To Kazakhstan, with love...

Link to our New Blog

2009-12-27T23:33:00.001-05:00

This time, just a family journal.....

http://randomlittlejoys.blogspot.com/

The end and the beginning.....

2009-12-18T09:18:00.007-05:00

Its been so long since I did not write anything here. We had a wonderful summer and fall and day by day, its begging to look a lot like Christmas in our house. It`s a house full of toys, games and books, all different kind of pencils and colors, a house full of laughs, joys and love.

A house with two parents who found their children in the wonderful land of Kazakhstan. We will dearly keep in our hearts all the memories of our waiting, the travel, how we met and how we became a family. It was not an easy road, but by choice and by chance, it was a wonderful one. We have so much to be thankful for. And every single moment was so well worthed.

Our adoption story is over. Our family story continues. Maybe a family blog will come soon....

With much love,

Yulia, Gabriel, Catalina and Calin

Happy Eastern!

2009-04-11T21:26:00.004-04:00

Its been long time since I did not blog, and this is because we have been busy, some of us busy with working, others with learning to read and write and others with day care, monkeys, potty training and bugging big brothers. We celebrated Daddy`s birthday, Valentine`s day, Mother`s day (March 8 - in Europe) and most important one year since Meetcha` day! It is so hard to imagine how was our life like one year ago and how everything has changed ever since we met them...

Our most important update is Gabi`s surgery, on February 11, the same day with Daddy`s birthday. We are so grateful everything went well and I can say from all my heart, Gabi was very well taken care of. Not only he had one of the top ophtalmologists specialized in ptosis, but the professionalism and kindness of everybody who took care of him made us feel like he was really in very good hands. I am happy we did not do the surgery right away, since we were able to explain him what and why everything is going to happen. We made a deal for a visit to Toys R Us for the day after. When we arrived at the hospital, he was welcomed by a big red car he was able to drive in the hallway, he was given a beautiful pajama with with Tom and Jerry and in no time we were called for surgery. We waited maybe 20 minutes in a room with other children, watching Nemo.

A nice lady brought him to the operating room, she asked him whats his favorite flavor - and with chocolate smelling anesthetic - he felt asleep in no time. No pain, no cry, no stress. The surgery started right in time - 8:00 am and it lasted for 2 hours.

The post-op experience, I dont even want to remember. With certitude, it was very painful for all of us, but he was very brave and recovered pretty fast. His eyes were very swollen, he was not able to tolerate light for several days, and even when he was in pain, he was not at all a wynner.

Everything is going great since then. He had a psycho-educational evaluation in Romanian and English and surprisingly he was more confortable in Romanian. At 5 yrs and 7 months, he scored an age equivalent of 6.5 yrs in math, 6.3 yrs in problem solvings, 6.0 in reading, 6.0 in time, money and measurements, 6.2 yrs in decoding and 5.6 yrs in comprehension. His speach and language were the only problem and he qualifies for speach and laguage therapy, but unfortunately it will take several months to get the services. However, his math skills were very flattering for his mom, who has a BD in Physics and Math. Needless to say, he is again and forever the Mommy`s Boy!

And lets not forget Yulia`s newest and the most frequently used additions to her vocabulary: "I can do it!!" "Let me do it!" "Why?" and of course, everything is about... Yulia`s. Yulia`s daddy, Yulia`s mommy, Yulia`s monkey (she has a collection of 5 monkeys black, white, purple, pink and blue), Yulia`s Gabi, Yulia`s DVDs, Yulia`s books, Yuli`s bed, Yulia`s milk, Yulia`s toys and I can go on and on and on.....She says "Love you", too.

Happy Eastern to all our friends!

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

The Moms Song

2009-02-10T09:19:00.003-05:00

"Moms Are Always Right!!!!!", this really makes me laugh :)

Birthday Girl!

2009-01-27T22:45:00.003-05:00

Born on January 27, 2007, our little girl celebrated her second birthday with her family and friends!!!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Every Day, a Funny Day

2009-01-22T21:51:00.020-05:00

He can really make me smile, this little funny boy. And he really likes to talk, with no R, in 3 languages (sounds like "Sto is asta?"), but lately, with better and better English ....

1. He is an artist. And I am his muse. He brought home a picture with my name on it: "BAIA MAMA": Look, mommy, I drew a long, grey snake. He looks like you.

2. He is still asking for permissions. "Mommy, I love Emma. Can she come to sleep with me tomorrow?"

3. He knows everything about our family chain, and most important, he knows his father:
- "Mommy, please scratch my back, if you scratch it, I will scratch Yulia`s back"....
- And Yulia?
- "Yulia will scratch Max`s back".....
- and Max?
- "Max will scratch tata`s back".....
- and tata?
- "tata will just sit there"......

4. He knows his limits...
- Gabi, would you like to have an other sister or brother?
- Noooooo way. I have enough.

5. He likes to take care of himself. Prevention! Prevention! Prevention!
- Mommy, I think I need some Tylenol. My ear pain is coming soon.

6.He is intuitive
- Mommy, look! This clock is counting.... Is 9:10. soon it will be 10:11 and after, 11:12... How funny.

7. He`s got a big heart. Very generous little boy.
- Mommy, when I will grow up, I will buy you a pizza.

8. He has clear future plans.
- "How old is Max?"
- 7
- "I knew he is older than me"
- How come?
- "I saw him giving tata (daddy) a hug. He is bigger than me, because 7 is bigger than 5. 7 listens more than 5. When I will be 7, I will listen to you. Not now.... You have to wait, OK?"...

9. He doesn`t like non-sense. May all those who dont listen to their children, just eat, wash, teeth brush, then ...hush!
- Mommy, I dont like tata because he is is not listenning to me. He did not let me watch TV today. He has to go to sleep early today.

10. He is a brave heart.
- We have to go to the doctor because my eyes are broken. The doctor will repair the eyes. I will not cry.

11. He is a real dandy.
- Mommy, please tell daddy to take Yulia and Max to the park, so we can close the door and dance. Just me and you.

11. He is a quick decisions maker.
He remembers he was in "his other house" with other children, and then, one day, mommy and daddy came there and brought him candies....
- And?
- And they said "Hi Five!" to me.
- And you?
- I said "Hi Five!" and came to my new home. On the airplane. With Yulia and Mommy. (aka Mama Snake)

And, this is how I look like, after 8 months of motherhood. Can`t you see the smile on my face?...

Happy New Year 2009!

2009-01-03T09:59:00.020-05:00

We had a wonderful holiday season. First, Yulia, the Sun Flower, Gabi, the Monkey and Max, the Ladybug celebrated their first Halloween together.

We spent a quite, relaxing Thanksgiving weekend in Rhode Island with our friends. Gabi fell in love with his new girlfriend, Emma, he was trying to still kisses from her. We (over)cooked a turkey, we barbecued, we walked on the beach and visited couple of the Newport Mansions. It continued with a Thanksgiving party at PS 24 where children learnt how to make butter and share it. Joy in Gabi`s eyes when he saw me entering the room “She is my mamma!”. Tears, I was able to hold when children made a list with things they are thankful for and Gabi wrote correctly spelled: “To mom, dad and Yulia!”. Completely not expectable (especially since I think I am under estimating his English knowledge, I did not even imagine he can completely understand what was he suppose to write on the big list.

The stories about Santa, the Christmas songs and the joy of the first Christmas tree followed. We built a gingerbread house at the school Christmas party. Our hands were full of chocolate! I got a little embarrassed by the other moms, when I did not know how chocolate icing looks like and Gabi told everybody he never ate marshmallows.

We were patiently waiting for Santa, day by day. Christmas lights, joys and significant less need for time outs. “Where is he now?” “What does he usually like to eat?” “Is he going to be hungry when he will come to our house?” “I will make sure I will leave some ice cream for him and … carrots for the reindeers”. “Do you think he will come?” “Please tell him that Gabi was a good boy, better than Yulia”. First play in the snow, first snow balls and first snowman. Christmas shopping. A not so quite dinner in four. Sarmale (traditional stuffed cabbage with sour cream) and Romanian sweet bread for Christmas evening. Santa came earlier this year because he heard they have been very good and since he has to visit so many children in the world, he stopped by first at the Baia Family. (Actually, I had to work the Christmas day and I just wanted to witness their big joy). Screaming and jumps and lots of gifts unwrapping. Max was hiding in the other room, seeming obviously disturbed by too much noise and no good place for snorring. The biggest surprise was not the big remote control red car, he was asking for so long time, not even the spider man on a motorcycle, but a cute 5 $ red watch, Mommy Santa found on the last minute at Target. Also, a huggable big plush Teddy bear and a truly talkative Elmo, who knows exactly how to give hugs to Yulia and make her laugh.

And then, the next day, the miracle has happened. The real Santa Claus (Mr. Bob, our neighbor) knocked on the door. Gabi, noticed him first and very excited said “Hi Santa, please come in!” But immediately Yulia got very scared from the loud Ho!Ho!Ho! and started to scream “Mammaaaa!, Tataaaa!” And then, her best friend Max came to help, he got really furious and he did not care at all that Santa came with more toys. So daddy had to catch Max and close him in an other room until Santa left in a big rush few more toys and ran away fast…. Hopefully he will come again next year too…

Best wishes from our family to yours. May we have a year full of Peace, Joys, Faith, and Love. May our families and friends be healthy and happy and may all our wishes come true. May we always believe in Santa, and may we never stop dreaming and never lose hope.

“We can cut all the flowers, but we can not keep spring from coming”.
Pablo Neruda

PS. We are very proud parents. Our dangerous girl, Yulia – whose parents are from the land of Transylvania, by the way - decided that biting is not a good thing to do. There was no need for big punishments. Time outs worked perfectly for her (no longer than 1-2 minutes at a time). She understands perfectly whenever she does something wrong and now, is enough just to mention about time out and she will stop doing it. She talks a lot, speaks few short sentences already, she says “go away” “give me milk” “stop it”, “Oh my God!” “Sleep, Teddy!”, "Give five", “Good Night” and of course, “I love you!”. She is still very stubborn and has a very strong, well determined, funny personality.

Gabi loves kindergarden and the teacher and his friends love him at school. He can count up to 100, and we are learning to add numbers and read books. He started to write few words like he, she, it, and, the, cat, pig and car. He and myself are enjoying Dr Seuss books. He still has some speech problems. I was advised to wait for 6 months of adjustment, but we are waiting for a speech evaluation. He has not had night terrors in a while. His surgery is scheduled for February 11. His vision is not yet affected, but unfortunately, he has a very severe form of ptosis and the surgery might need to be done in several steps and it will not be completely corrected until when he will be 18 when he will need to sign consent for the type of surgery he needs.

Danger! Biting Girl attends Yearling Nursery School!

2008-10-19T17:10:00.014-04:00

Whenever we lose hope and we feel lost, we must learn, there is somehow a solution for everything. Seems like there is Somebody taking care of us. We finally found not only a great nanny (actually 2 - since they are a couple) but also a day care where Yulia goes every day from 8 to 4 pm and things are working great. After couple of weeks, she starts to say few English words: Look! Go! Please! Thank You! Banana and Monkey!! and she has manny words in Romanian. She is a very happy little girl, but I must say, she is already showing her little personality. She is trying hard to eat by herself, rarely when she accepts help anymore, she is teaching us that whenever she says No!! this definitely means NO ! She is all about jewelries and accessories, she loves shoes, bags and sunglasses. She loves to dance. She knows how to get all what she wants with just one smile, she has no fears and knows nothing about danger (normal for her age!). However, we also got the first complaints from day care! She likes to eat other children`s food, she sleeps less than the other children and she is trying to wake them all up, and also we were told that children are afraid of her, because she bites, usually when she needs a toy or a child wants to take a toy from her. Her teacher is working on short time outs with her. I think she is a little too young for time outs, but teacher must know it better!! However, I am not over concerned, not that we have to encourage it, but biting is a pretty common transitory behavior in toddlers isnt it?!?

We spent a great weekend at Children`s Museum in Norwalk, CT which is a best place to learn and play....

and also we went apple picking last weekend in upper state, NY, close to Albany. The weather was just gorgeous and we had a lot of fun.

And all of the sudden, during a coversation about airplanes, Gabi told me yesterday that he remembers when he came with Yulia by car and met mommy in a place with lots of cars and then he, Yulia and mommy made a very long trip by airplane - we were all very tired - and when he arrived home, daddy was waiting for him with balloons and Buni was home and she cooked soup for us. And when I asked him where was he before he came home??? His answer: "I was with other mothers but I don't want to go back" Can I stay here with you??!! I am a good boy!...

We have an appointment with Ophthalmology on October 23 and Neurodevelopmental Pediatrics on November 7.

Oh, Noooo...Missing Buni!

2008-09-18T22:44:00.015-04:00

>"Oh, noooo!!" this is Gabi`s favorite since he started kindergarden. He is soo cute when he says it.

The most favorite grandmother (we call her Buni) went back to Romania last week. They had a great summer together and they absolutely adore each other. They got to be over spoiled, over fed, and over cuddled (which they really needed), but they also learnt Romanian and had lots of fun together. Both Yulia and Gabi really got very attached to her and now they miss her a lot. They are her first grand children and she is their only grand mother. So lucky to have each other. Gabi is asking every day about Buni and he thinks that she got upset with him bcs he did not eat all his food and this is why she left. I am trying to explain him that he did not do anyhing wrong, but he insists it and he promisses he is going to be a good boy if she comes back.

We found a nanny who started last week, she came with her 2 year old girl and Yulia enjoyed their company . After only 3 days, Isabel started with itchy eyes, sneezing, cough, and bad news from her doctor.... she is allergic to our Max. And all of the sudden, we have 3 more days to find an other nanny.

Oh, nooooo!!.....

And aside appointments with 4 nannies in 3 days, mama lion has an other appointment tomorrow with the parent coordinator and an other one with the teacher next week to discuss about the plan of his education. I was hoping to get more feedback from the teacher, but as for now, nobody told us weather he started ESL or not, how is he doing, and so on. I wish I got more support from school, and I do not have any plans to give up. It is very hard to make appointments with developmental specialists, we will make some arrangements for next month, but for those parents who are considering this type of evaluation, make sure you take care of this earlier rather than later.

