Florida Nursery Rhymes

Last week when we wanted to sing to Morgan, we both scrambled for tunes that we knew. I remembered "The Orange Blossom Song" which used to be sung at football games by (the tragically bigoted hate-monger) Anita Bryant. I tried to sing all the lyrics but didn't remember them - so we went hunting today.

We found that an elementary school music teacher has brought the tune back into the limelight to replace the (also containing some nostalgic, racist imagery) Suwannee River.

The original lyrics for the Orange Blossom Song were written by Richard Whiting, Ray Egan, and Gus Kahn in 1917. They are short and sweet:
(http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=57589)

I want to wake up,
In the morning,
Where the orange blossoms grow.
Where the sun comes peek'n
Into where I'm sleep'n
And the songbirds sing, "Hello".

I love the fresh air,
And the sunshine.
They're so good for us you know.
'Cause I make my home in Florida,
Where the orange blossoms grow.

Now the St. Pete Times says this music teacher has rewritten the song and is pushing it in Tallahassee, adding his own credit and deleting the original credit. In his version he's added tarpon and alligators, which I'm pretty sure were never in the one I remember hearing as a kid. (http://www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBIYU53CZE.html)

We'll sing just the original to Morgan.

I'm teething - can ya tell?

I'm teething - can ya tell?
Originally uploaded by Robertson Adams.

my bumble bee teether matches the bug theme on my new sleeper! Aren't I cute as a bug?

Video: Bellydancer at 444

Sunday in Kostanai

Today we went for what has become our routine visit with Morgan. Robertson fed Morgan a watery rice/broth mixture, and Morgan finished this off with her usual apple juice served in the traditional shot glass. That's her reward for being such a tidy eater (not!). Tomorrow, she'll probably go back to a more nourishing food combo which will include fresh fruit and chopped egg.

We played our regular line up of games with Morgan. We do the baby work-out routine, which is primarily focused on solo sitting; so far, she's more comfortable sitting with our assistance. She likes sitting in our laps, or bouncing on a knee. She is also able to support her weight standing for 30-40 seconds, and then bounces up and down. We end the "aerobic" part of the workout with some mat time, or tummy time as we call it. Then we play the farm animal game for some verbal/fine motor skill multi-tasking, and then it's pure cuddle/book reading time. Of course, each day Morgan gives us a puzzle: what will make me laugh today?

For lunch today, we enjoyed a meal at the Goldfish Cafe with Nan and Jim. I had a crab salad and meatballs with tomato sauce and mashed potatoes. After lunch, we walked around a bit, and shared our tip on where to get American style frozen, boneless/skinless chicken breasts. We couldn't tell the street names or the name of the shop, but could only walk them there!

Shout- out to Cristina -- the only TV we watch is Fashion TV which plays English language pop-- we leave it on all the time.

Tomorrow we learn who our Judge will be, which will directly impact the length of our stay. So that is the next piece of news we will have to report here.

Video: Shuffle the Deck

Playing animal games with Morgan...

Day 15 in Kostanai - We made it this far...

Today is our 15th day in Kostanai, and while for many travelers that might mean it's time to go back to work, we're amazed that this probably marks only the halfway point in our very enjoyable stay here. But more importantly this is the end of our required bonding and visitation period with Morgan, needed to apply for "pre-court." We might be able to apply later today, but more likely our capable coordinator and translator Zhanat will actually apply on Monday the 19th.

Morgan is learning more each day. We're teaching her how to sit up and we read 2-3 little card books to her each visit. We divide our 90-minute time with her into four periods - feeding time; physical skills (crawling or shimmying anyways) with nursery rhymes; naming animal shapes; book reading; and then we end at nap time. She most enjoys being "rocketed" up or being laid back to nearly hanging, upside-down. Before nap time we sing "Twinkle Twinkle" but it seems to have only the effect of waking her up. When she's really stoked she blows raspberries.

