Evan's new moves (video!)

Hey all,

Just wanted to let everyone know that everything is going well on this end. Jen and I are eagerly awaiting custody of Evan and are still enjoying our visits, despite the fact that giving him back each day just gets harder and harder. If all goes well, it's only 5 more days until we get custody and now just under 2 weeks until we bring him home to the States! In the meantime, here's some move video action to keep everyone satisfied for just a little while longer.

Jen has mentioned the fact that Evan has started walking and we finally caught him in the act!

Evan walks solo

Oh and he's been learning a few new dance moves too...

Evan dances

Enjoy!

Brian

Spaghetti, Four Steps, and the Exploding Diaper

Evan and his first spaghetti experience!

The one photograph we have of the exploding diaper incident. Note the one sock and shoe.

"Calling all cars, calling all cars, we have an emergency at the Shchuchinsk Baby House. We are OUT of Cheerios. Repeat. We are OUT of Cheerios. Send reinforcements from Kokshetau IMMEDIATELY..."

Ball bathing...

The "Evan Cam"

Hi everyone!

Sorry we haven't been posting a lot lately. All those stories you hear about how families are bored when in Kaz do NOT apply during the summer months! We are constantly on the go (except during our long, luxurious afternoon naps, which will soon end).

Anyways, news in Evan's world includes the headlines above. There's a picture of his first experience with spaghetti (note the sauce all over his face). He definitely liked it, but we're noticing that while this kid loves to feed himself, he does NOT like to get his hands dirty! He all but refused to stick his hands in the spaghetti! Same goes for anything squishy, including banana and pear pieces. Oh, he'll let MOM get all mushy and bite my fingers as he chomps on the food, but not him.

The second piece of news is that he is RAPIDLY learning to walk! Yesterday he stood up from the ground by himself, not holding onto anything! Also, he took as many as four steps completely on his own yesterday! To top it off, he's a climber! We are in BIG trouble!

And, of course, last but not least, is the Infamous Exploding Diaper. Imagine, if you will, three adults and one 15 month old baby. Hmmmm, what's that smell? The adventurous new parents do a little detective work... smells like a poopy baby! Jen runs to the diaper bag and gets ready to change her first diaper. Brian and Makhabbat ready themselves for the event. The pants Evan is wearing unsnap completely from underneath, so we think, "no problem"! Only once they are unsnapped and we see the disaster that awaits us in his onesie do we realize our mistake. The diaper had failed to live up to our expectations. The mess was NOT contained! I'm not certain whose idea it is to now remove the pants OVER the child's head, (perhaps it seemed like the path of least resistance?) but that's when the screaming starts. Then Brian is behind me saying, "we need a cloth or something or it's going to get everywhere! Which one do you want, the orange one or the burp cloth?" "I don't care, just hurry!" I yell. At this point I am holding the boy's legs way up in the air in an attempt to avoid poop getting all over his back and the floor. Makhabbat is at Evan's head, trying to keep him entertained while we all run around like idiots. (How exactly do you get a soiled onesie off a child without making an even bigger problem?) We find ourselves folding up the onesie in an intricate origami-like fashion to contain the mess and then pulling it up over his head. (Any sudden moves could spell disaster!) Finally, we end up with a naked kid, starkers, except for ONE sock and ONE shoe. We fully wipe him down. It's only once he's allowed to crawl away (still naked plus shoe) that he stops his wailing. I will avoid a description of the smell.

Yergeldi says that an exploding diaper means that parents will become rich. But that's hogwash and we all know it. It's like saying that rain on a wedding day is "good luck", it's just to make the parents covered in poop feel better.

Anyways, a little tidbit of good news is that we are hopeful that we'll get custody a few days early, next Friday (the 4th). Keep your fingers crossed!

Over and out.

Jen

p.s. Just got back from the baby house again, he took FIFTEEN steps today!!!

Court and the cooool dude

Here is our court picture from Thursday. A classic with my eyes closed (and it's the only one), it will be one for the mantle!

Here is the little darling in dad's glasses...

...and mom's...

I would be lying if I didn't say that it has been a very tough week for us. We have encountered many difficulties in the intricacies of our stay here. We will not be getting custody of Evan Ulan until our wait is up, another 17 days from now. Until then, it's back to the dirt road. We are thrilled, however, that the adoption is moving forward, and we can't WAIT to get him home!