Gabi writes by memory the letters up to M, in the correct order, is learning about shapes and counts up to 29 :). After 29, here comes twenty ten :). When he comes home, he speaks English only with the dog, never with us. I am really impressed about his improvements. We still have some difficulties waking up in the morning, but everything is much better as compare to first week.

Lets not forget about Yulia, she is doing just great, flowering day by day, weights 10 kg (22 lbs), knows body parts, points to animals and imitates their sounds, has lots of words - around 20 - her favorite is "monkey") and just like a monkey, she imitates everything what Gabi is doing or saying. Last week she started to say Gabi (Babi) and Yulia (Lulia).

The Most Unforgettable First Days of School

2008-09-09T22:20:00.006-04:00

Following the dynamical transformations in this world, I feel like we suddenly changed from a “family of 2 – just us and the dog” state of mind – to the one of very busy parents getting ready for the first day of school in just few months. There was not too much time for thinking about how this is going to be, nor for emotions, speculations, or big preparations, not even too much time for school shopping. We were just happy to live close to one of the best schools – PS 24 – and optimistically felt ready to start.

September 2, first day of school, I was much more nervous and emotional than he was when we arrived at school. Tears came to my eyes and mixed feelings between where all these years go since my first days of school?; am I already a mother of a school age child?; all of a sudden I realized we are little lost in the crowd; how difficult is going to be for him, to be far away from us and not understanding the language and. How is he going to react when I will leave him there? Is he going to feel frustrated, confused because he will again not clearly understand what is going on? What is he going to eat every day at school? Who is going to remind him every 2 minutes: Eat, swallow, finish your food...??

Luckily, we soon met with the social worker, ESL teacher, principles and finally with the 2 teachers (Mrs Amster and Mrs Gutierez) which were all very nice and willing to listen my story repeated again and again. No, he is not my biological child, we just adopted him from Kazakhstan 3 months ago "Spell it please, where is this country?" "What language do they speak there?". "Oh, you must have had a real adventure!). He speaks Russian, but we speak Romanian to him, now he starts to speak some Romanian and he is refusing to speak Russian anymore (maybe bcs he is blocking his negative memories?!???), however, he will have a new nanny and he will have to learn English. But, of course he is going to learn soo fast, kids` brains are like sponges, right??!!!!??.....

All my fears disappeared when we entered the classroom and he was very interested in all the toys and books around. Initially he was shy and did not want to participate in the activities the other children were already involved, but in less than 30 minutes he almost forgot about me, and he did not even noticed when I leaved the classroom and when I came to pick him up we were the last ones to leave the room because he wanted to share with me the new toys and books he found in the room. Our doctor will write a letter for him requesting a para professional to help him in school to better accommodate his emotional needs. He is going to be evaluated for speech therapy and occupational therapy and also have English as a Second Language 2 times/week in school. On the other hand, he will also be evaluated by a developmental specialist doctor to see what other services he will need, because sometimes, we were told, the services really needed by the children are not always the ones provided by school.

On the second day, while he was in school, I felt almostv lost going to Target to take care of a big list of school supply and I learnt about so many different kind of crayons and markers and also I added few words in my own vocabulary such as construction paper, post-its and index cards. Gabi enjoyed his day and this was all what mattered.

On the third day, we were very excited for the first day of school bus transportation. We arrived 15 minutes earlier and were waiting - as we were told - for the big Blue Bus. To our disappointment, there was no blue bus passing by, while we completely ignored the yellow school bus. Why in the world did they name a yellow school bus "Blue Bird"? We had a nice walk to school, and we arrived in time and everything was OK. At 3 pm grandma was waiting for Gabi in the same bus station, waiting this time for the yellow bus - which did arrived in time, but Gabi was not in the bus. She got very scarred, she tried to call me at work, but because she does not speak English she could not introduce herself and the lady who answered the phone told her that I am in a meeting and she should call later. In between she finally reached Calin, who did not know the school phone number but he finally managed to reach me and I felt I was about to faint when he told me that they can not find Gabi (my little Nemo). In between the school teacher called to tell us to come and pick Gabi from school, since they claimed the driver did not see anybody waiting for Gabi in the bus station. Luckily he was not scared, because he did not realized what is going on, and since this was his first day on the bus, he was thinking that this is how it suppose to be happening.

On Monday morning, I went to school just to check on Gabi and found him in the hall way, with tears in his eyes, but laughing and having fun with his para. I was told he refused to go into the classroom. He finally listened to me and entered the class. It was also the official first day with the new nanny - Julie. Grandmother took a vacation, visiting her daughter in law in Canada.

Today, it was an other drama day. In the morning, Gabi refused to go to school, he would not want to go into the bus, holding his nanny tight until the driver gave up and leaved without him and when arrived at school he started to cry and wanted to go back home with nanny. To my surprise, in the evening, I met with the teacher who told me congratulations, Gabi is behaving so well in school, he is very nice with the other children and he is making progresses every day. He knows colors and ABC and his drawing is pretty good too. She thinks he will soon not need a para professional anymore, since he is adjusting well. When I met Gabi home, he was very relaxed, singing Happy Birthday and showing us how he knows to spell his name. I am so confused, dont even know what to believe anymore, and my only question would be: now what`s next?!?

Plan of Action.
We are going to give him 3 - 4 more weeks time to get adjusted in school. Because of so many changes in his life, and also taking in consideration he is just a 5 year old boy, we think he is entitled to feel temporarily frustrated. Kisses, hugs, stickers, small awards, little toys, diluted juice and every once in a while even a little candy will be used for positive reinforcement if he will not make fuss to travel by bus and will behave well at school. I will also try to sporadically visit him at school as often as I can, talk to the teachers and try to arrange as many services as possible (and needed). If by the end of this period, we will see no improvement, decision will be made weather he should better be off going to a pre-K, to allow him to learn English and get ready for a busy school schedule. At the end of the day, all what matters is him to grow confident and happy. There is always time for learning. Any other thoughts about how to handle this situation? I just dont want him to be more traumatized again.

My Summer Sunshines

2008-07-31T22:51:00.037-04:00

I can not believe we have been together for more than 3 months and it is already hard to imagine how was our life like before. What were we doing with all our time? It feels like our universe has completely changed, and since few days ago I read somehwere that an average (American) family has 2 children, 2 cars and one dog, I can surely conclude, average (American) families never get borred. I forgot the weekends when we could sleep late in the morning, the long marathon phone conversations with my girl friends, or our spontaneous "lets go hiking today" - and I dont remember when was the last time when we went to dinner just the two of us.

We are constantly learning instead. We learnt about Sponge Bob and Curious George of the Jungle, sizes and types of diapers, we learnt about frustrations when it takes more than 30 minutes for Gabi to finish his food and Yulia is constantly dropping her food on the floor and and when we see their disarmingly mephistophelic smiles, we learnt that whatever they do, we can never get upset. We also experienced an evening rush to ER when Gabi had a "play accident" complicated with a forehead laceration.

We have been very very busy. We finally moved to Riverdale which to me is the dream place for any NY family with children. We are only 25 minutes driving from Manhattan, but close to so many beautiful parks not only for children but for doggies too. Max feels like he is in heaven with so many squirells around. We can finally see trees from all our windows and strangely enough our neighbours dont play jazz until late nights anymore (many of them are retired, by the way).

We both started new jobs, closed to our new home. I personally love it, is very challenging since there are a lot of working hours and we have to give many presentations which I can not prepare until our children fall asleep, but I definetely think is worthed since I am really enjoying it. And when I come home after almost 30 hours of no sleep and just feel like I want to hang around more with my kids, I can understand how happy I am.

Yulia and Gabi spend most of the time with their grandma who teach them about "spoiling without frontiers" and feeds them continuously. Gabi already speaks Romanian in short sentences and Yulia also comes up with new words day by day. Yulia gained 4 lbs since she came home and she keeps eating, except the past few weeks when she started playing with food.

Gabi will start kindergarden next week. He is the "mommy`s boy" type and mommy is very happy about it. He loves his sister, except when he has to share his toys - which I think is perfectly OK considering what he went through before.

So, what did we do this summer??

We explored the city a little ............

and went hiking with friends.....

we learnt about nature...

and met with cousin Daniel ...

The three little monkeys made a trip to the Zoo.....

....and made new friends....

Believe me, it was a lot of fun in the sun.....

And the summer is over. But never the fun.

PS. My blogger friends, I missed you :).

Who can quickly dress up like babooshka?

2008-06-20T22:16:00.015-04:00

Today, we had such a wonderful surprise. We got an email from Apryl, who is the mother of a little boy from Petropavlovsk. She is working for a foundation who is helping children from Petropavlovsk orphanages www.antares-orphans.com.
She found our blog and sent us few pictures of Gabi which she took during her trip in Kazakhstan in September 2007. The children were having a party and a competition: "Who can dress up like babooshka faster? Thank you so much, Apryl. Isn`t my boy so adorable??????

One month ago

2008-06-17T18:51:00.020-04:00

Few days ago, we celebrated 6 years since I moved to the US, one month since Yulia and Gabi arrived to US and the most important, Calin`s first Father`s Day. We enjoyed the special moment, in Prospect Park. It was just a perfect, beautiful day and the simple joy of being together was the perfect gift to Daddy and to each other.

Yulia`s first words (in this order): ham ham (woof-woof in English) = Max, alo = hello, miaou = cat, dai = give me, na = take, tata.....and finally.......mama. I wished she first said mama or dada before Max, but she is absolutely in love with our dog, first thing in the morning when she opens her eyes she is calling him, she cries when Max goes for a walk, she feeds him, she hugs him all the time and we have to be careful, sometimes she plays roughly with him and she bites his tail, which by the way is very, very short. She gained 400 grs (1 lb) and she is now 22 lbs. She did not qualify for Early Intervention Therapy.

Gabi sings the ABC and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, counts up to 20 in English and up to 10 in Romanian, knows his colors, and is working on learning few letters. His first words in English: careful, don`t touch and watch out, my toys, lyon, rabbit, kitty, monkey, thank you and he was soooo sweet when he said I love you for the first time. I felt like he meant it :). He also knows few words in Romanian and sometimes makes funny combination of the 3 languages. He still has nightmares but not every night anymore, as he used to have and even if he doesn`t fall asleep right away, he got much better with going quietly to his bed at night, when we understood that he must be afraid of dark and we are leaving his door open and a little light on. Thank you all for the sleeping advices. I am wondering if we should refer him for counseling. His doctor said to wait a little to give him some time to get adjusted, but I just feel so bad for him. Any of you has experience with this?

We are also making some progresses. Yesterday we signed the lease for the new apartment and also to rent our apartment. Also, the new addition to our family, Lady Toyota Sienna, who is not a baby anymore, but looks wonderful and has great qualities and manners which make her perfect for us, will come home on Friday and will help us move on June 28.

Life is good

2008-05-27T19:17:00.016-04:00

Life is good here in Brooklyn, and we are all adjusting pretty well. Yulia and Gabi seem to be happy with us and they love each other and between finding a new place to move and tenants for our apartment, buying a new car and getting ready for my new job, our hearts are full of joy to see them together. We are very lucky with Grandma who is absolutely in love with them and she will help us until beginning of November.

Last week they had their first doctor appointment. Yulia got 3 shots plus blood draw and Gabi - 2 shots and blood draw. Next set of shots and their PPD test was scheduled for next week. Their doctor seems to be pretty optimistic regarding their development.

Except for her language, Yulia is almost in target with all her milestones (she is walking very well, almost running, climbing stairs, scribbles and she has a great pincer grasp. She also started potty training. She has a musical Blue Deer potty which she loves and we do get 2-3 pipis in the potty every day). She would eat or drink anything we give her, including baby shampoo. She has an appointment with Early Intervention Therapy for evaluation in middle June. While bathing was initially a big drama, especially with Gabi, in less than 2 weeks they both consider it as a great play time. They both love playing with their toys in the water.

Gabi, as we expected, is the one who will need special attention. He is very affectionate, he loves to give hugs and kisses to us, Yulia and grandma, and even he is a little shy when he meets with other people, he would finally open up. He is very organized, and he loves to help with the chores in the house. He has speech delay (his vocabulary is most like a 31/2 year old and also has pronunciation problems (can not pronounce certain letters, s, h, g and r. He will certainly need speech therapy at least. He is slowly starting to pick up few words, and is very interested to learn, he loves books and cartoons (he is a Sesame Street`s fun), but because grandma speaks Romanian and we speak English to him, and he speak Russian with us, it sometimes gets confusing and the progress is not very fast. Playing in the park and being around other children is also of great help. We decided to focus more on affection, comfort and attachment with him, and certainly with the help of a good school and many available services he will have time to learn new things.

While Yulia is a great eater - I am actually afraid she is eating too much for her age and here Grandma has definitely her role :), Gabi is very picky and very resistant trying new foods. He loves fruits and vegetables and I think he would redefine happiness if we could only give him bananas and carrots every day.

One thing we had learnt, our house can never be child proof enough. Yulia is interested to explore everything in the house, checking all the closets, the drawers, and she wants to know how everything taste like. Now she is working on learning how to open the doors, how to climb everywhere. One day, Gabi locked himself in the bathroom. It took us almost 10 minutes to get him out. We really got scared, bcs we could not communicate with him, but luckily daddy was home and he saved him.

Everything is great during day time, but the night time is the most difficult to us. His sleep is extremely agitated, he has night mares, he awakes dozen times and he doesn't like to go to sleep. I am trying to stay around him and comfort him until he falls asleep, but he would cry if I leave him after 20-30 minutes (and when I go back to him he finds thousands reasons to make me stay in the room). The moment I think he fell asleep and I leave the room, he starts again to scream and call me. This is going on an on for almost 2 hours every night. This is something we expect, since he is going thorugh a big adjustment for him. It is certainly easier to say, but we are still optimistic.

This is how we looked when we got home, from the airport...

And few pictures from home.....

We had a great Memorial Day. We met with our new friend Stephanie and her beautiful family (see the link of her blog). They are also in process of adopting a baby boy from Kazakhstan and they invited us and Carolyn with her beautiful son, Henry, adopted from Kazakhstan 6 months ago. Her father`s parents were also born in Romania. We met through our blogs and kept in touch by emails and this was only the beginning of a great friendship. She made a you tube slide show with Memorial Day pictures which I copied from her blog - I love the music. Thank you, Stephanie for the great presents for our children and for such a perfect day we spent together.

We are home.

