Life on the road.

Our daily routing has varied little since we arrived in Semey. What has changed is our sleep time. The first few days we woke up early (4:00 or 5:00) wide awake. Mostly time adjusting but the first few days after we met Michael and Grace we worried about their future if they liked us, what medical problems do that have that we have not been told about…All normal parenting stuff (I think). Lately we have been getting a solid 7-8 hours.
Chris wakes up at 7 and pre-writes emails or blogs or downloads pictures and video. Barbara gets up at 8:15. In the beginning of the week we ate in the hotel restaurant. We ate dinner there too, so that got old very quickly. We now eat yogurt and juice and tea in our spacious 2 room hotel room. At 9:55 we are picked up by Almas our driver. We go 4 blocks north and 4 blocks west to get to the orphanage. We put out stuff in our room and at the same time pick up the kids. We alternate who goes to get who. One of us will go to Michael’s group room (named sparrow in Kazakh) Michael will have just finished his early snack and the caretakers are usually feeding other children. They get Michael and change him into his Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes(the same one every day). We he sees us he has a great big smile. And he runs to us. Grace on the other hand is always ready. She is in her bright shinny dress. She always greats us with a big hug. Then see runs down the hall to help get Michael. They have bonded well so far. Grace hugs Michael and we all go into the family room. Where we play and take pictures. Every day we learn something new about both of them. At 11:3o we clean the room and bring Michael back to his room. Grace then runs down the hall turns the corner and hide in the corner leading to her room. We finally get there and hug her and kiss her. Say “Ya tee bya lu blu” (I love You). She is quickly changed into her everyday clothes and she joins her group at the lunch table. The rest of our day is shopping and the internet café until 4:00 when we have tea. At 5:00 Chris usually goes back to the internet café. Barbara writes hers letters to the kids for their life book. We meet up again at 7:00 for dinner. We watch DVD movies on the computer at 8:30 with our glass of wine and Pringles chips. We are in bed with a book by midnight. If we did not have these movies we would have been stir crazy by now. The only other English is the BBC world wide and they repeat their stories every half hour. This is day 9 and everyday is beginning to look like the previous day. Hmm... might be a good theme for a movie...