Last night we went out to "444" for kebabs (shashlik) and enjoyed a ride into the countryside. We took two cars and were joined by Nan and Jim Wolfe of Boston; we were all in a good mood and chatting about children and what to see in Kostanai. The restaurant is known for belly dancers, but there were several other kinds of dancing demonstrated - traditional Turkish dances, Russian and even a kind of campy American disco number. Their glittery costumes, coiffed hair and sparkly smiles could have only been improved upon with ice skates. The lamb kebab was delicious and the vodka plentiful and efficacious.

The weather here has been warming generally and yesterday it reached 28F. The hard-packed ice and snow on the sidewalks has been coming up slushy now, and is turning a mucky gray. But it's still generally a beautiful white landscape. Yesterday I saw the first buds on tree branches, so I would think that it's a week before it's hot here. After the weather climbs to 32 on Monday, it's expected to dip back down to the low 20s again by midweek. I won't plan to go to the beach!

We have been learning how to cook with mysterious ingredients. We have found a single source of boneless chicken breasts - our usual staple for meals in Miami. But Thursday I saw meat that looked like lamb and bought 500 g. of it, though during cooking it became obvious that it was not lamb. We feared we had bought horsemeat, even while we ate the tasty stuff in a stew with carrot, potato and mustard, but the next day we found out it was only beef.

Our apartment, which we thought we knew every inch of by now, produced a surprise on Thursday - we returned from lunch and the water running from the tap came out as mud, dark as coffee. After running for a minute, it cleared, but it must have been some kind of Spring pipe clearing exercise that we missed.

Working from here has been more of a challenge that I had hoped. The dialup connection just doesn't play nice with the internet service, so we get kicked offline regularly and lose work; we can't download files files that would normally be quick to send back home. Citrix, the software that is most vital to having a "home office" function normally, works at best an hour a day for Michele when the connection is strongest. Otherwise it generally cuts out. I hope that my mates back at KF are having an easy time of the web project, the annual report, board meeting, etc. - it makes me crazy that I can't be involved with such interesting challenges.

- Robertson

Thursday hello

It's Thursday morning and we're getting ready to be picked up by Zhanat and Gennadi. The weather is supposed to be warming up to 30F this weekend, which may make the slush melt and refreeze, but we are going to take a wait and see attitude before we go out in shorts.

What's your opinion of Uzbekistan?

Sunset with powerplant

Sunset with powerplant
Originally uploaded by Robertson Adams.

It's a chilly 13 below zero F, this morning and we're headed over to the Dolphin house in a minute. Last night we had dinner at the Nautilus, a submarine-themed restaurant with great shish kebab and beer, with trendy lounge music.

Morgan is revealing more of her personality to us every day. Yesterday she had a whole morning of medical exams from an independent doctor, so that the "prosecutor" can independently verify her health. She came through with flying colors, we believe.

We're teaching her to crawl and to sit up, and she likes being read to. We also give her lots of exercise time and pick up toys.

Swimmers in the Tobyl River

Morgan

First feeding

IMG_0023-17
Originally uploaded by Robertson Adams.

Yesterday, the caregivers let "Michelenitz" feed Morgan, but she had to put on the caregiver scarf and apron. Morgan ate, but was not sure what was going on!

She's a charmer

IMG_0177-76
Originally uploaded by Robertson Adams.

Impressions

Vodka

Before breakfast it was the same old routine: first get out the bottle of Kazakhstan vodka . . . I needed it to clean out the French Press to make the coffee. Then after breakfast, and it was the usual two shots of vodka . . . to clean the toothbrushes. Just before lunch, I needed another shot of vodka . . . to clean the kitchen knife.

And so it goes with our new routine in Kostenai . . . this is a vodka and beer town. The restaurants all have place settings with glassware for water, beer and vodka. They also make meals last a very long time, and several times during a meal you will see men get up,leave their plates half full and put on their coats and leave. It took us a while before we realized that they were going outside to have smoke before they continued drinking and eating.