Until then, we will try to be better bloggers (sorry... you lose track of things here!). Y'all hold up your end of the bargain, too, and send us emails!

Jen

Douglasses say goodbye and Lucky's last hurrah

The last ride with the Douglass maniacs (they should start their own band, Michael would make a great death metal singer with a voice like his!).

The girls giving me hugs at dinner and taking pictures.

The HORSE. We did not eat horse, to my knowledge, at this particular meal. Here is ...almost everyone!

The last family photo of the Douglasses and Makhabbat!

Lucky the kitten's last photo shoot. That night (last night) we went to Makhabbat's family home where they stuffed us to bursting and got us wasted. I love it there! Hopefully Lucky will be happy in his new home; he's got a sweet garden to chase mice!

Success! (But no baby in tow...yet)

Hi everyone,

Our adoption has been granted! But custody has not...yet.

The most important thing for us, however, is it's over! It was pretty stressful, but the courtroom was small so that helped it not be TOO intimidating. Brian got up and read his speech, pausing for our interpreter, and then I had to get up and do the same (but mine wasn't as long). Then the Ministry representative and the prosecutor gave speeches. Then the judge left for about 25 minutes. Upon her return, she read to us what I was sure was a novel, but somewhere in there was the word "approved."

Unfortunately, we do not yet have custody of the munchkin. It's sort of ok that we don't today, because we are exhausted (it's 7pm and I just woke up from my nap, which started at 3!). It has been very difficult to convince the ministry folk that Evan will be ok if he comes back to the apartment with us. Everyone insists that he's "too young" (at 15 months!). Of course this makes no sense, as he will be only two weeks older after our 15 day wait, but there you have it. The Shchuchinsk director (at the ministry) declined the request to remove him from the baby house, but they are going to try to override it with the Kokshetau director. We should know sometime tomorrow, so we'll keep you posted.

Until the day comes when we DO get custody (even if that's the day we get his birth certificates, 19 days from now), it's back to the dirt road to Shchuchinsk! Ah, well. You win some you lose some!

Sorry no pictures today, we are wiped.

Almost parents!

Love,
Jen and Brian

Getting close to Evan (Video!)

Hey all,

Brian here. Well, we've now had a total of 21 visits with Evan Ulan at the babyhouse. And, this coming Thursday is our big court date!

I've been stressing for the past week about the big speech I have to give to the judge. (Honestly, we've been told there's not much to worry about, as our agency has a 100% success rate, but that doesn't change the fact that I need to give this speech!)

After court, we will HOPEFULLY get to take Evan back to our apartment immediately afterward. Now, just to clarify, there's a 15 day waiting period after the court date before we get Evan's birth certificate, which will make him officially our son. (So, he can't leave the country with us just yet!) But, often times the baby house will allow the adopted child to stay with their new parents during the 15 day wait. (Jen and I had the option to come home after the court date and then return at the end of the 15 days to take him home, but the cost and hassle of traveling to and from Kazakhstan twice, plus the fact that we'd have to leave him here, led us to deciding to stay for the additional 15 days.) So, we'll see!

In the meantime, here's a couple of new video tidbits for you.

Evan's been talking a lot lately, In this first one, Evan is just being introduced to the view screen on the video camera. (It's flipped around so that he can see himself.)

Evan's Image

Now, Jen and I aren't exactly sure what he's trying to say. "Da-da-da-da" either means "yes, yes, yes, yes" in Russian, or "Daddy, Daddy" in baby English, but considering the fact that his other "words" don't translate into either language, who knows.

He's also been laughing a lot more. Still feel like I haven't caught the ultimate moment on tape yet, but our interpreter, Makhabbat discovered a trick that's gets a good giggle out of him! It mainly involves putting your face against his tummy and making funny noises.

Evan Giggles

That's all for now! We can't wait to get him back to the apartment!

Brian

Ahhhh, sweet nectar...

