Winter in Almaty - Again!!!

Oops - wrong caption on the photo below. Guess I'm getting ahead of myself!

The past few days we have experienced winter in Almaty again. It was raining on Monday, and the rain turned to snow on Tuesday and Wednesday. It has been snowing all day today, and there is quite a bit of snow – a few inches on the ground. Because of the weather, we have not been doing very much besides our Baby House visits.

It’s really hard to believe that we only have a few days left here on this trip. We leave for the airport 12:30am on Saturday morning (or Friday night, depending on how you look at it), which essentially means we have two more days!

Yesterday’s Baby House visits were good, as usual. Bryce did a lot of talking and continues to enjoy playing with his blocks and his books. Yesterday afternoon he was dressed in some kind of warm zip-up sleeper type of outfit. We felt sorry for him. It was obviously a bit small, and he had trouble moving around. We didn’t dare take it off, as the Kazakhs believe that babies must be dressed warmly, and we didn’t want to get in trouble. Between visits, we took our film to get developed. For court, we need date-stamped pictures showing that we visited Bryce at the Baby House for 14 days. The pictures turned out very well. We also stopped at a café for laghman (noodles), which were good on a cold day. Last night for dinner, we went out to a restaurant called Mad Murphy’s. It was an Irish pub. I think all adoptive families in Almaty must go there at least once, and it was really strange because everyone in the place was speaking English. Our verdict – food was OK, but a bit overpriced compared to what we have had elsewhere.

Today Bryce seemed to be catching a cold, and he was a little bit cranky. Or maybe he was teething…..now we see about 4 top teeth about to appear. Or maybe it was a bit of both. Still, we had fun visits, and we think he is making progress. He is definitely a fan of Cheerios, and ate quite a few during our visits today. Today between visits we went out for lunch at a Kazakh restaurant – laghman for Chuck and chicken bishparmak for me. Then we went shopping at Tsum for souvenirs. So far we have bought matroishka dolls, a little yurt filled with 10 little wooden people, and an Almaty area map. We will have to go back for more – maybe tomorrow.

Tonight we went out to an Indian restaurant with another World Partners family. It was the first night we were out with other Americans and it was great! They are headed out to Uralsk tomorrow for their adoption.

Tomorrow will be another big day – 2 visits and then we get briefed about what court will be like!