Days 15 and 16 -- We have a voice, a court date, and some history

Over the last two days, ZM has really found his voice. In fact, we think we now have a preview into just how loud he will be on the plane when it comes time to bring him home. He is really starting to babble, and although nothing resembling any words (that we know of) is emerging from his little mouth, we are so happy to listen to ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba for long periods of time. Music to our ears!

And another piece of big news – and it is big – is that we have a court date for the adoption hearing, now set for Monday, May 12 at 10:00 AM. It is not lost on me that at that moment of time, Mother’s Day will be coming to a close back home. (Dang, if we lived in San Francisco, it would actually still be Mother’s Day back home! HA!) We will have been in the country 22 days as of our court date, and we continue to be so humbled by our good fortune that includes the aggressive, speedy time lines in this region. The sooner we get to court, the sooner we are through the 15 day appeal period, which means the passport and exit paperwork can begin, etc., etc., etc.

In the meantime, Groundhog Day continues, with more daily tweaks.

On Monday morning (our official last day of bonding), we stopped at the court house on the way to the baby house. The coordinator positioned this as “filing your court papers.” How very official sounding. Here’s what it really was: “Peer through this 2 inch by 6 inch window while the person on the other side of the wall looks at you and looks at your passport to make sure you are indeed the person in the photo.” We are certain that our coordinator had more to do in the “filing” department, but our important role lasted two seconds each (giving the clerk a chance to glance our way not once, but twice), and we were on our way to visit ZM.

When we arrived, ZM was all dressed up in the overalls and shirt that we bought him in Ust. He came running over, and although all of his mates were going outside, we selfishly wanted to keep him inside for some one-on-one time. He wasn’t too happy with us at first because he wanted to be with his classmates. We of course want him to prefer us, but we are comforted by how happy he is with his little pals and his caretakers.

ZM fell asleep earlier than usual – and perhaps it’s because he heard the caretakers talking about an important visitor that we only found out about at 11:00 AM when one of the translators stopped in and said, “Clean up now, we want you out of here as a commissioner is about to visit.” This is one of about a gazillion moments in time in Kaz where you have multiple questions that you simply do not ask. Instead, we jiggled our little guy awake and he seemed a little out of sorts. We stripped him down to his regular clothes, and sat him back in the “pit” with his friends (since he still had another 30 minutes until lunch). We were then whisked out of the baby house in a hurry. Ahhhh, the mystery.

As part of our court appearance, we will present a daily journal about our visits with ZM. It is amazingly challenging to make each Groundhog Day sound uniquely different than the prior day. (“Today, he waved at us with his left hand.” “Oooh, today he waved at us with his right hand. How amazing is this child?!”) Each day’s entry is accompanied by the infamous dated photo. So, we headed out at lunch in search of a way to print photographs.

We walked to the center of town, and spun in circles until we saw a Kodak sign. We headed through the doors and found ourselves in a maze-like shopping area of many little kiosk-type shops. We wandered around and came upon a Kodak color print machine just as we would find at home – except of course that everything was in Cyrillic and the photo sizes were in meters. The photo attendant helped us figure out the machine (with no words spoken between any of us -- it's amazing what you can accomplish with alot of pointing, pantomiming, and "uh huhs"). After a few seconds, we had the hang of it, and we were even getting cocky and editing the photos. Our little guy has the prettiest eyes, so we had to be sure to remove any hint of redeye! We printed out the required journal photos and several extras to carry around with us just in case someone stops us on the street and asks to see a picture of the most adorable 16-month-old in Ust. We then wandered around Ust a bit more, enjoying a beautiful sunny day and marveling at the fact that we were strolling through Kazakhstan as if we were strolling through Cincinnati.

We spent our afternoon visit outdoors. We love to get fresh air with our little guy, but to be honest, he’s just not that happy with us when he is outside. We are just about certain that he is a different kid when he is outdoors with his mates and his caretakers. We more or less pushed him to walk a bit by each holding a hand and encouraging steps that he stubbornly turned into dragging feet. These stubborn moments are also accompanied by a high pitched moan. After 30 minutes, we gave up and picked him up, sat on the swing with him, etc. and he was of course all smiles. He’s already figured out how to manipulate us! Most of the other families were also outside, and we were all carrying our kids around and acknowledging that now is not the time to try to push our kids to walk, interact, etc. We’ll all work on those skills when we get home, and we know it will all be fine.

