Pavlodar Day 1

We’re in Pavlodar. It’s actually a lot nicer than we expected. We got moved into our apartment last night and it’s really pretty nice. Big. Actually, I saw pictures of this apartment on a blog and started praying that we’d get to stay here. And here we are. It’s great after a couple of days on planes and one night in a teeny weeny hotel room in Almaty. Almaty was pretty cool. We found a McBurger restaurant and ate some burgers and fries. Not bad at all. Nicholas isn’t doing too good with all the different food, but now that we’re here we can cook, and things will taste a bit more like home. We stopped at a supermarket after getting to Pavlodar last night and picked up the stuff to make spaghetti. We are supposed to have an appointment at the ministry of education later today and we are just waiting to hear what time from our lawyer.

Just got the call from our lawyer and they’re picking us up in 10 minutes. Gotta go!

We had our appointment at the Ministry of Education this morning. It went well and we are now waiting for the paper she has to give us that gives us permission to go to the Office of Care and Guardianship for the next step of the process. We are hoping to get that by about 4:00 this afternoon. Hopefully we’ll get to the OCG today and will be ready to go to the babyhouse tomorrow morning, but if not, we’ll go to the OCG tomorrow morning and then to the babyhouse. We made spaghetti for lunch—I had bought what looked like a roll of ground meat at the store last night (it had a cow dancing on the package) but when I opened it, it was not ground meat but something like a roll of spam. Ok. But once it was cut really small it worked pretty well in the spaghetti, and even Nicholas ate a big plate of it without complaining at all. That’s the first meal he’s been okay with in Kazakhstan.

The lady at the Ministry of Education was very excited to meet Nicholas (who’s not up to his usual friendly self yet, but getting closer!) He talked to her a bit—I think it’s hard for him that no one understands him and that he can’t understand them. I hope he’ll get used to the translator thing soon. She said she had never gotten to meet a child who had been adopted from an orphanage and been with a family for a while, and it made her feel happy to see that he was happy, healthy and well cared-for. They told us after that few families bring their children and those that have brought children here have had biological children, not adopted ones. I’m so glad he came! I can only imagine how horrible it would be to have left him…all of you families that had to do that, wow. It must have been so hard. It’s hard to have him, too, but in a different way. For example, he woke up at 5:30 this morning because of jet lag. But he came and got in bed with us and went back to sleep (off and on) until about 8:30.

I’ll hopefully get to post all of this tonight. Maybe we’ll even put some pictures of our apartment and stuff.

We love and miss you guys!