Well, we finally got Evan to truly take a bottle today. It had pure apple juice in it, and once he got going he was in heaven. By the end of the bottle he was truly passing out on my leg, eyes rolled back in his head. It was so cute! He refused the bottle the first few times we've tried it, but we were insistent because we wanted to use it as a bonding tool. It's obvious that the babies are weaned off the bottles early, and in a way that is not condusive to ever taking one again (I'm thinking maybe vinegar on the nipple?). Anyways, he's now figured out that bottles=good (or he's getting there). I was VERY happy! For at least 15 minutes after he finished the bottle he was in a happy stupor, drunk on his apple juice and the joy of relaxing with a bottle. Now if we can just wean him off juice and get him onto some healthy formula, all will be right with the world...

And here's the dude's cool hot-weather hairdo today.

Pictures

The Supreme Master of Cuteness

Swingin'

The stylin' purple shoes the caregivers have been slappin' on Evan lately.

The hearty guffaw

Smiley

Pictures 2

Lucky, the kitten. Luckily, Lucky seems to have found a permanent home that doesn't involve him traveling to the US. Keep ya posted!

The Matrix poster for Kitty

Mutton skewers from a big group of Kazakh men at the beach today. I swear it was the best meat I've ever tasted.

The body-building Douglasses. Look at those biceps!

Sweet, maniac Mikael

Pictures 3

The Kazakhs who gave us mutton and vodka. There was an animated discussion about circumcision rituals in Kazakhstan. David got into a battle of wills with them that culminated in him telling them he had circumcised HIMSELF. The conversation stopped just short of all the men pulling down their pants. Ahhh, the mischief we americans get up to when we're abroad...

A slightly tipsy Brian and Makabat.

Deep Thoughts by Lucky the Kitten

Hi everyone!

Yes, we are still alive. Sorry we haven't posted, but life has been completely insane this past week and it's been difficult to get our thoughts together long enough to write anything, much less post pictures. We are bad bloggers and apologize! In fact, this post has no pictures because we have a morning visit tomorrow and it's 11pm here; I need to hit the hay!

Anyways, we've had a week very full with fun visits and not so fun other stuff. The boy is doing great; we just this week figured out (with the help of Makabat) how to get him to laugh a hearty guffaw. It's so cute, and we promise to post video of it very soon. He is getting SO close to walking! He's starting to stand without support more now, and every once in a while he takes a step on his own (shortly followed by a tumble!). The weather can't decide what it's doing here so our visits have been both inside and out, and we're stuffing the baby with cookies as usual.

The "not so fun" stuff has to do with the title of this post, Lucky the kitten. When we arrived here we saw litters of kittens and puppies all over the place, and we stayed away. We knew (enough) how hopeless it would be to get involved with any critters here, and it was easy to stay away. Besides, all the animals we saw were healthy enough, and the weather was warm. Well, several days ago at around 11pm we heard full-blown yowling in our corridor. It went on and on and we finally went out to investigate. It was during a freak cold spell we were having and it was in the 40's that night. Lo and behold, a teeny tiny black kitten was all alone yowling in the corridor. He looked about 4-5 weeks old, and when we caught him we realized that he was very sick and bony. Being the suckers that we are, we took him in and started fattening him up. As it turns out, it's even harder than we thought it would be to find homes for unwanted kittens in Kaz. Before meeting Lucky, we were already beginning to descend into our first real waves of culture shock. The point was brought home when we were told that the most common way to deal with unwanted animals in this country is to drown them. Sigh. There was just no getting around that we were very far from home, indeed.

Long story short, it's been a very rough week. The little whiny monster is still here (and still cute, and a little fatter, though we did think he might die one night). We are doing everything we can to find a cat loving person to bribe to take him. It is time for him to GO. We are here to adopt a baby, not save kittens! Still, if we were faced with the same situation again, I find it unlikely that we would have kept the door shut. Seeing a kitten out in the sun stuffed fat with mice is a bit different from a kitten in 40 degree rainy weather that is so skinny he can barely swallow.

So, until the crazy cat lady with 25 cats comes to claim him, we're stuck with him. Hey, at least he uses the box!

Otherwise, everything is going well. It just gets hard to be so far from home for so long. I would give my left arm for a big tub of sour cream right now. We went to the Douglass' tonight for spaghetti, and it was an awesome regression into american life! That, and we found a store that sells french wine, whoohoo! While a $12 bottle of french wine here might rival two buck chuck in the states, it's still heaven compared to what we had before.

