My happy girl is back!

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions and your “I feel your pain” stories yesterday, both in e-mails and in the comments. Grandma finally got Claire to sleep last night after an hour long back massage. Lucky girl. She woke up at 2 a.m. for a bottle, which I fed her while leaning over her crib (quite uncomfortable, but I wasn’t about to wake her up any more than she needed to be), and she woke up at 6 a.m. a very smiley, happy baby. The howler monkey seems to have disappeared, and she’s actually been happy almost all day on only one half hour nap. Perhaps we got the world’s first practically sleepless child. We’ve pretty much decided to let her dictate her own schedule while we’re here because that makes for a happy Claire, and thus a happy Mommy and Grandma, and we’ll try to establish a more consistent routine once we get home.

We went to lunch today with two other American families – Alyssa Tabora and her mom, Betty, and Tim and Kersten Farah. They’re adopting two adorable little ones, Maddy and Gannon, here in Almaty. This country sure produces some darn cute kids. We went to Mad Murphy’s Irish Pub, which was the closest we’ve come to an American restaurant in a LONG time. The menu even had quesadillas and nachos! I LOVE nachos, but having bad ones would almost be worse than not having them at all, so I’m holding off until I get home. Then I’ll get some good, greasy, cheese-smothered ones. Yum.

I called the law offices today and got our schedule for the week. Claire has a medical check up on Thursday, and we have appointments with the law office and with the US Embassy on Friday afternoon. That means we have tomorrow and Wednesday completely free for shopping! Unfortunately, our luggage is pretty full so we’ll have to go easy on that…or we can just buy really small, shiny things (someone please give Justin a paper bag to breathe into).