Going it alone for a day...

Hi everyone - this post is from Kevin (all of the previous posts and likely most of the following ones will be from Teresa). Teresa is still feeling sick, with a cough and sore throat, in addition to the rash. Yesterday morning, she stayed at "home", and I went to visit with the kids. I was a little worried, since Jackson is very active (crawling around, grabbing toys, climbing up on the chairs), but thankfully he was pretty mellow. I was able to just grab his shirt before he could scoot off... it was kind of like a baby treadmill, where he was running in place. For the most part, they were both calm and didn't cause too much trouble, so I was able to handle it.

Teresa came to the afternoon visit, where the kids were a lot more active. Madden was even trying to climb up on the chairs. She got there, just with a little more help than Jackson. She likes to stand and lean up against the chairs and bang the chair... it makes her smile and laugh. Jackson, of course, likes to show off - he climbs up on his own and then starts walking while holding onto the chair.

After about 30-40 minutes, they both get tired... Jackson sticks his thumb in his mouth, but refuses to sleep. He will lay in our arms and look at us, and even yawn, but we can tell that he's fighting the will to sleep. Madden puts her middle 2 fingers in her mouth when she's tired... she yawns a lot more, and rubs her eyes... she's fallen asleep a few times. She is always looking around, and likes to make eye contact. In fact, if I'm holding her, and looking at Jackson, she will start to hit me until I look at her again.

We went to the "Dixie Pub" last night - it's what it sounds like, a pub with an English menu. None of the servers actually spoke English, but we were able to point and they'd nod and say "Da". The food wasn't that good, but it was "American". Teresa had a hamburger that was huge - but it seemed like it had hamburger helper in it. I ordered a sausage & ribs plate, but no ribs... the sausage wasn't that good. Either way, it was a good experience. We met another couple a few days ago from North Carolina, and they went with us and our travel partners. While we were there, another 3 couples who are adopting were there and we talked to them for a bit. They told us about the bowling alley - very nice apparently, with people who speak English, they serve beer and sodas... we'll probably do that one night this week.

Teresa is still sick, she was coughing during the night (it's about 5 AM here now). Not sure if she'll end up going to visit the kids or not today. We went to a laundry and got all of her clothes washed, thinking that some of the new clothes that she got might have caused the rash. We'll see when we get them back today.

The apartment is OK, but certainly not home. The temperature is pretty consistent, around 76 usually. No problems with electricity, which is nice. The two main things that it doesn't have are TV & a shower. Well, there is a TV, but it's only 7 Kazakhstan stations. I keep hoping to find a soccer or basketball game that I could follow, but it seems to be talk shows or comedies. Oh, and lots of music videos. Everyplace that we go is playing music videos, and probably half of them are English (Madonna, Pussycat Dolls and Gwen Stefani seem to be popular).

The shower situation isn't great, with the water sometimes getting brown (rusted pipes)... plus, no shower curtain, so it's all hand held. Depending on how Teresa feels, we might consider switching over to one of the local hotels - I'm thinking that a nice shower would help a lot with how she feels.

We're going to try and find a good high speed internet connection today - the one from the apartment is only 28.8k. It's OK for most things, but putting up picutres is too slow. Plus, the first pictures that we took were way too big of a file - we've fixed that now on the camera. So - more to come!