Ode to Doug--

Ok, my sociological observations so far. The middle class people here have a achieved a very pleasant standard of living in the city. They are much closer to Russia than to China, and Russian culture and music are everywhere. It is fascinating to watch the tall thin men with asian features smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka and somewhat shocking to hear the gutteral sounds of the Russian language emerge from their lips. The Russian ethnics and Kazakh ethnics appear to co-exist very peacefully and harmoniously. In this University town, we often see “mixed” groups socializing and dating.

In every restaurant you go into and in our apartment, right beside the coat rack , a mirror is positioned right near the front door. People do not go outside until they have made sure that their hats are on correctly. Because being outside in this town is a social activity. People really enjoy being on display-- there are so many beautiful coats! They manage to be very shapely, and really know how to wear a flattering hat. The exotic blending of Russian, Ukranian, and Kazack displayed in the variety of facial features is fascinating.

The local State University has about 5000 students, so there is a young vibe to our neighborhood. They like Russian pop which is bizarre because it's mostly rap and disco. One of the most popular songs right now is a remix of Pink Floyd's The Wall. We watched a variety show with two Russian looking guys rapping, all costumed in stocking caps, tatoos and bling. Our interpreter's teen age daughter's favorite show is the Russian dubbed “Pimp my Ride”, coincidentally Robertson's favorite as well. Classic tv is classic tv.



The snow--

The Russian/Siberian wackier side of life here in Kostanai was shown to us yesterday by our co-ordinator Zhanat when she asked if we wanted to go to the “beach” along the Tobyl river which runs through the center of town. Ha! We said. We're from Miami, we would love to see your little river beach.

So, we drove down to the waterside where brand new $200,000 condos are being built (just like Miami), and past the new development through the oldest part of town where many people live in 100 year old wooden houses without indoor plumbing and have to walk to get their water. We then drove over the packed white snow (its been along time since I've heard the crunchy sound cars make on snow when its really cold out) through a little birch tree grove and past some guys with cross country skis on their shoulders. We pulled up to a parking area on the edge of the half mile wide river, where a small municipal building was the only building around. Oddly, there were a couple of pretty recent model cars parked. So, Zhanat asked us if we wanted to go take some pictures of the beach. We said sure and got out of the car into the cold, and because it was before noon it was still in the 'teens, we zipped up our North Face parkas and braced for the wind.

After gingerly navigating the icy steps, and thankful for a permanent metal handrail we made it down to the river's edge, the beach. Zhanat shouted to get our attention, “Look! They're going swimming!” And out of a side door came a steaming, bright red man with a tiny towel on . . . he scurried down the icy steps in his little rubber shoes and made a beeline for a small hole in the ice which I hadn't noticed before, and whipped off his little towel and jumped in the Tobyl river.

And he looked like he was having fun. It's different here, but Robertson could not resist putting his foot into the hole which had been carved out of two feet of ice. We have great video :)

Michele

Thanks Sharon & Eric

I think now that we've spent eight days in Kostanay, it's a good time to express some gratitude to Sharon and Eric, who adopted a girl in 2005. Sharon's (generally) positive experience traveling to Almaty gave us a lot of the confidence we needed to choose Kazakhstan. You can read a little of Eric's account in this Slate article - http://www.slate.com/id/2152789/?nav=ais.

- Robertson

My best friend

IMG_0028-22
Originally uploaded by Robertson Adams.

Morgan really enjoyed playing with and eating this blue puppy that came from Robertson's counsin, Kristie. The dog makes a arrrff-arrff sound which is the same one dad makes when explaining the farm animals. Video link of same to follow.

Latest visits with Morgan

Morgan is a little bit hard to read-- she doesn't immediately show that she's happy, but you can tell she's happy child. She's getting to know us and yesterday she was very outgoing and playful. Today she was more reserved. She likes being read to, and she likes the picture books we brought.

She doesn't crawl yet, or make any attempt to truly stand, and she's not curious about her toes, be/c she's always in footy pajamas with socks over those. (Kaz baby houses are notorious for overdressing the kids.)