We hoofed it over to the Pancake House and met Matt and Suz for dinner. We already miss them so much, and they have only been gone from The Shiny River for 24 hours! I thought I ordered “thick pancakes” for dinner for both Glenn and me, but when it came, it was more like fried dough balls – like the dough in carnival-style Elephant Ears, but without any powdered sugar. Glenn had sweetened condensed milk as his dipping sauce, and I had jam. So, we basically had doughnuts for dinner. Only in Kaz. :-)

We then walked to the edge of town to see Matt’s and Suz’s apartment. It’s a bit of a walk from the hotel, but we of course are going to make every effort to continue to see them as often as possible.

We had a big day on Tuesday. After a great morning visit (with a really loud child!), we journeyed to the village where ZM was born. It was important to us to see this area, so we had asked well in advance if we could be driven to this village at some point during our stay. It took just under an hour to drive to this area (to be named publicly after the appeal period), although at least 15 minutes of that time was getting out of Ust. Once we passed the airport, it was smooth sailing through the countryside. I would compare the road on which we traveled to what would be a secondary county roadway in the US … two lanes for traffic, very uneven pavement, a gravel berm on either side, and no lines on the road. There was a surprising amount of traffic, and it is truly amazing how aggressive some drivers are with passing other drivers, even with a truck bearing down on them in the incoming lane. On more than one occasion, we watched the passing car win the chicken game as the oncoming car swerved onto the gravel berm to avoid the head on collision. Our driver’s car has seat belts – including in the back seat – and I was strapped in tightly!

The village where ZM was born is a small town of about 50,000 people, with a large zinc plant on the outskirts. It reminded us a bit of the housing and lifestyle of Appalachia. You’d think in a town this small, it would be easy to find the hospital, but it was a challenge. As we were attempting to find it, we came upon this town’s memorial to the Great War (they do not refer to it as WW II). We got out and studied the memorial, checking the names of the local soldiers who were lost in the war to see if any of them had ZM’s surname -- there was no one. We then proceeded to continue to try to find the hospital. We had stopped earlier and asked about it, so someone had pointed it out to us in the distance. We could see it – but we could not figure out how to drive to it! We turned down road after road that would result in a dead end. We finally ended up in what felt like someone’s back yard, and our driver asked a man in the yard, “How do we get to the hospital?” Watching his gestures, we think he was motioning that we had to go quite a bit north of town and make a big U-Turn so to speak to work our way back to the building on another roadway …. or we could just start walking up a path that led out of his back yard and make our way to the building. So, we started walking.

We took a lot of video footage and many, many photographs of the outside of the building – all sides. It looked like a long-ago abandoned factory, and if not for the ambulances that were parked outside (and the neighbor man pointing to it), there is no way we would have ever realized it was the hospital. No sign, no “grand entry”, no cars sitting in a parking lot, nothing. As we were walking up the path, a young woman carrying a baby passed us by, and our driver asked her which floor of the hospital was maternity. She told us, “the first floor.” When we got up to the building, a few of the first floor windows had numbers posted in them …. 1, 2, 3, etc. Our coordinator said that a visitor could come stand outside of the appointed window and the baby would be shown to the outside visitors. It sounded a bit unbelievable to us, but we took photos of the numbers just the same. We didn’t go inside, and to be honest, we didn’t even ask to do so. It felt invasive as it was, and we saw many people (no one on floor one) peeping out the windows at us as we were walking around the building. I did not need to see the inside of the building, and I think there is a decent chance it would have been more upsetting than sentimental to see it. It was a completely surreal experience, knowing that our little boy could just as easily have been growing up in this village … but his birth mother decided for whatever reason to give him an opportunity at another life, and he will now be raised in America.

We also passed a school, with several children playing outdoors during what seemed to be recess. We know that ZM has an older birth sibling, so it occurred to both of us that this child could be on that playground. We can't put into words how odd that feeling is.

We took a lot of pictures of the Main Street, and of the big entrance signs to the village. We totally believe that ZM will come back here one day – if he wants to – to see his birth place in person, and we hope that he will appreciate that we took the time to visit it while we are here. We feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity.

We will post additional news as the next days progress, but we have made the decision to come home between visits, and to both return to Ust to bring ZM home when the paperwork is complete. It is a difficult decision, but we feel we have received many signs that it is the right decision for us.

More soon! We miss everyone, including all of our Blogger friends! It is not always easy to read your blogs, but we are doing so whenever we can get the Internet to cooperate!!!