2008-05-16T23:29:00.031-04:00

We had a week full of adventures. When we left, I realised I forgot the most important thing - the Russian dictionnary.

We had a lay over in Frankfurt, where we spent few hours with my friend Claudia with her husband and their little doggie - Max, whom I did not get the chance to see for several years. We were waiting for them outside the airport and they were looking for us inside for almost 2 hours - but finally we met and we were very happy.
We arrived to Almaty on Saturday night. The apartment where we stayed was very nice, but this time, we did not have any telephone or internet access. No big deal, we thought, since we are going to be there just for couple of days, we are not going to need it too much.

We spent all Sunday walking around, we made a trip to Kok-Tobe where we enjoyed beautiful views of the city and the mountains. It was such a beautiful, happy, sunny day, I will never forget.

Kok-Tobe Pictures

In the evening, we met Yulia and Gabi at the airport. Not sure if Yulia recognised me or not, she seemed pretty tired, but Gabi was very excited to see us, his face was all smiley, he gave each of us candies from his pocket together with many kisses and hugs. It was the sweetest present for my first Mothers day. He is so much changed as compared to how I knew him in the orphanage, very sweet, carying, loving and he seems so happy and easy to please. He absolutely loves his sister and loves his role of the big brother. He likes to feed her, he is helping out with changing her diapers, massage her body with cream and is very gently when playing together. He is very organized with his toys, always cleans up the table after finishing to eat, brings his plate and cup to the sink. When we go shopping, he likes to cary a little bag too to help me out. When we were sleeping, he was waking up in the middle of the night to cover me and Yulia. Most of the times, he acts more mature than his age. There are also times when he likes to be a little baby, he loves Yulia`s pacifier and he craves for hugs, cuddles and snuggles.

Surprinsingly, language has not been a bareer between us so far, he does not get frustrated when we dont understand everything what he is saying and we are learning from each other. He counts up to 10 (he remembered it from the oprhanage), loves to sing, we started with Twinkle, Twinkle little star and now are working on his ABC. He is also starting to learn his colors.

Yulia has a little cold, but is a very happy baby and she is also adjunsting very well. In terms of eating she is just the oposite of her brother, she would eat all day, whatever we give her and is hard to stop her eating. She is full of energy, exploring everything around and we have to watch her very closely, since she is constantly trying to open the doors of the cabinets, put her fingers in the electric plug, touch everything, put everything in her mouth. She is walking very well but falls a lot because she is very fast. She is only crying when she is hungry (and this happens pretty often) and when she is sleepy. She refused the baby carrier and since we did not bring umbrella stroller and I did not want to spend extra money, for 2 days we had to carry her everywhere.

Both of them are very happy during day, but when it comes to sleep, Gabi has nightmares (or night terrors - since we can not know if he recalls his dreams or not) every night and Yulia can only fall asleep on the floor banging her head and rocking her body for almost one hour.

The story continues. On Monday - we had appointment to the SOS - International Clinic. The children were very good and fortunately they did not need any blood draw.

On Tuesday we went to the US Embassy and we had the big surprise to find out that the information from USCIS was not sent to Kazakhstan and we have to wait at least an extra day. Our tickets were booked for Wednesday night and we were not sure if we are going to make it or not. Since we had no internet and phone in the apartment, we went to an Internet Cafe to email and call Calin, our agency and USCIS to speed the things out and make sure it would be possible to change the tickets in case we need it. Finally on Wednesday we were told that the information from USCIS was sent in time, but Calin (who misunderstood me, since I called him at 4 am) - cancelled our flight tickets and made reservation for next Tuesday. Lots of emotions again. Are we going to ever leave Kazakhstan or not? Luckily our agency and Calin worked hard and took care of everything and at 11 pm we were off to the airport. The day before, we went to a little park in the neoghbourhood where children played around. Our flight was scheduled for 1:30 am.

At the airport, we had an other surprise. Lufthansa flight has been cancelled and the next flight available was with KLM at 7:30 am. We spent all night with the children in the airport, it was very cold (Yulia was sick too). At around 5:30 am, we checked in our baggages, and were so ready to go home. Everybody was smilying - but I guess it was too early. The adventure was not yet over. We found out that my passport is not OK since I did not have an exit visa - I can not leave the country (during our first trip, my visa expired - bcs it was issued on December based on invitation from Arkalyk). We got an other visa in March, with one entry - one exit (but since my previous visa expired, they considered that based on my new visa I was only entitled to only one entry (and no exit from Kazakhstan). I was adviced to go to the Airport Consulate to renew the visa, but when we finally found it, a very sleepy, bored looking face told us that there is nothing he can do about it and we have to go to the Emigration Service in Almaty to aply for a new visa. After so many nights with no sleep and so many emotions, I almost started to cry. We had no choice, but take action. We took our baggages back, we called our agency, and we spent an other day in the airport hotel which by the way I would not reccomend to anybody(no hot water available).My new visa was easily taken care of for 300 $. I was very lucky with Ramona, she was not only very suportive but also has experience with children and she helped me taking care of them and go through everything much easier. Obviously, I think it would have been very difficult to manage everything by myself.

We finally left Kazakhstan Friday 3:30 am (we had 2 hrs delays - this meant nothing for us at that point) and arrived to JFK on Friday afternoon.
The children did very well during the flight. They slept almost 5 out of 6 hours from Almaty to Frankfurt and around 4 hours from Frankfurt to NY (with a high-pitched voice Soprano concert given by Yulia in Frankfurt airport to a full audience).
Daddy welcomed us with baloons and flowers, grand mother with yummy dinner and everybody is happy again and feel like the last few days were just a bad dream which is finally over, because we are finally home.

May 11

2008-05-07T17:12:00.006-04:00

Two days ago, our agency called to inform us that I have to be in Kazakhstan on Sunday, May 11, which is not going to be only our Gotcha Day, but also our 6 year Anniversary Day, and the Mother`s Day as well. It will be our best anniversary present ever. I will leave on Friday at 5:40 pm with Ramona and we will be in Almaty, Saturday at 11:30 pm (KLM with connection flight in Frankfurt). On Monday morning we have appointment at the US Embassy and on Tuesday, Yulia and Gabi will have their medical visit. If everything goes well, we will come home on Wednesday night.

Tickets are booked (they will arrive by FedEx tomorrow), our house is clean, the children`s room is ready, Max has an appointment for grooming on Saturday and grandma arrived to town on Monday, from Romania. Everybody is happy!

And as a surprise, because I always get lost in NY when I drive, as an anniversary present, to make sure I will spend more time with my children, Calin bought me a GPS navigator. What a nice husband!

An other family who is adopting with our agency - Faithful Adoptions is waiting for their LOI most likely next week. They are also traveling to Petropavlovsk. We are very excited for them and we wish them a wonderful journey to meet their daughter! Here is the link to their blog:

http://mortenson946.blogspot.com/

Waiting ....

2008-05-03T10:48:00.014-04:00

I was thinking it is hard to wait for the home study to be completed; for the fingerprints; the I171 form; the dossier to be translated; dossier to be in the country; to hear about the region; to change the region; for the LOI to come (this was really, really hard); to get the visa; to meet her (well.... them); the court date; the 15 days after the court... Every single step was very hard, but waiting to go back to bring them home is the toughest one. Not knowing how are they doing, if they forgot us or not already or maybe they think we are not coming to bring them home as we promised, it just breaks my heart. I am mostly worried about Gabi (he seemed to have an understanding on what is going on). After we arrived home, we had to wait 2 more weeks to get the updated I 171 form, apostille it and send it back to Kazakhstan (express delivery took around 5 days). Yesterday we celebrated one month (wow!!!) from the court day and since now everything is OK with the paperwork, I am expecting to travel next weekend, but I was told not to book the tickets until we know for sure. Well, guess what? Our coordinator - Sholpan`s phone is off and nobody from our agency could get in touch with her for 3 days (not even Igor)!. Hopefully we will hear something by Monday, after the May 1 celebration is over.

I became compulsive in checking my emails, answering the phone before it starts ringing twice and watching their pictures over and over again. Dreaming with open eyes. Wherever I go, I am imagining how everything is going to be so different when they will come. Everything is ready, except for the potty, diapers and baby wipes which we are going to buy today. We opted for co sleeping and a very cute Mermaid toddler bad, nothing trendy or expensive, but we really love it. My mother in law will come on Monday. we don`t know yet if we have been aproved to move in the hospital housing. They started to accept applications early in March, while we were in Kazakhstan. Only after the middle of May, when we will have a final answer, we can start to look for a good kindergarden for Gabi. Life is beautiful, but never easy.

Last week, on April 30, 6 months ago my father died. There was a family ceremony at the Orthodox Church in my town in Romania and we were the only ones missing. I felt so sad to be so far away. I am lucky my mother in law and her husband bring flowers at the cemetery every once in a while. He loved flowers so much, they were a passion for him. I miss him a lot, I miss his voice - we were talking every day - either on the phone or by messenger. I am thinking of him every day. He was a great parent and my best friend.

I hope he can see us from somewhere above with my mother and grand parents, and know how happy we will be soon, when Yulia and Gabi will come home. It is so hard to know he never got the chance to hug his grand children and they will know him only from my stories and pictures....

It is official!

2008-04-17T22:51:00.015-04:00

Our 15 days waiting period was over and the court decision is final. Today, we became a family of four. Yulia Alina and Gabriel Sergey Baia are our children. A full life in front of us! So many dreams are about to come true! We still need the I171 form, which will hopefully arrive at the beginning of next week, notarised, verified, apostilled and sent via Fedex to Sholpan, our coordinator. And of course, 2 to 3 more weeks of waiting. I wish they will just fly.

Until they will come home, we are just running around, getting the home ready and organizing everything for our babies. It feels good to keep busy, it helps the time pass faster. We were overwhelmed with all the support we got from our neighbours (Thank you, Kate!), colleagues and friends! Yesterday, I had a big surprise, a baby shower! My colleagues were so sweet! I never thought I will ever have my baby shower! Our children already have plenty of books, clothes and toys waiting for them. We still did not buy any furniture yet, it was very hard for us to decide how to organize the room. We were thinking to buy a bunk bed, but we decided this will not be safe, since they are still too young. Mademoiselle Yulia will initially sleep in a crib which will become a toddler bed in few months and Gabi will have a cool boy`s bed. Max had no objections to give up his King size mattress from the children`s room (which will be until the end of this week, just an office). We have a shopping list and hopefully by Sunday, a trip to Ikea plus on line shopping will save us.

Grandmother will arrive on May 5, but because of visa issues she will not be able to come to Kazakhstan, most likely, Ramona, my sister in law will come with me. We decided to move in an apartment in Riverdale, very close to my future job, which is also much bigger. So many other things pending, lots of adjustments, but we are optimistic!.

Pictures from our last day in Petropavlovsk! Happier than ever!

We miss them so much!

The baby house

2008-04-09T05:17:00.030-04:00

This is where our children have been raised (Yulia since she was one month, Gabi came here when he was 2 and moved to the orphanage when he was 4).

The construction was built 1990 and has been recently renovated. There are around 70 children in the orphanage, divided in several groups by age, newly arrived children, children being visited by their families (not available for adoption), babies (available only for adoption by Kaz families) and few groups of children available for international adoption as well. Unfortunately we could not take too many pictures, but all we can say, everything is very clean, well organized and we can be very thankful the children were very well taken care of.

Children are usually - as we already know - overdressed, but well nourished. In everybody`s best interest (caregivers and future parents), they start toilet training very early, before they are 1. They do get a pretty good food variety. Yulia (14 months) has always been on low sweet diet and no red or orange food (no carrots, no beet, no tomatoes, no oranges etc), for incompletely understood reasons (face eczema, possible "sweets allergy"). They all drink cow milk, never formula.

I can not believe I forgot to take pictures of the front of the baby house. This is a new building, in front of the "Yulia`s building", where they have a swimming pull and older children can also go to sauna (yes, sauna, believe it or not :).)

On the first floor there are some offices, Dr Rima`s office, the receiving room, where new children live until they they get all their tests done, 1 or 2 room for sick children (if they are only mildly ill and they don't require hospitalization -a kind of quarantine), a room with children very sick (there was a child with severe hydrocephalus), a treatment room where they get all their immunization, shots and any other treatment, and the group of children who are not available for adoption (being visited by their families).

Yulia`s room is on the second floor. There are around 6 other babies in her room I think, the youngest is around 7 months and Maia who is 18 months was the oldest one. There are always two caretakers with the children at any time. There is a small room before you enter the room where they play, which is full of toys on the shelves. We gave Yulia a little lion which we found few days after on the shelve. Children do get to play with many toys also. A room where they sleep (with only cribs), a small bathroom and the small kitchen (these have not yet been renovated, but they are pretty clean). On the second floor there are few more offices and also the doctor`s office and the speech therapy office.

The room where we played, with pretty big windows and a big mirror which was the main attraction for Yulia. She just loves herself :). On the wall there are beautiful pictures of children already being adopted. Since I promised not to post pictures of children anymore, I hope this is not going to be a problem to post, since they have already been adopted. I just love them all.

We had so many sweet memories in this room, we`ll never forget! But a baby house will always be just a baby house, no matter what! All children deserve to have a forever home.

PS. Missing my babies. Thinking and dreaming with them. It`s been one week since we did not see them. Hopefully 3 more weeks of waiting.

Brooklyn, sweet home!

2008-04-05T21:05:00.022-04:00

Spring is beautiful, here in Brooklyn. Our travel has been long, 6 hours from Petropavlovsk to Almaty (with connection in Astana), one night at hotel in Almaty and other almost 17 hours from Almaty to NY with connection, this time in Amsterdam and surprisingly no more adventures. Max is very happy to be back home too and we can`t wait to meet with everybody. Yesterday, our neighbours had their usual weekend party until 2-3 am and we still have a jet lag, so we could not have enough sleep, but it feels so good to be home!

In Almaty we had the pleasure to spend our last hours in Kazakhstan and finally met with with Sara, Julian and Zoe Yeomans from Canada. Our plan was to meet with them on our first day of our journey, but we had to postpone it because of our unexpected trip to Dubai. We kept in touch, and thanks to our court delays we finally got to meet with them in our last day. We started as blogger buddies and hope to stay friends for ever. Zoe is only 2 weeks older than Yulia, and she has the most adorable smile. Since we don`t have a big family here in US, we got an offer from Zoe to be Yulia and Gabi`s cousin. This was a big and very well apreciated offer, since Zoe has 7 more cousins. We hope they had a safe trip and Zoe was OK in the airplane, it must be so difficult with a baby.

