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