This weekend, I PROMISE, I will post pictures!

Jen

Do you know the munchkin man?

Everything has been going great with the little dude. For those of you who don't know already, Ulan is Evan's given name, and it will be one of his middle names when we return. His full name after we get back to the states and do a re-adoption (a U.S. adoption) will be Evan Ulan Brian Cantwell. Anyways, all is well. We are 11 days from our court date, so are starting to prepare for that. We are very anxious to get Evan back to the apartment so we can really dig in and have some fun! Unfortunately, it appears that the weather has started to change. The past several days have been quite cold and rainy. This is unfortunate because we have mostly summer clothes! We'll see how it goes!

Smiley baby.

Evan's favorite new game: putting the little cups in the trunk of the barbie car, taking them out, throwing them, retrieving them, putting them in the trunk again. Then he climbs in the car for a ride!

Picnic with everyone!

The other day the folks all took us out to the "lake" for a picnic. Well, there was no lake in sight, so I don't know what they were talking about, but we did end up in a beautiful field with some mighty sized bugs! We all picked strawberries while Yergeldi finished up the traditional dish we were eating (Johnson, this was the dish your friend liked, we think). Boy, was it good! It was lovely fat noodles with meat and broth. Awesome, at least until Dave looked at us with a mischievous smile and said, "Do you know what you're eating?" Um, no, we didn't know what we were eating. We thought it was mutton. We were wrong.

Here is a picture of Brian with his cup of horse juice. Finding out what it was both threw us off our dinner and that was it for us. To Diego and all the other offended horses, we offer up our sincerest apologies. They tricked us! Horse milk we may have tried willingly (or drunkenly), but never flesh. Blech.

Here is a beautiful view from our drive in the big field.

Our hosts, Yergeldi andn Shaizada.

Me and Michael spinnin'.

Everyone gathered around the horse/vodka table.

Some cuteness for you...

That's right folks, you'd better watch out because the E.U.P.D. is on the prowl (Evan Ulan Police Department). You can see their top agent, Evan Ulan himself, cruising the streets on his chopper, hunting down the bad guys and eating every cookie that comes across his path. There's no stopping him!

Hangin' out with the Pops.

A little before 2nd breakfast reading material...

And... you guessed it... a morning nap!

That's all for now. Stay tuned tomorrow or the next day for pictures of the wild lake party we're about to go to with the Douglasses and our new american prey, the Lansers! Let's see, that's 8 americans, two almost-americans, one translator who loves to party, a smattering of sure-to-be-grumpy drivers, and one surly cook (Yergeldi)! See you on the other side!

Jen

Rocks and Strawberries

Makabat and her family in their garden. I should mention that it is Kazakh tradition to send their guests away with a gift. For our impromptu visit they sent us with a bag of (yummy) bread, and a big ball of hand-churned butter the size of a bowling ball!!! I am not kidding!!! We won't need butter for the rest of the trip!

Waving goodbye

The ROCK

View from the top of the rock

Makabat's bundle of strawberries. We ate them in the car and tossed the stems out the window.

Makabat's house

The amazing Kazakhstan countryside...

Makabat as a little girl! This cracks me up!

Makabat's father and her nephew.

The awesome feast Makabat's family made for us!

All of us around the lunch table. One of our (many) toasts was to our wonderful hosts and friends around the world.

The big trip!

Evan eating freeze-dried apples, aka "astronaut food". Hmmm, wonder if Brian is trying to prime him?

Feed me SEYMOR!

Evan in his sweeeet Barbie ride.

Guess who's sleeping...again? Must be all that good food we're stuffing his little face with!

Makabat and her beautiful daughter.

Wow! What an insane day we've had! What started out as a normal, but good day, turned into a great adventure in the countryside of Kazakhstan.

We got up this morning and made the drive to Shchuchinsk for our visit with Evan as usual. The visit was great! Today for the first time I went in to get him and saw him in his little playpen; he smiled and crawled up to me quickly, ready to go! That may not sound that exciting, but to me it was great. Evan has really bonded with Brian, but not with me as much, and until now he cried every time I went to go get him from his room. :-( I was VERY happy to see him so happy to see me and excited to play!