We are now back to our waiting, counting the days before Yulia and Gabi will be home forever. We were told we should be ready to go back in about a month (15 days when anybody from their biological family can come and contest the court decision) and 2 more weeks for paper work. In between we will be busy and hopefully the time will pass by fast.

As a tradition, here are the pictures on their first and last days, before we said good bye to them! The smiles on their face, brought us thousand more smiles!

Thank you everybody, old and new friends for all your help, advices, good thoughts, prayers and comments in our blog. They really meant a lot to us.

Court Day

2008-04-02T14:58:00.002-04:00

Since I read so many blogs about how the court day experience will be, I did not expect anything emotional. We started just in time, at 11 am. The judge, the prosecutor, the secretary, Dr Rima - the director of baby house, Yuri – the director of orphanage, the two social workers, Sholpan - our coordinator, Igor – our translator and of course us, were present in the room. The judge started by asking Calin a tricky question: why did we come to adopt two children, followed by general questions like: why did we decide to adopt from Kazakhstan; where do we work and for how long; are we going to have enough money to raise two children; how long have we been married; if we understand that being parents will require a lot of responsibility; is he going to be jealous since his wife will not spend so much time with him anymore, being busy with taking care of the children, why don’t we have biological children; are we going to be able to “love them as our own children”; what kind of methods of punishment are we planning to use when they will not listen to us. Since we are coming from a former communist country are we planning to use the common punishment methods used as the belt, the wood spoon or keeping them in the corner with hands up for hours; what is our opinion on the case of the Russian child who was killed by an American family few weeks ago; can we promise we are not going to do the same to our future kids; I was asked questions like: am I ready to be a mother, am I aware that my life is going to completely change and taking care of two children is going to be very difficult; that they will be with us 24/7 and not only 2 hours to play; do I have any experience in taking care of children; do I have enough patience - J; do I know that they come with their own genetic background and their own life experience and is not going to be as easy as taking care of my biological children; why did I move to US; do I like US better than Romania; are we planning to bring them back to Kazakhstan?; do I love them; would I leave without them; if something will go wrong, will I bring them back; are we aware of their general health and their specific needs; what is our specific plan, who is going to help us when we will bring them home; is there any school close to our house; do I have a full time job. Maybe there were more questions, but this is what I remember.

Yuri, Dr Rima and the 2 social workers, spoke about Yulia and Gabi, when did they come to the baby house, when did Gabi moved to the orphanage, their known family and medical history. We were prepared to hear a very sad life story, but I can say everything what we heard was shocking to us. Looking in their eyes, playing with them, hearing them laughing, we could never guess what they have been through their life and of course, we will never know their entire story. I felt tears coming from my eyes, but I stayed strong. Finally everybody agreed that is in the best interest of the two children to be adopted and we would be great parents for them. After about 30 long minutes of waiting, we met again in the same room and the judge read the final decision: we have been approved to be a family of 4. I have to give a little unexpected speech, talking about how happy we will be to be their parents and how much we appreciate how well our children were taking care of by all their staff. We are really grateful, the orphanage and the baby house are very clean and we felt everybody involved was very dedicated. This was the first day of parenthood for Mama and Papa Baia.

Our most beautiful day ever was continued with a champagne toast at dr Rima`s office, saying good bye to the care takers, pictures, gifts, last kisses to Yulia and of course, more papers to be notarized. More hugs and good bye kisses to Gabi, more presents and again, celebration with Yuri and Igor, when we have been really forced to drink vodka and eat way, way too much. I am sure many of you who already returned from Kazakhstan, know exactly what I am talking about. Everybody has to give multiple speeches, say jokes or funny stories each of them followed by a toast (for our health, for our children and all children from the orphanage, for our parents, for family, for all the sisters, for all the brothers, for friendship, for Kazakhstan, for US, for Romania, and many other toasts). Dancing with a singing Santa Claus. Multiple promises that we will come back soon. We are going to miss each others, keep in touch and always be friends. A very sweet present from Yuri, a furry lion, meant to protect our family of four. Endless hugs, again and again. And hurry up to start packing.

This is our last post from Kazakhstan. Sorry there is no time to attach any pictures. It is very hard to say Good Bye. Or Paka Paka. We spent really great moments here and really tough ones. We will remember and tell our children only about all the beautiful things and wonderful people we met here. It was really a great experience and a very important event which opens a new chapter in our life. We really hope we will keep our promise and we will come back soon together, the four of us. For now, we already miss Yulia and Gabi so much!!!

Tomorrow!!!

2008-04-01T11:04:00.007-04:00

Ruxi, our good friend from NY, who takes care of our Max at home, sent us today the cutest pictures of a new adoptive happy family, from Ohio which I would like to share with you. Seems like Pink, the cleanest puppy ever is adjusting very well with his new family, which proves one more time, doesn`t matter who or where you adopt from, with lots of love and patience, everything is possible and so well worth.

Our waiting was hard, but, hopefully, is finally over. If in 15 hours there will be no more surprises, tomorrow at 11 am we will ask permission to the judge to be Yulia`s and Gabi`s parents. Luckily, we will not have to give any speech, just answer some basic questions to prove we will be able to take care and give them a loving family. We already exchange the tickets and for the second time made final flight reservation, which will cost us 500 $. We hope this will end here, and Thursday we will meet with Sara, Julian and Zoe in Almaty, to celebrate our last day in Kazakhstan. Friday we will be back to NY, to start the beginning of the end of our waiting.
Today we had a little good bye party with Gabi`s friends with - of course - candies, ice cream, juice, but mostly with plenty of fruits (we did listen to our friends` healthy advice!!). The children were so sweet!.

We did have quite an adventure here, but we will always remember our first 30 days spent with our children in Petropavlovsk, the city where they were born. A little advice for parents to be, who are considering to adopt from Kazakhstan: learn some Russian, especially if you are considering a child older than 2, learn to be patient, and learn to expect the unexpected.

Ready, Set, Take a Deep Breath and WAIT......

2008-03-30T10:14:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow we supposed to be have such a happy day and we were ready to leave Kazakhstan on April 2! We just found out, our court has been cancelled again. I am not sure exactly what is going on, but more notarized papers will need to arrive tomorrow to Astana and once our children will be taken off the registry, our coordinator will be able to reschedule the court again.

We were all packed, have no more books, no DVDs, our TV is not working anymore, the washer is broken for 10 days, and about 2 days a week there is no hot water. There is nowhere to go closeby in our dusty neighborhood. There were minus 17 Celsius when we arrived here and today were more than plus15 Celsius. Should I mention, I already hate my warm sweaters, coats, jeans and winter boots?.

And because of so many things were going on with us, for the first time, I also forgot to bring candies to Gabi. It happened that the Spanish family was in the same play room with us with very cool new Ninja toys and plenty of candies for Vladimir. He is little older than Gabi, I think he is almost 8 and he would not allow him to play with his toys, until his parents insisted. I felt so guilty; he got nothing, my poor boy and he was asking me where are his candies! And he has also been little sick for several days (we know very well why!).

We don`t know when, where and if we will ever leave Kazakhstan. We had already booked our tickets from Petropavlosk to Almaty and from Almaty to NY and we have to get in touch again with Eldo from Golden Travel to see how much is going to cost us to change the dates again, for the second time.

Why were we given this bad news just in the last moment? Nobody knows, but we were told this is a brand new change in the international adoption process. Just wondering, what`s next? Needless to say, we miss our home so much. Meanwhile, the precious moments we spend with Yulia and Gabi keep us smiling.

Our routine and a list of favorites

2008-03-28T23:32:00.012-04:00

Yulia

- playing with balloons – on top of the list, for sure

- the mirror – she just loves to watch herself in the mirror –she thinks she is so cute and she is so, so right!!!
- Maia`s toys; Maia`s “Water Water” book (she gently took out from Kristen`s bag and put in mommy`s bag).
- a musical telephone
- the Teddy bear
- a musical walking lobster
- baby toys, baby books - she just loves to carry them around; Fuzzy Bee cotton baby book.
- mommy`s bag – she pulls everything out. Kristen`s bag – was even more appealing
- plastic shopping bags, paper, napkins - everything tastes good!!!
- bubbles - playing with the ball (her favorite is a yellow–pink beach ball)
- pulling out the curtains, empty the drawers in the baby room

- dancing with mommy and daddy

- blowing kisses, waving “paka paka”; showing “Where is Yulia?”; imitating daddy making funny faces; pulling mommy`s hair

- pooping – it happened many times, first thing she did after we brought her in the play room, we had to take her back and go through all ceremony of washing, diaper changing, etc which she really enjoys!.

First word other than mama and dada (which is not specific either), I think I heard from her, repeating after me: “OK”. She never repeated it again, so I am not sure about this, so we can not consider it as official.

Gabi

- Favorite toy: a singing nursery rhyme book – we were told he takes it everywhere, he also sleeps with it. - a musical phone - military toys (with an helicopter, a tank, few cars, 3 soldiers and 2 trees) - few cars, an airplane - balloons, bubbles
- Playing with the ball with his father - Playing in the snow - Playing piano (well, just making noises) - Puzzle (with driving Pluto and 2 robots)
- Elmo DVDs - Drawing, coloring, counting, learning English, teaching Russian - Favorite teacher: Pavlovna - Best friend: Urok (he told us he once gave him one of his balloons – I think this was a really big deal for him!) - Girlfriend: Palina (not interested in playing with girls, though) - Favorite toy he wants to play when he goes home: airplane - Favorite food: candies (he calls them confetti) and chocolate. Follows closely: carrots, potatoes and tea (chai). - Favorite animal: Lion (Liev) - Favorite color: green (Zirlonye) - Favorite parent: Papa (he just loves him. He keeps saying “Papa maladietz, Serioja maladietz, mama no maladietz. (maladietz means good job or sometign like this). Why? “Because mama doesn`t know how to make balloons and she doesn`t know how to play with the ball like daddy does!”.

Mommy and Daddy Baia – when we were not with our children, we would love to explore more, but this time we really did not get to walk too much around, since there was not too much time, our apartment was pretty far away from everything - 40 minutes walking distance from the closest shopping mall and after 7 pm it was already getting dark

- the closest place to our apartment: flea market. Been once, not interested to go again.

- our routine:

morning: breakfast, reading, blogging – (internet is very, very slow and it takes around 2-3 hours to attach 2 pictures, check emails, answer emails, etc. aprox 2 $/hrs, much cheaper after 11 pm)
1 pm to 3 pm – baby house
3 pm to 4 pm – travel to the orphanage
4 pm to 6 pm – visit with Gabi
6 pm to 7 pm – travel to Petropavlovsk
after 7 pm – grocery shopping, cooking for the following day, reading, watching movies, chat with our friends or mother in law (this really takes long time since she keeps us well informed about everything what happens not only in Romania, and in her neighborhood but also she knows all the details about all the news in the world! Sometimes she knows better than us what happens in NY, even how weather is going to be like in the following days and I really love her for this)

- grocery malls: Iceberg and Sokol approximate prices, maybe little cheaper: milk 1 $/liter, 4 oranges and 8 tomatoes around 13 $, 1 beer – 1 $, juice 1 liter 1 – 2 $/liter, lunch or dinner at restaurant around 20$/person, toys around 10 $ - the cheapest – they are not very good quality, one bicycle 100 $. Same with children clothes – nice baby outfit around 30$. Gabi`s pants and blouse around 40$, shoes were around 35 $ - really not the best. Clothes and toys are really better quality and price in US.

- Restaurants: Alibaba, a Russian restaurant (no English menu), Slovenian restaurant (they have menu in English but the food is not Slovenian at all), couple of pubs (not sure about the names). - We ate 2 times in a fast food store; once Nadya – Igor`s wife cooked horse meat for us (really good) and once we had lunch with Yuri when we celebrated Nauryz. Otherwise – we ate whatever we cooked or we bought. - Favorite food: borsch, caviar (around 3 $ - delicious), marinated fish, Zakuska (egg plant paste), pickled carrots, stuffed cabbage with ground pork meat (Romanian traditional sarmale – not sure about Russian or Kazakh name), and yellow cornmeal sticks (called Butik, Romanian Pufuleti – I could eat 2 bags at a time, they are just delicious, they really melt in your mouth!!! I think I am going to take a picture and recommend to everybody!

- favorite book: Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

- favorite movie: Good Will Hunting

- favorite place in the city: the new Orthodox Cathedral

- favorite person, who we are going to miss a lot, when we will be home with our children: Igor, our translator, he is really a very nice guy, he is fun, very friendly, honest, genuine, he loves the kids and he helped us a lot, we really think he is a great, great person.

Court Day delayed, Sick Baby, Great Daddy and a Very Happy End Story!

2008-03-26T00:46:00.009-04:00

Our court day was initially scheduled for Friday and we already made our tickets reservation, finished to read all our books, have seen all the movies, got ready to come home, when yesterday, we were told that court day will be on Monday! Of course we are upset, there are also more reasons to be upset (maybe, I will write about this later), but let`s think positive: we will spend 3 days longer with our children!

For few days I have also been little sick, just a cold, but I missed one day with my children. Dr Rima is very strict, when parents are sick, she does not like them to go to the baby house, which is completely understandable. Calin had to go alone. Just between us, first days when he met our children, he was very happy to play with Gabi, but hesitating with Yulia. I know he loved her from the first day, but he was afraid to hold her, he taught she is too fragile and did not know how to play and how to talk with her. Maybe he was not used with babies, but both of us came to bring home a baby girl!

You should see what a greatd daddy he is now, after 3 weeks! I am so proud of him, he gained so much experience! Yulia played as usually and Gabi when he was told that mommy is sick, he asked: “is my sister sick too?” How sweet! Next day, when we went to see Yulia, the doctor was in her room examining her, she got a little cold too with a rash all over her body. She does not have a fever yet, and she plays as usually, so I am not too worried yet. This is maybe just a virus, and this is how they build their immunity. I can`t wait to see her today again.

Gabi is slowly starting to be more attached to us, day by day. We tried to explain him what is going to happen in the next month. We officially asked him if he wants to be our boy and us to be his parents, and he said YES!!!!.

