Insert Your Favorite Expletive Here
We’ve hit a little problem on our trip home. The machine in Astana that prints passports is broken. We can’t have our exit interview at the US Embassy or get Claire on the flight home without her passport, so we are stuck here until the machine is fixed and Claire’s passport arrives in Almaty. It’s been broken for two days (they didn’t want to tell us earlier because they didn’t want to worry us until we really needed to worry), so they’re hopeful that it will be up and running soon. If the passport arrives tomorrow, we can still catch our original flight home. Otherwise, we have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, since no one works on the weekends. So please send every prayer, positive thought, and chant our way and if you know a little passport dance, feel free to toss that into the mix as well. We’re disappointed, but there’s really nothing we can do about it, so if we end up having to stay until next week, we’ll just make the best of it and see some sites around Almaty.
In better news, we went to lunch today with another family from our agency, the Williams. Tom, Michele, and cute little Cameron were here two years ago adopting Cameron and found out last fall that he had a sister in Kazakhstan, so they’re back this time to bring home their new daughter, Katya. It’s such a great story with so any coincidences that you just know it was meant to be. We enjoying having lunch with them and Cameron enjoyed entertaining Claire (and until the naptime fussiness kicked in, she quite enjoyed the entertainment).
Claire’s medical appointment was this afternoon. Her doctor was a very frank guy who looked at her medical history, waved his hand, and with a few expletives, told us that Claire’s medical chart was loaded with a bunch of junk that you can’t even find in a medical dictionary (in order to be adopted internationally, babies have to have something “wrong” with them). He pronounced her healthy and tiny. She’s 12.3 pounds and 28 inches long. He said that’s the size of a 5 month old baby, but he was confident that she’d thrive and grow once she gets home and settled. He said that the main thing to worry about is if a baby’s head size is not in proportion to the body, and he said that Claire’s little noggin is just the right size for her body. A general rule of thumb for children who’ve been institutionalized is that they’re one month behind for every three months they’ve been in an orphanage, and Claire falls pretty much in line with that. Michele told us at lunch that Cameron was 14 pounds when they brought him home (at pretty much the same age as Claire), and he’s a happy, healthy, good-sized almost three year old now.
We picked up Claire’s portrait tonight, and it’s wonderful! It’s hard to go wrong with a subject like Claire, though. I’ll post a photo of it tomorrow because I’m too lazy to download it off the camera right now.
Again, keep us and the Astana passport machine in your thoughts today.
In better news, we went to lunch today with another family from our agency, the Williams. Tom, Michele, and cute little Cameron were here two years ago adopting Cameron and found out last fall that he had a sister in Kazakhstan, so they’re back this time to bring home their new daughter, Katya. It’s such a great story with so any coincidences that you just know it was meant to be. We enjoying having lunch with them and Cameron enjoyed entertaining Claire (and until the naptime fussiness kicked in, she quite enjoyed the entertainment).
Claire’s medical appointment was this afternoon. Her doctor was a very frank guy who looked at her medical history, waved his hand, and with a few expletives, told us that Claire’s medical chart was loaded with a bunch of junk that you can’t even find in a medical dictionary (in order to be adopted internationally, babies have to have something “wrong” with them). He pronounced her healthy and tiny. She’s 12.3 pounds and 28 inches long. He said that’s the size of a 5 month old baby, but he was confident that she’d thrive and grow once she gets home and settled. He said that the main thing to worry about is if a baby’s head size is not in proportion to the body, and he said that Claire’s little noggin is just the right size for her body. A general rule of thumb for children who’ve been institutionalized is that they’re one month behind for every three months they’ve been in an orphanage, and Claire falls pretty much in line with that. Michele told us at lunch that Cameron was 14 pounds when they brought him home (at pretty much the same age as Claire), and he’s a happy, healthy, good-sized almost three year old now.
We picked up Claire’s portrait tonight, and it’s wonderful! It’s hard to go wrong with a subject like Claire, though. I’ll post a photo of it tomorrow because I’m too lazy to download it off the camera right now.
Again, keep us and the Astana passport machine in your thoughts today.
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