Also, the kids are all very healthy. We took a tour of the entire facility, and never saw a funny nose. They have a 20 foot indoor pool, and a sauna and salt (vapours?) room for the kids. The babies get massages, and the older kids have regular music classes and speech therapy.

So back to Morgan. We visit every day for 90 minutes at 9:30am. We go to a baby playroom on the second floor, which is for her group which is like 7-9 babies up to one year.

When we arrive, one of her care givers, often a young, tall and blond Russian woman named Nastia is feeding her. We've seen her being fed a baby cereal of some kind and juice, we really don't know what it is. But at nearly 17 pounds, she is a notorious eater.

We lay out the green picnic blanket that Lee gave us a few years ago, with our assorted toys and books. We try to divide the time into physical activity, reading and social skills. We also try to figure out what she's in the mood for. She seems get a workout.

Two days ago we went to a close by mini-mall which had a small toy counter. We bought a wooden puzzle which you will see in pictures tomorrow when we get a chance to upload them (which is a whole other story). So, this puzzle has nine different cut out farm animals with a small peg handle on each. (We're eager to develop that pincer grip, you know.)

To introduce this baby, whose never seen a dog, to the classic farm characters, Robertson did his best imitations: moooooo, meow, arrf arrf, whinny, oink oink . . . . but what sound does a bunny make? If you said it gives bunny kisses, your'e right.

So far, we've found that Morgan is pretty quiet. She's the youngest one in her group, and is very aware of all the older kids around her. One girl is being adopted by a New York woman through MAPS. Her mom left today, and will be back to pick her up soon. The mom left a fabulous talking picture frame-- with mom's picture in it. (We would love one of those! We will work on getting a post address.)

At the end of our time with her, she's ready for her nap, so we try to wind her down with reading, and we're grateful that we get to put her in her crib. So far we've found her to be very sweet natured, and tolerant of inexperienced parents to be.

Remember, we are a long from getting through the court dates.

Internet vs. Laptop

We're in Kostanay now, and I've been dealing with the photo and laptop
issue for 5 days now.

First let me say that Michele and I absolutely love Kostanai and think
it's a very livable city. Many restaurants do take Visa cards now - most
importantly the Gros grocery store, which has everything but oddly not
salt or matches.

First of all in Kostanai there seems to be no DSL available anywhere at
any price, even in hotels. It's all dialup. The speed you get is
frequently only 14.4k (remember 1989 era AOL) and the highest is 46.6
which I get by logging on at 6am before Michele gets up. To use my
laptop in the apartment, we buy a 3,000 or 5,000 Tenge card at the Kaz
Telecomm office across from Tsum on the mall downtown. From 6pm to 11pm
is 2.34t per minute. From 11pm to 8am is 0.74t per minute, and from 8am
to 6pm is 1.74t per minute. A 3,000t card may get you 20 hours and it
might get you much more depending on when you surf. In the room, the
connector is a standard "RJ11" phone connector which fits in your laptop
with no adaptor, but since it's possible you might not get a long enough
cord on your telephone, you might bring an RJ11 extension cord from
Radio Shack it's about $4.

Next, the internet cafe at the Kaz post office, next to the downtown
mall area, is 6t per minute from 9am to 1pm, and 12t per minute for 2pm
to 9pm. They have about 5-6 older Win XP pc's running Cyrillic operating
system, so it's very difficult if you're trying to burn a disc, import
from a flash card, or camera. I would ONLY use these terminals for web
surfing. ON the day I went, I got a virus from their system embedded not
only into my compact flash chip but also into my 2gb jump drive. Argh,
how stupid of me. If it's a bad enough virus it could have copied all my
sensitive adoption related documents and vital info from that Jump drive
which is my lifeline should the papers all get lost.

The best and greatest thing I found so far is to take a couple of days
of photos on compact flash chips, then take them to one of several Kodak
processing shops. There's a self-serve kiosk at which you can extract
all the pictures and save them to a CD-Rom for less than 500 tenge. It's
amazing peace of mind to have my pics on a disc.