To make a long story short, we told him, mama and papa have to go home after few days to get our home ready for him and his sister. Many, many days he is not going to see us, but he has to know we love him and we are going to think of him every day. One day, the nice lady (Sholpan – our coordinator) will come and take him from the orphanage and he will have to say Paka Paka to his friends and teachers because he is not going to see them for long, long time. Same day, he will meet his sister and together with the nice lady they will fly with the airplane (of course, he knows what an airplane is). If he is going to be good and listen he will get many candies. He also has to take care of his sister and make sure she is not going to cry, since she is a baby and she will not understand what is going to happen. Then, he will meet with mama and babushka, and the lady will go back to the orphanage to tell everybody what a good boy he was in the airplane. Just for few days, he will stay together with Yulia, babushka and mama in a small room, but mama will make sure there will be toys and many candies there (I already start to be worried about his denture!!). We will go to see the doctor who maybe will have to give him few shots (he said he does not need shots, because he is healthy! – But the doctors don’t know him and they would allow him to come home with mommy if they are not sure he is healthy! So he needs to be brave and mama will be with him. I think I will have to explain this differently – he did not like it!). After the doctors will say OK to us, we will go again with the airplane, this time is going to be much longer, there will still be many candies, and we can also draw and write, and play with few toys but he, his sister, mama and babushka will be very, very tired and we will try to sleep. After long, long time, we will meet with daddy and Max (he is not impressed when he sees his pictures or we talk about our dog) and we will go HOME. At home, he will have a whole room only for him and his sister, and mommy and daddy will buy many, many toys if they will be good kids and listen. He is going to miss his friends and his teachers, but soon he is going to make new friends, who speak like mommy and daddy (well, with no accent) and don’t understand Russian. But he is going to go to school and he will learn how to speak the new language and he will make more friends and everything is going to be a HAPPY END!

End of story. Mama and Papa are so much waiting for this happy end. We don`t know how much did he understand, or how much he will remember what we said, but we tried hard with Igor`s help. He listened without saying too many things and he agreed with us. We did not tell him about the surgery yet, I am so scarred and I don`t know how to explain to a 4 year old child, my son, that he needs eye surgery. I am thinking, maybe is too early and I don`t want to scare him too much, but I guess I am much more scared than he is. Their future doctor is Russian and she is great, I hope everything will go OK.

A Happy Nauruz!

2008-03-23T12:08:00.006-04:00

Today, is the last day of “Nauruz” - The New Year in Kazakhstan (from the Persian words “Nau-New, Ruz-Year.”) and welcoming of the spring.

This is the time for Kazakhs to get together with family and friends, exchange gifts, ask for forgiveness of their sins, and be joyful and “revive themselves spiritually”. The city, the streets, parks, stadiums, are all full of people who say “Koktem tudy” (spring is born) to each other and celebrate Nauruz with songs, competitions, horse racing, ethnic theaters, fashion shows and marches. The main ritual dish, “Nauryz-kozheh,” includes seven ingredients, signifying the seven life beginnings – water, meat, salt, fat, flour, cereal and milk. And they symbolize joy, luck, wisdom, health, wealth, speedy growth and heavenly protection.

Our Nauruz started with no water (cold or hot) for the first morning!!!. Since we had not too much water left, we could not welcome the spring too happy! We do drink filtered water from the sink – as everybody here does – and nothing happened to us so far!

The celebration continued with a short walk on the Constitution street which was extremely crowded, lots of people were walking on the street to see the yurts and the show, listen to the music, eat shish kebab and drink beer. We arrived little late to the orphanage, where the Nauruz show already began. The children were so cute – they danced, sang and played some games! Gabi was not in the show, but he was happy to see us there as part of the audience. When the show was over, Yuri, the director of the orphanage gave a little speech and at the end, lots of candies were shared with everybody.

We also had to meet with the social worker to take pictures together with us and an other Spanish family who is adopting a little boy, Vladimir. It was very funny, after she took few pictures together with each family, she changed her clothes, took off her high heel boots and changed her hairstyle quickly; asked us and our children to change our jackets between each others and took an other set of pictures in the opposite corner of the room. This is how she will prove in the court she was with us every day. Honestly, we are so very happy it was just the two of us and Igor to play with Gabi!

Yuri was very nice, he invited us for lunch in the guest room of the orphanage and we spoke about Nauruz and other Kazakh traditions. While men were toasting with vodka - and I was toasting with green tea, we could not stop ourselves tasting fish salad with red beet, pickle carrots, corn salad, home made cold cuts and many other Kazakh or Russian? goodies – and for the first time, we ate horse meat!. Yes, we did it, and we are still alive! Would I try it again? I guess I would rather prefer a horseback riding in the forest!

We finished our day in a pub, with Igor and Nadya - drinking Karaganda beer and eating shish kebab to celebrate the New Year, and the end of the winter which is truly over!….. And the second day, we went to the baby house and for the first time, ask Yulia for forgiveness and listened to her Nauruz speach! We did not get to visit her for one day!

Few pictures from this Happy Event!

We Have a Court Date!

2008-03-20T10:18:00.004-04:00

Finally, our bonding period is over and we have a court date: March 28! Since our children are in two different orphanages, we were initially told that we may need to have two court dates in two different places, but luckily, this is not going to happen. As in other regions, after the court, our judge did not wave the 14 days waiting time when anybody from their biological family can contest the court decision. We are so much looking forward to officially become their parents.

Today was a day of firsts with Yulia. Because the room where we usually play was busy, we got to play in her room, together with the other children. I also got to give her the first bath, to change the first diaper and change her clothes for the first time. It took me a pretty long time, but I think I was pretty successful. She did not cry at all and she actually seemed to like it. She enjoys exploring everything, pulling out all the drawers in the room, looking for toys, climbing everywhere, putting everything in her mouth, playing with the electric plug. First thing to do when we arrive home, baby proof the house!!!! And then when it was time to leave, she cried for the first time! Well… she was immediately consoled by her caregiver, but she did look after us, for the first time when we left!

Gabi had some behavior changes today. We were initially giving him chocolate or candies every time to do something good. Well, today he refused to listen to us, he would not answer any questions (English or Russian); refused to count, refused to draw, refuse to do anything we asked him to do. We already started to get a little frustrated until the moment he saw the magic chocolate, when the metamorphosis to the very good, big boy happened suddenly! I guess he is just trying to teach us how not to teach him! He is also starting to show some signs of regression in his language. Igor, our translator mentions he was able to understand his Russian much better 2 weeks ago when we met him and he is now using a baby language he can barely understand. Today, he witnessed him speaking a perfect Russian while talking with his caregiver. I am sure he is going to need lots of attention when we will be together. However, he is so adorable!

Today, we also said good bye to Maia, Yulia`s friend who went home with her mommy, Kristen! We wish them a wonderful life together and to continue to enjoy their stay in Kazakhstan. And it is still winter time here in Petropavlovsk, we don’t get too much to do except bonding with our children, but somehow the time passed by really fast. We have one more week! Wow!

Missing home!

2008-03-17T12:07:00.008-04:00

Yulia is feeling much better; I guess I was too much worried! The first two weeks passed by fast and we did not think too much about anything else but our children. Now, we are really starting to miss our home! We can not believe, in few more days, our bonding period will finish and we will have a court date (after 7-10 days)! The weather is getting really cold here, it`s snowing and the city is beautiful. Yesterday we had dinner at a Slovenian restaurant with Kristen, her mom and Susan (she is adopting a cute baby boy from the same room with Maia and Yulia). We were all laughing about how much were we waiting to come here, and now how much we are looking forward to go back home again! When we are so far from home, it feels so good to have somebody to speak English with.

Well, we miss a lot our other home – Romania, too, but it would be really hard to find somebody to speak Romanian here! However, as we actually expected, I could say the life style, the buildings, the food, the people and even the way they are dressing and also the communist reminiscences and its consequences, remind us very much of our Romania.

I was initially planning to stay for the whole trip (Calin has to go back to work after the court). During the first 2 weeks after the court – until the judge decision will be final, I would not be able to visit her (as per our agency), and I think it would be difficult to manage with two children all by myself. I would be especially afraid of this long travel with 2 brand-new children. We decided to return home together after the court to organize the room for our children, find a good school, make doctors appointments, schedule the surgery for Gabi, get back to work to save some money and get everything ready. Finding a good school in NY is not going to be an easy task – especially for us who know nothing about the school system in United States. We are still in process of learning the difference between day care, kinder garden, pre-K preschool and school. But thanks to our great neighbors and friends we are very optimistic!

Hopefully by the end of April, I will come back for the second trip and together with my mother in law – we will bring Yulia and Gabriel home. I can`t wait! I am so much looking forward to finally teach my children to say: "Paka, Paka Kazakhstan! Hello, Brooklyn!"

Crying baby

2008-03-14T13:40:00.005-04:00

Today was our 10th day of bonding. Our visits to the orphanage and the baby house finish around 7 pm, and after doing some grocery shopping it gets dark and we have to go back to our apartment. For the past 3 or 4 days, we did not have hot water in the morning, which reminds us of many, many years ago in Romania. Everything else is well with us. Starting from tomorrow, we will have a video camera and Igor will record some of our happy moments together!

Few days ago, we witnessed Yulia`s first crying. When we came to her room to pick her up, we were surprised to hear a high pitch soprano voice. It was Yulia sitting on her potty with her caregiver on a site who was encouraging her to poop. My little 13 months old baby was crying and crying while her caregiver was nicely trying to convince her to poop. Finally, when they saw us, they both gave up. Yulia`s tears disappeared right away and the caregiver received hugs awards while getting the cute little girl ready for her parents. We are thankful we will not have to change too many diapers, but we were surprised to hear they start toilet training so early! After every breakfast, lunch and dinner all the children from her group have to sit on their potties. Yesterday, while we were playing together, she tried to fall asleep. Igor told us, we should never let her to fall asleep while we are bonding; otherwise the caregivers would get upset with us. They have a very strict schedule, everybody in the class, will have to eat, sleep, play and apparently pee and poop at the same time.

She has also been a little cranky in the past 2 days, seems she was catching a little cold (little runny nose and sneezing). Our today`s visit did not last more than an hour, she was very fussy, crying continuously, and I think she also had low grade fever. We brought her to the doctor, who advised us to bring her back to the room and she will examine her later. While Calin was very calm, thinking this is just a minor cold, I was really worried about her all day. I hope this is just a cold, but until tomorrow I am thinking of anything else possible.

Gabriel is as always, ready to play. We are trying to divide our 2 hours together between playing and learning. Sometimes the gym room is busy, and we have to play in a very small room with 2 beds, a desk and a chair. Luckily, we brought Elmo DVDs and he really seems to like it. He pretty much plays with any toy: balloons, military toys (Calin`s idea!), cars but his favorite is a musical nursery book! Even if they told us he is very good in his class, is very hard to figure out, but he definetely has his delays. I think he speaks like a 31/2 year old in Russian (he is almost 5). He draws - like a 3-31/2 year old, he does not want to draw a person yet and he refuses to color. He loves songs, but he mentionned to us nobody taught him how to sing. We speak English with him, but he hesitates to repeat the words after us. We (re)invented the M&M reward system, and we are happy for now with Thank you, Please, Good Bye, Lyon and count up to 5. I am sure he will need special services, at least speach therapy, but with no jokes, if there is one place in the world where he can get the best available services, the Unites States is for sure the one. One day, we played outside, in the snow, and it was so much fun. He is so sweet, he has such a big laugh, we can easily see his tonsils!

Every day we meet his friends who are all, so cute! Some of them call us mama and papa and I wish we could take all of them home! I know the adjustment is going to be difficult, but we are happy with our decision! However, I am sure if we were to come here again, our expectations would have been so different. Not that somebody would ever listen to our expectations! We came here, thinking we will be able to chose our child from several healthy children who will meet our age, sex and health requirements and we were thinking is going to be so difficult to chose! It was nothing like this! We could only say Yes or No to the two children who they thought are meant to be ours, otherwise we had the option to go home!.

It does happen every once in a while, to become the happy parent to a beautiful healthy baby girl you could only dream for! But I guess, this is just a random luck! You ask for one child – you better took care of your home study to be approved for 2! You ask for either sex, and you would prefer a girl, you have 80% chance to get a boy; you ask for any age up to 2 yo, you have good chance to get a 2 ½ - 3 yo. You have a pink-painted room ready for two girls? What a cute little baby boy was waiting for you! You should consider yourself really lucky if you asked for a healthy child and the child they choose for you, has only minor, correctable health problems! And you should also be ready and brave enough to say NO to a child who you feel is not meant to be yours and have the power to wait again.

The question is what about the biological children: how much do we get to chose the right child at the right moment? Isn`t this all about destiny?!? We just have to keep our heart and mind open; be faithful and patient! Because “patience is a virtue!” (as Sandi`s grandmother said!). After so many months of waiting, the right child(ren) is (are, will be) waiting for us! And these children were never asked to chose their parents!

After first week.

2008-03-11T12:16:00.006-04:00

It has been already a week since we met our children and we are learning many things about each others. Even if initially we were told it will be possible to move Gabriel to Yulia`s baby house after the chicken pox quarantine will be over, today, dr Rimma told us she will not accept older children in the baby house, so we will have to travel 60 km back and forward, crossing the trans-siberian railroad daily (remember Dr Jivago?).

Initially we only had eyes for our children, but 3 days ago we started to explore the city as well. We live in an old building - one bedroom apartment, which we find little pricy; we are working on negotiating it again. The internet is extremely slow. The apartment is pretty small, but it looks clean, however we got new pets – bunch of overfriendly, uninvited small ants are visiting us daily. It takes us around 30 minutes to walk to “Iceberg” – the supermarket – and maybe 35 minutes to the orphanage. Two days ago, we enjoyed our first dinner out with Igor and Nadya at “Aladin”. It is hard to be picky, menus are usually in Russian or Kazakh? and we have to trust our advisors. I ordered salanka (great soup: meat, vegetables, and pickles with sour cream) and kurduk (Kazakh specialty made of organs – liver, kidneys, heart, etc). This was a big surprise even for their most Transylvanian guest: a big plate of meat and onion with no vegetables at all, no rice, no potatoes, not even bread. I managed to exchange my plate with my dear husband – and also taste a little from what everybody else ordered (lamb ribs, borsch, beef tongue salad). Very tasty!

