Claire's New Year

The babyhouse asked that we visit Claire early today because of the holiday, so we went from 10-12. That’s the time we used to visit when we had to share the room with three other families, but today we just shared the room with a very nice couple from Belgium (the mother has bought 16 pairs of shoes for her children since they’ve been here…I think we could be friends!). Claire was fun and smiley for the first hour of our visit and spent most of the last hour fighting to keep her head up. She’d play frantically, put her head down for about 30 seconds, and then play frantically again. I think she knows that if she falls asleep, we’ll be gone when she wakes up. At least, that’s what we like to think. It gets harder to leave her every day, especially if she reaches back for us when we hand her back to her caregiver. We told Asel today that we were going to put Claire in our backpack and smuggle her out, and her eyes got very wide. I guess those are things you don’t joke about.

The Nauryz festival was…well, it was an experience. If you combined going to the mall the day after Thanksgiving, a mosh pit, and fighting for a Cabbage Patch Kid in the mid-‘80s, that’s pretty much what it was like. There were a ridiculous amount of people, so many so that when we first arrived, they had closed the gates and people weren’t being allowed to enter until others left. The people standing up against the gates were being shoved into the gates like it was some sort of rock concert. There was a poor grandmother with her grandchildren at the front being squashed, and the policemen tried to open the gate to just let her through, but people behind her started pushing the gate open. Asel said, “Perhaps this entrance makes you uncomfortable and we should find another.” Uh, yeah. A little uncomfortable. We finally found an entrance where people weren’t being trampled and managed to get into the festival. It was so crowded that we couldn’t even get to the food or any of the other kiosks and we got shoved all over the place. Shoving is pretty much a cultural norm here. Where we might say, “Excuse me,” and wait for the person to move, they pretty much just move you aside and neither the shovee nor the shover takes it personally. It’s something we’re both having a hard time getting used to. After all of five minutes inside, we were ready to leave. I know Asel was relieved – I think she was terrified of losing us there. If she could’ve made each of us hold one of her hands, I think she would have. There are supposed to be fireworks tonight, and we figure we’ll watch them from our apartment (we’re on the 13th floor), and shove each other back and forth at the window. We’ll feel like we’re there.

Court is one week from today! In some regions you get to take custody of your child after court, but Astana just changed that a few weeks ago. We’ll have to continue visiting Claire for a 15-day waiting period, and then we’ll be able to take custody. The next day, we’ll fly to Almaty, which used to the be capital (it moved here to Astana in 1997) and where the US Embassy still is, where we’ll out-process and take care of a few other official matters. After a week there, we’ll head home and immediately find a Schlotsky’s so I can get a smoked turkey sandwich.