This morning I'm using Flickr uploadr to put pics up at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rga and it's very very slow. Plan to only
upload low res images of about 600 pixels across, or they simply will
not go up.

This information is all for Kostanai, and I would presume things might
be more sophisticated in Astana or Almaty.

Robertson

Tech advice for future PAPs

Since I know several American families are either in Kostanay now or
headed here shortly, I thought I'd post some notes and share the limited
knowledge we've got so far with the Kostanay Adoptive Families Yahoo group.

It's cold. We're from Miami and think everything north of Orlando is
cold so we might not share your perspective, but my toes and cheeks say
bring wool not cotton. It's March 8 and our fabulous translator and
region manager Zhanat from MAPS says the locals call this Spring, but we
could expect another 3 significant snowfalls before it's bikini season.
The sidewalks are well shoveled and safe even pretty far out into the
suburbs here, but ice forms when the sun shines and then freezes, and
I've heard it's just payback for growing up in a beachside tropical town.

They do take Visa and MC here but not Amex. Many restaurants, especially
ones you might like as a tourist, do take credit. But you can't count on
it always working. We dined in a nice looking place with two Visa and
one MC sticker in the door, but when it came time to pay the check, we
were hugely embarassed that four different cards between us didn't work
because they needed the kind with the embedded computer chip in them,
according to the wait staff. You might see if your bank card can upgrade
your card to this smart chip. Either way bring enough cash to pay for
any meal into the restaurant. We had to settle up with a $100 bill;
thank goodness we didn't have to wash dishes for the evening.

If you're a coffee fiend, bring your own. We heard this advice from
others on this list, but we're soooo happy to have got a little French
press from my brother before departure, and brought 4 lbs. of the Target
house blend, coarse ground, with us from Miami. Oh was that the right
thing to do!

There's nothing on TV in English. No movies at the theatre with English
or subtitles. Bring your entertainment. I filled my 30gb video iPod with
movies and brought a cable that connects it to our ancient TV set, and
so far it's great. You can buy entire seasons of Monk or Grey's Anatomy
on the iTunes music store for $15 or $20 and just one iPod could hold
enought TV entertainment to fill a 5- or 6-week fix of nightly TV shows.
We also brought piles of borrowed DVD movies, but watching them on the
laptop PC isn't easy when we're using it simultaneously for web surfing
(slow surfing!), and the audio quality isn't amazing. Suggest you might
bring some adapters to hook it up to a TV set. Remember the TV here is
in PAL format so you can't just bring a DVD player or video camera and
plug it in, unless it has a setting for that. The iPod DOES display in
the PAL mode, so I think it's the best solution available.

Skype is only working so-so for us so far. We got all excited at the
idea we'd be in constant contact with friends back home via this miracle
product, but since we're using dialup the connection is so poor on Skype
most of the time, that we're better off using regular email. If you are
thinking of using it a lot, bring a headset for your PC and don't count
on it for doing important business.

Some U.S. Cellphones can work here unmodified. I have a great T Mobile
plan and a Motorola V195 phone, and called before leaving to set up
international calling for Kaz. So, I get $2.99 per minute calls in or
out to my phone regardless of the hour, and 10-cents per SMS message. I
have not used up the 2 year contract with Tmobile so my phone is still
locked, which means I can not just come here and swap out the Simm chip
with a local one. If you do have an "unlocked" phone though, you can get
incredibly cheap local phone service, like 1,000 tenge ($8) for the chip
and it includes lots of minutes. Look for the "bee line" sign in the
window of convenience stores to buy this chip. When I first turned on my
TMobile phone here it found the KZ Telecom network and logged in
instantly. I dial as if I'm a local, so to get the US I must dial the
country code, area code, etc.

I hope these thoughts are useful for the group and for others that are
headed to Kaz or Kostanay.

Robertson

Video: First meeting