Friday, July 31

We are at Coffedelia enjoying a snack and the wifi so I thought I would make a last post from Almaty. By the way the food at Coffedelia is yummy, much better than Segrefredo which is a coffee shop closer to the hotel.

We had our last visit with Roman today. On the way to the Babyhouse, we stopped and bought 16 packages of diapers to donate. We also stopped at a small green market nearby to buy 10 kilos of local apples and 2 bunches of bananas to donate, too. We were running a little late, so Roman was waiting for us to arrive.

There was an Italian couple bonding with a baby in the play room, so we had to share the space. This is a little hard to do because Roman can be indiscriminately affectionate as he doesn’t understand that he has only 1 mama and 1 papa. I brought my apple slicer so he shared his 2 apples with us and even attempted to share with the other family. When there is another baby in the room, he always tries to offer a toy to the baby. We played with the toys for a while then went outside to kick the small ball. We also played with bubbles for a little while too. He seems to have caught some sort of cold, as he has had a bit of a cough and runny nose while we are here but it sure didn’t slow him down! We learned that there is something going around in his group.

It was time to go too soon and say ‘paka’ good bye. He was ready to go for lunch. He doesn’t understand everything that is happening right now. We plan to leave a small photo album for him with pictures of the girls and pictures of us in it so hopefully he won’t forget. It's bittersweet leaving because he doesn't understand and we will worry but we have our girls waiting for us back home.

It looks like we will make our final trip back the first or second week of September which is later than we expected. We knew we had to be home the week of August 24th though since that is the first day of school for the girls...trying to balance the needs of everyone in our family can be hard. We learned that after the 15 day waiting period, our agency will apply for Roman's Kazakhstan passport and it takes time for all the paperwork to get done about 1-2 weeks. I'm sad Roman has to wait so long, but kind of glad so we can get into some sort of routine while school is in session. We also have lots to do around the house, decluttering (BIG job), organizing, babyproofing (yes,that's right babyproofing so Roman doesn't get into anything he shouldn't), fixing up his room, etc.

Thanks to everyone for all your comments, support and encouragement, while I read every single comment, I just don't have time to respond to each one...again thank you so much for commenting!