Tea Party

Courtesy of Lauren, the children had a tea set to play with today. Initially, Tanishka was the only one interested. Yet when the service was used for juice and carbonated water, Kostin was the first in line for "tea", with Alina not far behind. Kostin became enamored of his tea cup and hid it between two boxes with himself on top (like a hen on an egg). We think he imagined himself to be invisible, so we kind of played along.

Blythe was on cloud 9 today as Alina was very attentive. Many hugs and many questions. She wanted to know what kind of pajamas Blythe wears to bed. We told her short pants rather than nightgowns, which is what Alina prefers as it turns out. Kostin was much more behaved today. In fairness to the children, when they can run around outside with their friends for a while they are much happier. Given they know the orphanage much better than we do, and there is really nowhere for them to get lost, we just let them do what they wanted today. After about an hour they gravitated back to us (which was comforting) and we headed inside for the tea party.

We are in the home stretch. Our court date is Thursday morning the 26th. After that we are on a plane back to Almaty that afternoon and flying back to the states the next morning. We asked our friend Laurie (who left this morning) what we can expect from the court process. She said you pretty much phase out as the entire thing is in Kazakh. Our job is to stay awake and look courteous, and speak only when spoken to. We think we can handle it.

Wish us luck!! We'll be posting on the blog for the next couple of days. We may get a chance to post on Thursday if we're lucky. Otherwise, we'll be posting sporadically once we get back to the states. With any luck, the kids will be arriving at the beginning of August and we would like to keep everyone abreast of how they're doing.