This morning we enjoyed coffee with Kristen and her mother at the “Black Jack”. We were planning it for few days, but it took us a while to find out where we are located. We will meet with them every other day at the baby house. Yulia and Maia are roommates and they love each other`s toys – means they enjoy playing together. We are very much looking to spend more time together.

Our children are slowly getting used to their new names and they seem to like it. And every day, an other surprise, we found out their last name is Turkish! Yulia is already pretty much walking few steps by herself and she is so proud of it! She is continuously moving and is becoming pretty hard to take pictures of her. For unknown reasons, her favorite word is still “dada”, but hopefully she will change her mind pretty soon. She loves the mirror and she is trying to discover new things every day. She is very cute when she points to herself and she shows her nose (in Russian).

Gabriel discovered his future career. I think he is going to be a very good teacher. We already learnt some Russian, after he was very patient with us when we were trying to make him repeat after us few English words. We are very good with few colors, we count up to 10 (we actually learnt this lesson from home), and we also know “skaje!” – “say!”. We are trying hard to be good students and not to disappoint him too much, however, communication with him is going to be the biggest concern. He loves to play football with his father and few of the toys we brought for Yulia were proved to be much better choice for our son. And as much puzzled we have been a week ago, we managed to finish our first puzzle together :).

Mother`s day!

2008-03-09T14:37:00.008-04:00

Happy Anniversary to all of you, Mothers and Mothers-to-be! March 8, was a special day in Kazakhstan (and Romania) everybody celebrated The Mother`s Day! A celebration of the unconditional treasure of the Mother`s love!

The children from the orphanage had a little paintings exhibition for The Mother`s day!

As a woman who had just a dog and a husband a week ago, this day was truly so special to me – the new mother of two children! Many years ago, as any other woman, I was dreaming of the day when I will hold my child! I always thought is going to be in the small maternity of my natal city in Romania! A special day which would have been marked in the calendar months before, surrounded by parents, relatives and friends! Enjoying the miracle of the first feeding, first cry and then, the first smile! Watching my baby growing day by day! Just simple joys of life!

Six years ago, I never thought I will move to the United States to get married and I will find my children in Middle Asia in Kazakhstan. Today, I wish my parents would be here to share my tears of joy! Because, yes, I did find my children! It was a long road, but it was the destiny which brought us together. Our finger prints have been rejected 3 times; my agency coordinator had to relocate and we could not have been in touch for one week; a month ago our letter of invitation was waiting in the city of Arkalyk; our flight has been delayed!

There were so many days when we lost our hope! And now, we know for sure, everything happened because we were meant to be today, together!

And when I look in my children`s eyes, and laugh at their laugh, I find a clear answer to all my fears: no, it did not happened as I was expecting, I did not give them the gift of life, they are not blood from our blood, they don`t even get upset when I leave yet, but I know for sure, what I feel, it is love, and it does grow day by day. With no doubts, it is a truly mother’s love. A love I was so much longing to give.

And reading with my children, from a nursery rhyme book, I feel nothing, but joy!

“Row, row, row your boat.
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.
Life is but a dream”.

Our journey continues.

2008-03-07T14:04:00.008-05:00

Our journey as brand new parents continues. We feel like waking up from a nightmare and except from running from the baby house to the orphanage every day, back and forward and enjoy our children, we did not get chance to do too many other things so far.

Sergey was very busy with his new musical telephone! We were trying to teach him the ABC, but with not too much success today. I don’t think he learnt the letters and the numbers yet and as we are asking him to repeat some words, I think he may have some pronunciation problems. However, I am sure in few months his English is going to be much better than mine. He copies the square and the triangle pretty well, but he refused to draw a person!. That`s OK, we`ll keep trying. I think I may be little bit obsessed and trying to test everything from the first days. It is pretty hard to communicate with him. He talks a lot, but he doesn`t seem to be very upset when we do not understand what he is saying, he just repeats it again and again until somebody understands or we will give up or our translator rescues us. I wish we learnt more Russian! He is very sweet otherwise, he calls us Papa and Mama already and today he asked, Igor – the translator: “if is he going to be in the car with his parents when he is going home?”. I think he pretty much understands what is going on, maybe one of the educators told him and he also saw other children in his class, going home with their parents.

Alina was dressed today in a blue pajama with “Here comes the trouble!” written on it. This was funny! We are already scarred! We witnessed her first step with no support. She pulled herself up from the sitting position, she waited few moments to make sure we can see her and appreciate her effort, the she fell and started laughing. She imitates everything what she sees. She says da-da and ta-ta but no ma-ma!!!! Too bad, I am the one who is trying to improve her vocabulary, while her father is enjoying teaching her to make funny faces, stick out the tongue and giving back kisses. She does everything back! She very much enjoys seeing her face the mirror, today she started laughing and give kisses to the mirror. It was so cute! She has such a beautiful laugh. She also discovered the massage today, Aveeno cream for her face eczema made miracles! Thank you, Allyson! That`s my girl!

We are waiting to find out when will they be together. We found out that the quarantine for chicken pox will be over only in March 24, which is way too late. The director of the orphanage offered today to move him in a shelter, just to be in the city for us not to have too much to travel, but we did not think it was a good idea. If he is not going to be with his sister, we think there is no point to move him again in a different place, with different children and caregivers. We may also leave after few weeks and we don’t want to confuse him more. Let`s see, unfortunately there are not too many choices!

For the waiting parents: try not to pack too much! We paid 150$ for extra 45 kg of baggage from Almaty to Astana. There is a limit of 20 kilograms/person for internal flights. Not to forget home: a flash light (we had no power yesterday evening for several hours), toys, books and DVDs. Also, very important, please keep in mind, when you rent the apartment, you can bargain!!!!

Tomorrow we will meet with Kristen and her beautiful daughter – Maya, I only saw sneak pictures of her, but tomorrow our girls will play together!

Follow your heart...

2008-03-06T11:37:00.009-05:00

… and double the joy! We finally decided to follow our hearts and become a family of four. We are very happy to introduce the newest additions to our family: Yulia Alina, born January 27, 2007 and Gabriel Sergey, born July 25, 2003. Until they will get used to us, we will call them by their middle names – the original ones. About the names: we chose Yulia together - before our arrival. We had a list of common Russian and Romanian names, and we were waiting to see the baby to decide which one would fit her better. Gabriel was named in the memory of my mother, as an appreciation and respect to her endless love.

Alina is a happy baby, with a contagious laugh, extremely ticklish, full of energy, crawling, standing on her own, walking with support, babbling a lot and dancing every once in a while. Since we were expected a 2 year old Kazakh girl, it was a surprise to meet this blond baby with blue eyes and cute, big ears (her brother was actually the biggest surprise). She was born full term, 2600 gr and has always been healthy. She is little small for her age, her weight is only 7.8 kg.

Her brother, Sergey is a very sweet boy, with a beautiful smile, very much loved by his caregiver, who loves color books, drawing, singing and playing football with his daddy. He was also born full term, 3250 gr, and is otherwise healthy, except congenital palpebral ptosis (not being able to keep his eyes fully opened from birth). I am not sure about his exact weight, but this is not a concern, he looks vigorous, more like a 51/2 year old. He has always been in target with his milestones, little too mature for his age, however he only spent 1 year in the orphanage. His vision is still good (he has been checked 2 times/year), but this needs surgical correction (we have been told, not very complicated procedure) as soon as he will arrive home, in NY. He has now chicken pox as almost everybody in his class. We initially fell in love with Alina, but the more time we spend with Sergey, the more we understand the meaning of “the joy of boy”J. He is such a beautiful, sensitive, cute little boy. And as I remember Amy`s post (which actually made me cry at that time), this age is so much fun too!

Our official journey started yesterday and for now we are visiting Alina from 1 pm to 3 pm – at the baby house and Sergey from 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm in the orphanage which is 30 minutes of driving. Luckily we have visitation rights Saturdays and Sundays too. As soon as the quarantine for the chicken pox will be over, the brother and sister will be reunited forever. We are very much looking forward to be the four of us together, but unfortunately, it doesn’t look this is going to happen very soon. Once one of the children has the chicken pox in the orphanage, it is very easily transmitted and the quarantine will be over only until 2 – 3 weeks from the last case of chicken pox. We do understand this situation and our wish is all the babies from the baby house to be in good health and well protected.

The orphanage and the baby house are very clean, and it looks they do take very good care of the children. Everybody is very helpful, we are lucky to have a very nice translator and coordinator. We do think they are doing everything, as much as they can in the best interest of these children. Our agency coordinator has been in touch with us every day and she is also doing her best to help us taking care of the paperwork (more documents again!!!!). We now need an addendum to the home study (to be eligible to be parents of 2 children) to be sent with the application of I-600A form. This will hopefully happen soon.

Since yesterday, we have full happy days together as we will have such a full house very soon. We only have to figure out how to fit the new parents, baby girl, big brother, mother-in-law (for the next 6 months only) and the 70 lbs dog in our apartment. This is just something minor, the most important: we will be together, the 6 of us.

Thank you so much to all of you, blog buddies, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family for all the support in taking the best decision for our family. It really helped a lot; it feels so good to be surrounded by so many people who do care about us. Thank you for the prayers and for the OMs....It helped us stay optimistic and be reassured, everything in this life do happen with a reason, for the best….

A visit to the baby house

2008-03-04T10:55:00.006-05:00

We had time only to take a shower, at 9 am we went to MOE to sign more papers and at around 11 am we arrived at the baby house and together with our translator, the agency coordinator and the social worker we met in the doctor of the baby house`s room who started to bring children in.

First baby was the most beautiful 13 months old baby girl, healthy, who almost jumped in my arms and did not want to let go. She crawls, she can almost walk without support, she says “dada” and “da”, she had great eye contact and was pretty interactive with the other persons in the room, however she looked for comfort in her caregiver`s arms when she felt unsecure. She has the most beautiful eyes and curly hair. I could say, the perfect baby. We spent more than 15 minutes together.

Next 2 or 3 babies were children with obvious special needs (cerebral palsy, developmental problems, microcephaly, etc) we did not ask to spend too much time with, we were obviously not meant to be their parents.

After few minutes, a beautiful 2 year old girl came at the same time with a 4 months chunky baby boy (who looked like 6 months old) – and when we asked about his age they told he is 4 months and he is not available for adoptions. We asked to take him from my arms until I don’t get too much attached. We looked at the 2 years old, she started to cry and run away from us. We said, is OK, is her first day we want to hear more about her. But, we were told she has just been visited by her mother a month ago and she will be available for bounding only 2 weeks from now – if the mother will not come back. We got upset again, why did they show this child if she is not available for adoption?

So we are left with the only option, the perfect 13 month old baby girl. We asked to spend more time with her, and we are told she has an older brother who has “some correctable eye problems”. We were confused since we were not expecting two children. We asked to see the boy, and we were off to an other orphanage to see him, 30 minutes from the baby house.

When we met him, he was just awaking up from sleep, but he did come to us and he told us about a fight he had with another boy – one of his friends today (because of some toy sharing issues – I think). However, he reassured us he is a very good boy, he sleeps well, he listens to the caregivers, he eats everything caregivers are giving to him, he likes to play and he has many friends. When we asked him who are his best friends?, his answer was disarmingly simple: his sister and his mother. However, the mother was not in the picture for long, long time (I will surely not go into details). He is a very beautiful boy with an eye condition which can be possibly corrected with specialized plastic ophthalmologic surgery. However his vision is good, he has no cataract, his eye movements are OK and he has no other health issues at all. He is very smart, he knows colors (including pink, orange, beige), he sings songs (we did not witnessed this), he can copy a square and a triangle. I will explain his diagnostic if we will be his parents.

Than he started to draw, he drew first a smiley sun and then a big red house (beautiful drawing for a 4 year old, many details - I was really impressed). We asked him who lives in the house he just drew? The answer was very straight: except him, many children, many caregivers and Yurry (the director of the orphanage). This is the little universe where he lives. But he is planning to bring his sister with him - he proudly added. Tears came into my eyes and I had to leave the room. When I came back, he was asking me if I want to see the place where he is playing, and we surely did. He invited me to put his shoes on. They were so tight, he could barely fit in. Later, I was realizing he was limping, maybe bcs of pain (I remembered Stacy and Kim - how important is their help for those children).

We followed him in a big room with a small piano and the coordinator started to play a nice Russian song and he was laughing and dancing around. He looked so happy, it was soooo cute. Soon after, he left and we were left with a decision to take. Do we decide to learn more about these two beautiful children or not? If yes, tomorrow will be considered our second bounding day, if not, we will most likely have to plan our trip back home.

This came as a big surprise, we only asked for one child, our I171 is issued for one child, we have only a 2 BDR condo and not too big space in our apartment and physically and financially we did not feel quite ready to take care of two children at the same time right now. We were reassured, the paperwork can be done easily.

Also, the brother needs a surgery, is it going to be covered by our insurance?, how complicated will this be? I am also about to start my new job, which will be pretty hectic next year. However, our hearts hurt to go home without any child, and leave those two beautiful smart children in the baby house. Is so hard to ignore we ever met them. But, is it fair to bring them home with us, for now I am sure they are pretty happy the way they are, since they never knew any different, are we ready to make them happier?

We are extremely tired, especially Calin, we decided we have to wait until tomorrow, to have our minds clear to see what is the best decision. We waited so much for this day, and are so confused now. Today is the anniversary of 3 months since my father died, and in the video camera which I lost, there was the only tape where I had him recorded for few minutes. I think I am exhausted. Tomorrow is another day.

If tomorrow I will prove I am not electronically challenged anymore as I was today, once we will take the final decision, I will try again to download pictures from the san disk to the computer. It (the computer) keeps asking me if I want to reformat the disk, but I am not sure what does it mean and I am afraid to lose the pictures. Can somebody help me, please? We have poor internet connection, but I will try to post again soon.

For those of you who are traveling soon, dont pack very warm clothes. The weather is pretty nice. It was very sunny today.

The travel

2008-03-04T10:51:00.001-05:00

After around 80 hours, we finally arrived at Petropavlovsk.

Our adventure started Friday night at JFK, when we found out the flight to Amsterdam was overbooked and we did not have seats reservations. We decided to spend the night at Holidays Inn at JFK, 30 minutes from home, and next morning our first destination was, guess what?: DUBAI.

