiful!). I think we had been expecting to be grilled by a forbidding nun-type, but as it turns out the whole office was as lovely as could be. From our meeting we went to the airport and boarded a plane to Astana. No, we didn't have to take the "Yak" plane! But we will probably have to take it on the way home.

When we got to Astana we were a little surprised to meet a man (our driver) who had our name a little wrong and didn't speak english. Still he seemed very sure of what he was doing, and everyone else had gone, so we rolled the dice and went along with it. In the car I was shortly reassured when I saw some WPA paperwork; we were with the right guy! Then we drove for 3 hours to Shchuchinsk. Outside the baby house we met our translator, Mahabat, and we all drove straight to the Ministry of Education to do more paperwork before we were allowed to meet the little guy.

Which brings me back to where I started. He was not into it! I can't wait to blackmail him when he's older with his "first family photos" of him screaming bloody murder and us looking uncomfortable!

So, the great part of all of this is that eventually his caregiver needed to go in to feed the other babies and we were left alone with Evan. Again, he screamed and screamed, snorted, blew his nose, and coughed and coughed. But after about 10 minutes I decided that he was just gonna have to give me a big hug whether he wanted to or not; enough of this asking permission to hold him! I stood up, snuggled him tight, got a good grip and held on. After a few minutes his screaming turned to snuffling and occasionally coughing. The poor little guy! It took him a while to discover that I wasn't going to cause him horrible harm. I got him to calm down, but after too long looking at anyone's face he would start screaming again. Leave it to us silly americans to overstimulate a tired, hungry, sick child!

In the end he still wasn't sure about us, but that's ok because we're sure about him! We're hoping hoping hoping that he'll be well for our visit tomorrow. And that maybe, just maybe, he'll accept my apology for giving him such an icky cracker!

Alright, I'm passing out now. More tomorrow!

Jen