So our morning routine is, we get the baby, he gets changed into american clothes while we wait, then we go into the music room to see what new toys we brought today. After a few minutes of tinkering we eat 2nd breakfast: oatmeal or some other sort of cereal (which I call porridge for lack of a better term... it's mush really) mixed with secret scoops of formula for vitamins, some variety of flavor of baby food mixed into the porridge, two cookies and a big cup of keifer. Today we also had little freeze-dried apples. They weren't as exciting as honey-nut cheerios, but Evan ate at least a few (they're chopped up baby-style).

After breakfast we played a little in the music room. There were some big kid toys in there today which Evan was fascinated with, including a rockin' barbie car! And we were so lucky to have one of the head caregivers come in with her accordion and play music for us! They taught us how to teach him to dance to their songs, it was very sweet.

Then it was off to the big outdoors. Usually at this time Evan takes an illicit nap, but today we managed to keep him up (we get busted for handing them a sleepy baby). We walked around and around the baby house, feeling the trees and leaves... the usual. Today our translator's daughter came with us to the baby house. They are both pictures. Makabat told us at the end of our visit that we needed to run an errand with her to drop off her daughter in the countryside at her parents' house. We agreed, but were not thrilled about an extra 2 hours in the car to run this errand.

Little did we know what adventures would await us after the baby house! First of all, let me just say that the countryside of Kazakhstan is absolutely unbelievable. It's impossible to capture it in a picture. It is simply endless, and the sky is simply huge. So we had a fantastic drive through the countryside to Makabat's childhood home (in the Audi...hell yeah!). When we got there, Makabat ran inside with her daughter and told us to have a walk in the garden. Well, we met a man in the garden. Ummmm... So we introduced ourselves, in english, and shook hands with him. And then he must have asked us who we were or something like that in russian because that's when things started to go downhill. We were still stuck on the introduction part of this conversation and trying to get him to tell us his name, "I'm Jennifer, this is Brian, and you are?" Then he must have said, "I'm so-and-so, and who the hell are you and why are you in my garden?" At that point we realized the conversation had progressed without our knowledge, so we just said, "Makabat!" OOOOOHHHHH, then everything became clear! So he took off, looking for Makabat.

Makabat came back out and invited us inside. The home was comfortable by Kaz standards, and I was impressed that they owned their own house and land. We met Makabat's absolutely gorgeous niece and nephew, and then were ushered into the sitting room where we were handed several large family photo albums. At this point, her father was our guide and was rattling off in russian everything we were looking at. Brian was so funny, "Ahhhh, I see," and, "Mmm, hmmm, da, da," he kept saying; it cracked me up. We DID get to see pictures of a funny little Makabat, and many pictures of men in big fur hats.

After our introduction to her family history, we were unexpectedly invited to lunch. Makabat had mentioned lunch, but we thought we were going out; we certainly didn't expect the spread her family laid out for us! It was a little scary at first with a lot of unfamiliar things, but as the vodka started flowing it wasn't so hard to try new dishes. There was bread, a huge plate of butter, mutton, liver, another big hot dish of mutton, potatoes, more butter, carrot salad, a sort of coleslaw, cookies, vodka, and did I mention the butter? It was today, at this point in the trip, that it has really become clear to me the quality of the vodka. For a moment this afternoon I was pretty certain that I was drinking jet fuel. And when you only finish half your glass here, apparently it means you want more, so they kept refilling our shot glasses! This wasn't so bad once I discovered that watermelon isn't a bad chaser for jet fuel. PHEW!

At the end of the meal they served tea and the cookies. Then they said a prayer, and then we were off again. Makabat had told us that she was going to drag our drunk asses up the side of a big rock. We quickly forgot that she had said this until we pulled up the the big rock we were expected to climb. It was actually quite fun, and once at the top you could see everything because the land in this region is so flat. It was quiet, quiet, quiet.

After our little hike, we headed down to the car amid every large bug you can imagine. I don't know what they feed them here, but they're like small cats! I took refuge in the hot car while we waited for the others. Once we thought we were on our way again, we stopped yet again, this time to pick wild strawberries. This, I must admit, was pretty cool. It is difficult to describe what the day was like, all in all, let's just say that the day felt like a dream.

Enjoy the pictures! Write us some emails, people!

Jen