The 12 hours flight with Arab Emirates Airlines was pretty comfortable, the food was great, we watched some good movies (two of them: Juno - a pregnant teenager who decides to give her unborn baby for adoption; A Nanny Diaries - a young woman who works for a high class society "organic" family from Upper East Side Manhattan discovers how little time do those parents get to spend with their own child, how little they know about him and even if they have plenty of money, how unhappy can they be).

We had four hours layover in Dubai, and if we were not in rush to meet our child, we wish could spend at least 2-3 days there to get the chance to visit the city, I am pretty sure it would have been very exciting. In the airplane to Almay, there were few Kazakh children, all of them so beautiful, we looked at them and thinking, how does our child look like? And finally, we arrived in Almaty on Sunday night. It was so exciting to be there.

We spend our first night in hotel Kazzhol, 140 $/night, in a pretty small, but very clean room; we had a delicious dinner with borsch and Russian cold plate (herrings, potatoes, red beets and pickles). Upon arrival at the hotel, I managed to lose our video camera. We were checking in at the hotel, and I think I let it at the front desk. After few hours, when we went to ask for it, there was no more video camera.

The initial plan was to fly on Tuesday to Kostanai - spend a night there in a hotel, and on Wednesday to go to MOE (to sign rejection of Arkalyk and change it with Petropavlovsk) on our LOI. We were also planning to meet Sara and Julian for dinner. However, we had a last minute change in our plan, on Monday evening we went to Astana, our agency representative waited for us and we arrived in Petropavlovsk this morning at 7 am after almost 10 hrs of driving (very foggy, decreased visibility).

Leaving Today!

2008-02-28T21:04:00.021-05:00

We have been like perpetuum mobiles, energy bombs in the past few days: we managed to copy, notarize, verify, apostile few other documents; got our visa; booked our tickets; arranged cash money; call credit card company; finished packing; did some baby shopping; found two back up doggie nannies in case he will misbehave; been in touch with our agency daily; finished two of my work projects I was working on for a long time (a small research project - discussed with statistician - got great, valid results - also submitted a rare case report for publication yesterday - so excited about it!); took care of family leave; said good bye to our colleagues, neighbours, friends and family. We still have to work today, bring the dog to our friend and buy a big extra luggage! We did not realised, there is much to pack!!!

We are tired, little scarred, but so excited and happy now! Because finally, beyond so many unknowns, there is one big known: after 1 year, 2 months, 2 weeks and 4 days, we are leaving TODAY! We are opening a new file in our life`s book and so many things will change! In 12 hours we will be on our way to Kazakhstan, the place where our child was born. Most likely we will arrive in Petropavlovsk on Monday evening and Tuesday is going to be our so much waited "Meetcha day". Bye, bye, my blog friends! In the next post we will have news about our baby from the other side of the world! There are 48 F in Petro right now, not bad at all! I hope we will have internet access soon!

I have no words to thank you enough, dear blogger friends for all your help, your words of support, and all the fun we shared waiting for this big event to come; the excitement following your adventures while in Kazakhstan; the joy of being home and watching your beautiful children growing just under our eyes! I feel like part of a big family! We hope to meet many of you in Kazakhstan! For those of you who are waiting, you will be in our thoughts, we hope all of you will travel soon! Except those of you who chose to wait to taste the cold beer in the summer ! And more happy days to share to be continued...

The LOI arrived today

2008-02-25T19:58:00.007-05:00

I opened my email today, and wow, what a surprise! The LOI. We were waiting for it on Wednesday, at the earliest. This really took my breath away.

Tomorrow, Calin will make a trip to the Kazakhstan Consulate to arrange the visa, and if everything will be OK, we will be in Kazakhstan Saturday, March 1, 2008. Our departure is scheduled for Friday at 10 pm, with Northwest Airlines and after a 3 hours lay over in Amsterdam, we will arrive in Almaty on Saturday 5:30 am. We booked our tickets with Golden Travel. Our agency gave us an other recommendation, but Eldo from Golden Travel gave us the best deal ever with no fee in case we will have to change the date. I really recommend them from all my heart.

In Almaty, we hope we will get the chance to shortly meet with Sara and Julian - who will be celebrating their court date to become parents of beautiful Zoe (http://yeomans2kaz.blogspot.com/).

Hopefully, in the same day we are going to meet our daughter, in Petropavlovsk. We will also meet Kirsten who is also adopting a little girl from the same baby house. (http://hornadoption.blogspot.com/ - her blog is private for now).

What an adventure... this is the real beauty of the life! The lesson we learnt: when you are adopting from Kazakhstan, expect the unexpected and always be ready. I am so scarred and so happy!

Destination changed

2008-02-22T19:42:00.007-05:00

I was initially afraid to post anything until we know something for sure, but I just feel I have to share my joy - hopefully not too early - with you, my dear friends and let you know that, today, for us was what we can call a Happy, Happy Day!.

As she promised, Valerie called today to give us a great new: there is a baby, our child waiting for us in:

P E T R O P A V L O V S K

Petropavl or Petropavlovsk , city (1993 est. pop. 248,000), N Kazakhstan, on the Ishim (Esil) River and at the junction of the Trans-Kazakhstan and Trans-Siberian RR. On the caravan route between Turkistan and W China, Petropavl was founded as a fort in 1752 and became a center for trade between Russia and the central Asian kingdoms. Its industrial development began in the late 19th cent. and intensified during and following World War II.

We don`t know exactly what is going to happen in Arkalyk, there are rumors the baby house may close and they will send the children in other regions. Nothing is for sure yet. However, we will be always thankful, because our dossier was first sent there, we had the chance to meet wonderful people, we made real friends we`ll never forget and our hearts will be with them and all Arkalyk children. We will keep these children in our prayers and our hope is that everything will happen for their best.

Our LOI should arrive soon, most likely next week !?! :). Since we felt so frustrated and disappointed last week, this came as a big surprise. Our feelings now? Confused, surprised, excited, anxious, faithful, happy, ready-to- go.

SO HAPPY :)!!!!!!!

Region closed??

2008-02-15T16:21:00.009-05:00

February 13, we celebrated Calin`s birthday - he is 42 now! We had a romantic dinner to celebrate both his birthday and Valentine`s day, and in the weekend, we are going to celebrate it together with our friends!

Our coordinator called to announce that she finally got news from Kazakhstan: it seems like "Arkalyk orphanage, because of not enough children in the baby house is closing and they don`t accept new families".

Our dossier was sent back to Almaty - to MOE I think - and they are looking for an other region for us. She told that they are completely aware about my job situation and they will do their best to make sure we will travel as soon as possible. On February 23 - this time we have an exact date - she is going to call us again to give us more information.

Until then, we keep waiting and try hard to be optimistic. Let`s hope for the best! Some day, somewhere, somehow, we are going to be parents!

It`s Winter Time in New York!

2008-02-12T16:28:00.001-05:00

We always like to go to Vermont for ski, but this time, in the last moment as usually, we decided to change and explore something new. Just the two of us and the dog spent a wonderful, romantic weekend at Belleayre Mountain in New York State. We skied, we played with the snow, we did a lot of hiking. This is a much smaller place as compare to Killington, but everything was just perfect. I am not a very good skier (Calin always makes fun of my uphill skiing abilities), but I am happy to announce my first day on a black diamond (most difficult) slope. No falls at all :).

We also had a little adventure, in the last day, around 4 pm, just before getting dark, a strong snowstorm started, so we had to ski with almost no visibility, and by the time we arrived to the lodge, both of us looked like 2 old freezing snowmen, with our hair, eyelashes and eyebrows full of ice. It was so much fun! However, I hope this is going to be our last trip before we go to pick up our little baby from Kazakhstan.

We are home for 2 days now, and today was the first snowy day in New York. Since morning I was enjoying the big snow flakes, and coming home, I realised I am in a such a NY state of mind. I love everything here, the diversity, the people, the culture, the buildings, the parks, everyday I can find something I can be amazed about. And I love our hystorical Brooklyn. By now, everything is covered with snow, it looks so beautiful and clean, to me New York is by far the most wonderful city in the world. What I am going to think about too much snow after 3, 4 or 5 days? I am ready to handle anything - including a LOI from Kaz. Not sure about a MTA strike. :)

However, yesterday Calin called our agency coordinator again and we got no good news. Last week, he had a long conversation with her, and she adviced us - as usually - to be patient and wait one more week, and if nothing is going to change in Arkalyk, they will assign us to an other region. She knows very well that time is getting very short for us, since I am going to start a new job, I am not sure if I will be able to travel after April anymore.

When he called this time, she seemed little upset why we are calling so often, she said she could not get in touch with their Kazakhstan partners and we should know that if she would have some news, she will certainly call us. And I certainly believe this, I am sure she is as much frustrated as we are. We are trying to stay calm, but there is more than one month since our scheduled travel day and we do not have any news. I know we have to be patient, and everything will happen when will supose to, I am so good in theory, but I am just wondering, how long waiting is too long, and how often is not too often to bug our agency? I know they are doing everything and certain things are not in their hands, but as a parent, is it OK to be anxious about not knowing when and where we are going to meet our child?

Oops, I`ve been tagged

2008-01-28T18:13:00.001-05:00

Thank you, Karen for tagging me, now I get to write weird things about myself, and hey, my blog is not yet private :). I never played this game, but there is a beginning for everything and these are the rules:

You have to link the person who sent this to you and leave a comment on their blog so their readers can visit yours. Post the rules on your blog. Share 7 strange/weird facts about yourself. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post, linking their blog. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

These are my 7 little secrets:

1. When I was a little girl, I was very upset about being too tall (with too skinny legs). My nicknames at school: "The Giraffe", "Olive" (Popeye`s Wife) and "The Pink Panter". I am a 5`8" now and not upset anymore.

2. I always had a mice phobia. One sunny day, 2 years ago, when I came home, I found my cute little dogie (see pictures below), playing with a dead mouse in our house, very proud of himself. I had to wait for my husband for more than 2 hours outside the apartment to come and remove the scary, ugly creature. Ouch. I hope I will never ever experience this again.

3. I was born in Transylvania and as a doctor I love bloody invasive procedures. This is just a pure coincidence. Yeah, right....

4. I call my husband Puffy and he calls me Puffarina. The reason? Little hair excess: He`s got a cute hairy belly, I was gifted with a little black moustache. This is one more reason to love and have fun of each other.

5. When I was young(er), I had speedomania until one day, my car flipped over several times and I ended up in a corn field while speeding 90 miles/hr. Of course I did not wear any seat belt. It was a big lesson for me. I am so grateful I am alive, and today, I am the most careful driver ever.

6. I am a Paulo Coehlo fun. I think (hope) I read all his books and one of my dreams is one day to do the pilgrimage to Santiago.

7. I love music, I love to sing, and sometimes I do get over enthusiastic when I am singing. And by the way, my voice is absolutely terrible. I was always a choir member and our teacher always reminded me to be quite (I was advised to MIMIC) at our school big events. I never understood: WHY?????

Now, its my turn to tag in random order my blog friends. Since I usually do not like to follow rules, I chose more than 7, just for more fun, keeping busy is so helpful:

Monica
Kim
Regina
Shannon
Suzanne
Sandi
Suzan
Sara
Angela
Kelly
Amy
Chrissy
and... not the last, Karen, you have been tagged back!!!!!!!!!!!

PS. And by the way, for reasons everybody will understand, our blog will become private very soon. I will send an invitation to all of you whom I have been in touch with. If you did not leave a comment in our blog and for some reasons, you would like to follow our adventure in Kazakhstan (which hopefully will happen in 2008), please leave a comment or send us an email. If you send me three notarised, verified and apostilled copies of your FBI clearance, personal statement and a letter of intent on why do you want to read our story and in less than 1 week, I promise I will send you a LOI to read our blog. Just kidding. One copy should be OK.

Maximilian, the other baby (very furry)

2008-01-26T08:42:00.000-05:00

While we are waiting to learn everything about diaper change, sippy cups, baby powder and play-doh, and so far we have no good news to share, we still have our joys of squirrels chasing, jerky treats, stealing toys from other dogs, dealing with rangers when we stay after happy doggie hour in the park, begging and very loud snoring. He already trained us giving hard time while bathing and we also know that there will be some issues with toys sharing. Otherwise, I am sure he is going to be very happy when the baby will come home.

One year ago when we had our home study visit, our 70 lb angel scarred the social worker to death, he would not want to let him enter the house for any price. It was the first time when he did this, he never had any problems with any of our guests and the UPS and the food delivery guys are his best friends. We did not find out yet if the 6 months duration of our home study was the reason or the result of his attitude.

I love our dog, I hope he is going to be OK, while we are going to be away. He is going to stay with a good friend of us who always takes very good care of him and I know he is going to share her bed, even though he knows very well this is a big NO, NO.

Celebration: TWO BABIES ON BOARD

2008-01-17T19:48:00.000-05:00

Four years ago in the city where I was born - Arad, Romania, it was with great honor and joy when we became parents in front of God to our friends, Lumi and Marius. Even if so far away, 30 years of friendship between me and Lumi kept us always very close to each other. She really is my sister I never had. Later on, our husbands became very good friends too.

Here is a picture of all of us listening to our priest`s blessings and advices. Little we knew at that time about the roller coaster the next coming years will bring to all of us.

Today, January 17 we celebrate the birth of Emma Maria (2500 grs) and Sara Ioana (2550 grs) born at 10:30 am Romania time.

In their first day of life, the two beautiful babies are healthy and except for some low blood sugar (which has already been taken care of) are doing well. After a long, but wonderful day, mommy is already feeling much better, while the proud, extremely tired, exhausted daddy who learning to take care of twins will never know boredom anymore, is recovering at a very, very slow pace from this overwhelmingly happy event.

Twice the sugar

and twice the spice

two baby girls

are twice as Nice!

Double the giggles

and double the grins

Doubles the joy of

Baby Girl Twins!

As per the happy God parents - they are blowing kisses, hugs and blessings on their way, across the ocean.

May they have a wonderful life, may they be happy and healthy and always love and respect their parents who prayed so much to can give them the precious gift of life.

-----------------------------------------

Today is also the day when as per our agency we supposed to arrive to Kazakhstan to meet our child. And also the day when we were told we have no news so far and we have to wait more.

More good news will hopefully come soon.

Delays, more delays

2008-01-07T14:50:00.001-05:00

I just spoke with my agency and looks like they don't have great news for us yet. Even if they were planning to send us to Kazakhstan by middle of January, it looks like some of the children from the group they were planning to show us, have been visited by their families during holidays and we have been advised "to be patient and wait a little longer".

