So What's New?

Let’s start with the new things that Max is doing. First of all, he babbles constantly. Well, actually sometimes he replaces babble with all and all out yelling, but it’s the happy sort, so we love it. He would never be allowed to be this loud in the baby house, especially at nap time. He usually sings himself to sleep, which we love listening to. He also is making a few new sounds, including ‘ma’ and ‘ba’ (he already had a solid use of ‘da’) and is starting to try to imitate us. Max most definitely has begun to understand some English, especially his name and ‘no’. He responds to the words ‘come here’, ‘up’& ‘sit’.

He has started to stand a little bit on his own and we can really see the strength in his legs build. Today he spent about 20 minutes bouncing up and down on us, mostly under his own power with us to balance him and give him a little up start.

Today he decided to try out using a spoon on his own and actually did very well. We have some spoons that have slightly longer handles so Mom was able to give a bit of hand over hand help loading the spoon, but he got it in his mouth and eaten all on his own. It helped that he was eating stew, which sticks to the spoon so he could be successful even if he tipped the spoon over. He’s also sitting at the table on his own for most of the meal. We found a little stool that we can use as a booster seat and he will sit there even though there is no belt to hold him down. Of course one of us is always right beside him, but this makes it so much easier to feed him. Once he starts to get full he moves over to Mom’s lap for the last little bit, but this is so much better for all of us.

Other than that we are waiting for Max’s passport so that we can start to make plans to move to Almaty. As we said, we don’t know exactly when this will happen, but we will try to do a quick post when we know. We don’t know what or where our accommodations will be in Almaty, so we can’t say if we will be easy to contact or if we will have Internet access right away. If we end up in an apartment there that doesn’t have a phone, we try to find an Internet café. We’re hoping that our coordinator there will be able to fly to Moscow to process Max’s visa, which would shorten our wait by two or three days. The peace of mind will be worth the fees to expedite the paperwork.

The forecast for tomorrow calls for lower temperatures (26 degrees) so we are looking forward to getting out for a walk or for a treat. It’s 31 degrees in our apartment right now and we just heard some thunder, so maybe our relief will arrive a bit earlier than expected.

Take Care and Best Wishes