As a conclusion: we are not going to travel soon - at least not in January so we need to be patient. When the time will come, we will be so ready and everything will be so much worthed; and we will become experts in waiting.

We do not know yet what does exactly mean: if those children will become unavailable will we have to change the region or just wait for children in the same baby house to become available? This is something we have to find out later.

However, we have to be thankful not to travel on the other side of the world only to find out that the child meant to be ours is not yet ready for us. And we still have so many other reasons to be happy and listen and believe what Dalai Lama said: "Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck"

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T10:08:00.002-05:00

An other year is over and it was full of events for us.

First of all, in December 2006, we started our Adoption Journey and every single day of the year we were thinking of our dear baby. How does she look like? Is she healthy? Where is she? When are we going to meet her? Every single day is a waiting day when we are dreaming of our little one.

In May, we had a wonderful vacation in Barcelona for our fifth anniversary and to visit good friends, and a short 2 weeks trip to Romania for Lumi, my dear sister-in law`s wedding. We spent special moments with our close friends and family. I was so happy to see my father again and everything was just perfect.

In June, I finished my Pediatric residency. It was hard to say goodbye to my good friends - many of them moved all over the country. We love NY and we decided to remain brooklyners (I am not sure if this is an English word) - this is the perfect place for us at least for few years from now. I felt ready to intubate, place IVs, treat sepsis or bronchiolitis in children. But much more ready and excited to become a mother and take care of my own baby.

In July, I had an unnecessary infertility surgery. My doctor decided is necessary to take my fallopian tubes out - I had a very severe reaction to anesthetics before surgery - I was so close to think this was my end) - and after everything was done, I just got the beautiful hand shake with: "Everything was perfect, we did not have to remove your tubes. It was just some endometriosis and a cyst. See you in 2 weeks. Call me if you need me. Bye". Yes, it was just perfect, I was so happy to be alive and we continued to dream of the day when we are going to meet our child.

September, our papers were already translated and the waiting became much more exciting.

October, I had - one of my most difficult and scary exams - the Pediatric Board. Same day we found out our dossier is in Kazakhstan. I was so scarred for the results of the exam - when I got a beautiful message from my father - telling me to relax, he trusts me and he loves me doesn`t matter what. My happiness doubled, so did my waiting.

October 31 - in the afternoon, I was talking to my father on skype - we used to talk every day, he was so close to me. He looked so well and happy, we were joking around making plans about our Kazakhstan trip, weather to meet there or better for him to come directly to NY.

November 1 - 5 am in the morning, I got the phone call from my father`s friend - they found him dead in his bad. I felt so lost, confused and guilty bcs I was so far away from my home. I don`t think I realised at that time I am not going to see him again. Even if I am 37, I never imagined how it would be to have no parents. When we went to Romania to say good bye for the last time, it was extremely painful. I felt how much he loved and missed us but also how happy he was there, with his good friends and neighbours, his dog and his beautiful garden. I always insisted he moves with us, but now I know it would have been a mistake. We felt so lucky to have each other`s love and the support of Calin`s family and of all our friends.

December - we got guests. My friend, Adriana visited us (and NY) for a month with her boyfriend. I was trying to keep myself busy and being around friends was very helpful. We grew up together same kinder garden -same school, same high school, same University. Lots of memories together. We were busy shopping, we made a trip to Washington DC and one to Pennsylvania. We spent our last Christmas and New Year Eve without the baby.

January 1 - Our friends left, we are home alone, just us and the dog again back to our waiting. And packing. I am thinking of the next year, as a blessed one, when our life will become more meaningful, the days when we are going to give plenty of hugs and kisses to our baby and tell her how much we love her. I keep writing "her" - but we don`t know if is a her or him, we just know she is there. In Arkalyk. I am still thinking of my father every day and keep all the good memories as the most precious gift.

Happy New Year, may it be a year full of love, health and happiness to all of you! May all our dreams come true and may we and our children have a wonderful life!

Our best wishes for harmony, compassion, gratitude and celebration in our lives and in this world!

Pass it along

2007-12-22T05:58:00.000-05:00

How lucky we feel when we meet special people who can really make a difference in our lives. Last week, I knew nothing about Arkalyk, but searching the Internet, I found the blog of a family who came back from there with a beautiful 2 year old girl, just 5 weeks ago.
Here is the link to their blog:

http://tomally2kaz.blogspot.com/

I called Allyson and yesterday we visited her at home. They live in Brooklyn, 5 minutes close from my working place and maybe 15 -20 minutes (by subway) from our home (which is really something for NY). They are very nice family, great parents, wonderful to talk to.
While we were absorbing as a sponge every single word about their adventure in Kazakhstan, we watched their biological daughter (Aydan) and their new precious Nika having dinner. Allyson showed us lots of pictures with Arkalyk, the orphanage, the children and people we are going to meet there. She gave us so many good advices about presents, toys, expenses, etc. Nika was too cute when whe saw the pictures of her friends.
This is what Tom - her husband - said yesterday about adoptive parents: they are divided in 2 groups, people who are relaxed and take everything as an adventure, accept and enjoy everything, and the other group. I am planning to move out from the second one :))

I hope they will not mind, I forgot to ask permission to copy a picture from the blog. One of these cuties may be our child soon. They did not have any pictures with the babies, we would very much be interested in a baby girl, but who knows? Is going to be so hard to decide.

We will fly 20 -22 hrs from NY to Astana or Almaty, from there it will be an other 14 hour trip by train (overheated - which is always better than not heated) to Arkalyk. Few hours later after our arrival in Arkalyk we are going to meet our child.

I made a list with some of the important things to consider:

1. a small book called Adopting from Russia - by Teresa Kelleher which can be found at
www. worknotes.com/AZ/AdoptingfromRussia/kelleher. Is very thinny and can be carried everywhere. It was so fun to watch Allyson reading some Russian words and see Nika`s response. If I were to be allowed to carry one single thing with me, I think this should be the one.

2. presents. Very delicate subject, since women are very fashionable and picky there and is very difficult to buy a present for people we never met. Great we saw their pictures and we got an idea (age, style, etc). What I am planning to buy:
- little jewelleries, cashmere scarves, body creams, make up, lip sticks, perfumes, few t-shirts
- American chocolate bars/candies
Most of them from
- Victorias Secrets, Bath & Body Works, TJ Max, Marshalls and Macy`s discounts, Costco.

3. paper gift bags, small thank you cards

4. plenty of DVDs and books - we are going to live for almost 2 months in the Middle of Nowhere. I also bought 2 new fitness DVDs.

5. food - we are not too picky about it - we will maybe bring some coffee for Calin and some special tea for myself - nothing else necessary. We can chose to live in an apartment and have somebody cook for us which will be great, we really enjoy to taste different kind of foods (most likely not different from our country actually). They really enjoyed the kazakh food. If we are not going to like it, not big deal, I am actually planning to lose weight.

6. 2 pairs of slippers - very important. In their culture, is very important to take shoes off. Also since we are going to wear boots (obviously is not going to be a trip to Hawaii). When we go to the orphanage we will need a pair of slippers or clean comfortable shoes to wear inside of the orphanage.

7. a little blanket - for the child when we go to the orphanage

8. medicine:
- antibiotics - I never took medicines with us when we traveled, but we may need to consider: Augmentin (broad spectrum), Zithromax (for atypical pneumonia) Cyprofloxacin (for traveller diarrhea).
- Motrin or Tylenol for adults
- Motrin for children (100 mg/5 ml) - over the counter, 10 mg/kg every 6 hours for fever higher than 100.5 F (37.5 C).
- nasal bulb syringe and normal saline solution - to clean that little stuffy nose

9. baby cream - not only for the baby`s skin, massage does magic wonders too.

10. baby clothes (is hard since we do not know the age and sex), but we are going to bring few things for each group of age, not too many though. I can imagine we can buy some clothes there too. There is always time for "dress to impress" when we come home.

11. toys to consider:
- little educational toys, books, balloons, bubbles, phone, cars, musical toys, play-doh (this is my new English word - learnt yesterday).
- not too many furry animals or dolls.
Interesting, Allyson brought so many toys with her and when she brought her to the appartment, the only thing Nika was interested in it was a little empty bottle. Now she has hundreds of toys to play with :).

12. family pictures. Picture with Maximiliam - our little 70 lbs cute, spoiled, toy thief, furry baby, who has a crush on squirells. He is recovering from a tooth extraction - a week ago.

13. umbrella stroller

14. Internet is going to be very slow (dial up) in Arkalyk. For international calls - I was planning to use Skype - it doesn`t work there. We will probably use prepaid cards, which will be also pretty difficult to find.

15. video and digital camera (glad I did the list, I always forget the video).

This is what I learnt from Allyson yesterday and I am so happy I met her and her family. I am so grateful I met you, my blog friends, I feel as part of a big family.

I will be so glad to pass it along and share this wonderful experience of meeting our child .....

Happy Holidays to all of you!

Our baby is in Arkalyk

2007-12-13T10:35:00.001-05:00

Valerie called me yesterday and now is oficial. Our dossier was sent from MOE to Arkalyk - Kostanai region. Our travel date will be most probably in the second week of January.

Now, little scarry, we did not find Arkalyk on any map - but this winter picture is from there (I think the little trail will take us to the baby house). However, Arkalyk has few lines in Wikipedia: is a city in Kostanay Province, central Kazakhstan. As of 2005, around 45,000 people live in the city. The Arkalyk Business Centre describes today's Arkalyk as "a city of miners, of regional administrators, and people excited to live in a regional center". Historically Arkalyk was a centre for the Soviet space programme. Cosmonauts would land on the huge central Kazakh steppe and come back to Arkalyk before heading to the Baikonur, the Union's premier "space city".

So this is so wonderful, the baby was born in a "space city" and we are so ready to go there too.

I am just thinking, life is so good, but still I wish my father got the chance to meet our little baby.

MOE

2007-12-04T06:24:00.000-05:00

Finally, great news for us. Our dossier is in MOE. We are waiting now to find out where are we going to travel, but we were told that we should expect some delays after December 10 and most likely we should expect to travel by the end of January - beginning of February.
There are 3 families waiting to travel from our agency - and all 3 dossiers are in MOE.
We initially asked for a healthy girl younger than 2, either Caucasian or Kazakh but after a lot of thinking (and waiting) we decided that a little boy would be wonderful too. Everybody says that if you ask for either boy or girl, you have more than 70% chances to get a boy, but why not? Let it be a surprise.
And until next week, guess what? We have to be patient....

Being thankful

2007-11-21T16:52:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow is The Thanksgiving Day and there are no words to describe my feelings. In my country, we did not celebrate the Thanksgiving, but I am learning now to understand the value of a special day for being thankful. Even is he is not here with us, I want him to know that I am thinking of him and I am so thankful for being his daughter and I do appreciate all his love and everything he did for me. We were so far away, but so close to each other.

He was a great father and a great man - the only parent I had since I was 19. He will always be in my heart and I will keep with me all the good memories and all the precious moments we spent together.

I know how much he wished to meet our child and I am so sorry he did not get the chance to do so. We made plans, either to meet in Kazakhstan (bcs he speaks a little Russian - he offered to be our interpreter) or to come to NY to take care of the baby until I come back from work.

Nothing will be the same anymore. I will miss him so much. But I will always be thankful for everything what is good in my life.

And Happy Thanksgiving to everybody!

Tremendous pain

2007-10-29T15:55:00.000-04:00

I have to run to Romania, my father died yesterday in his bed, while sleeping - maybe few hours after I spoke to him on the internet, He was my only parent since I was a child and I can not describe all my tears and pain . Specially not being there when all those things were happening. I am so confused. God Bless Him. He was such a perfect parent and I am so proud of all what he did.

Where is our baby?

2007-10-23T16:26:00.000-04:00

I spoke to Valerie today - and she told me that there are 3 regions where we may be going to: Shimkent, Aqtobe or Petropavlovsk.

Yesterday we renew our medical certificate, and got a copy of our doctor`s medical license, which was fast and easy.

These are little baby steps, but each of them brings us closer to our baby.

The baby`s room is still an office (with 2 computers and full of books), since I just finished a very difficult exam. I only bought her a little book and a very cute outfit (for 12 months old girls), for now.

Now, let the shopping season begin, I am sure I will enjoy it to the fullest - my dear husband will have to make an effort too.

Our first post

2007-10-17T21:07:00.000-04:00

About us: Born in Romania, currently in NY we are two happy parents to be, ready to welcome in our family a little baby girl from Kazakhstan.

Why Kazakhstan, when there are so many orphans in Romania?.... When we decided to adopt, this was our first thought too. But as most likely many of you know, Eastern European countries are making international adoptions more and more difficult every year. Since we moved to US, even if we are Romanian citizens, adoption from our own country is not an option. This was heart-braking for us, but since we are so ready to become parents and have so much love to give, we strongly feel that we have to follow our hearts and believe in our own destiny and soon hopefully we will find our little baby who is waiting for us, doesn`t matter where she is.

We are waiting for a baby girl younger than 2 years, generally healthy. Our adoption agency is just great, I only have great things to say about them so far. Yes, there were some delays, but this can not be avoided and anybody who wish to adopt must be very patient and have a very positive atitude.

We will get to see our child, if not this year (most likely not), but hopefully next year we will have a wonderful Christmas together. What will we do until then: start shopping :), search internet, participate in other people`s joy, go hiking, work late - save money for the baby, spend time together and with our friends, hopefully we`ll get to go one more time to ski to Killington - our favorite place in Vermont, and the most important: will not forget to enjoy every single moment!

Time frame:
September 2006 - decided to adopt
January 2007 - signed contract with our agency and started home study
June 2007 - Home study aproved. - our fingerprints have been rejected 3 times, we thought it will never end.
July 2007 - INS aproved
August 1, 2007 - dossier sent for translation.
In between, he had to redo some documents, which was nightmare - second edition, it took at least 3 more visits to notarize - verify - apostille the documents.
In Romania we can only get one copy of birth certificate/marriage certificate. A second copy will be given only if lost or stolen. So, we had to give up our original documents to be able to speed up the process. Now we have to send power of attorney to my sister in law and hopefully we will get second set of original documents :)
September 17 - dossier translated, sent to the agency
October 15 - dossier in MFA