Whiney and irritable… and that’s just us

Steve and Terri here. Today wasn’t our best day. There was nothing wrong with our visits to the boys but we are really feeling like our hands are tied with them in our interactions. Both visits had Aidan crying again when he came in, even on the second visit when I went down to his playgroup to get him. He walked back with me fine but decided to cry when we got to our area. What do you expect though when you have to go to the same 10’ x 10’ room with limited toys and activities. Liam was happy during both visits and is even making more sounds—today he made the raspberry noise! Part of our frustration is that we feel our role right now is babysitting two times a day. We aren’t allowed to give them snacks, nor can we help feed them, change them or dress them so our boys can’t really attach to us because we aren’t the people they need to depend on. We are even receiving ‘advice’ from the caregivers that we should let the boys be independent and not do too many things for them—that certainly is not going to help us form any attachments. So, mama and dada are just a wee bit on edge and feeling that real progress is going to be hard to come by until we get home. Of course, the boys are also at an age where they really can’t understand what is going on. Aidan gets told what is happening but I don’t think he really gets it yet. We have showed him the photo book of our home, family and pets and Anya walked him through it in Russian but it hasn’t sunk in yet—how can it, he’s not even 2.

We are also getting a bit of cabin fever. At the end of our second visit we wanted to go to a market called the Green Bazaar. We were basically told we couldn’t go today because it would take too much time. This is probably not the best thing to tell people who are already frustrated. We have also been told we shouldn’t go out in the evening for our safety. But we have read so many other blogs where people have gone to museums, malls, bazaars, hockey games and even had and evening out. Instead, we are rushed through lunch and encouraged to go back to the apartment.

We know this isn’t a vacation and that the purpose of our visit is to adopt but we also know this will likely be the only time we will visit the city and country of our sons’ birth. We want to see and learn as much as we can about it to be able to tell them all we can as they grow up. We are here to also experience the culture of our children and would like to at least catch a hockey game and go out for dinner. We’d like to try to do more with the Woods, the other American couple we know—more power to the masses. In fact, we were talking about visiting some festival today. They also would like to go see the local hockey team play so maybe we will all get there yet. Many of the other translators try to find ways to accommodate the couples they have, example: the Woods translator is going to try to get them to the hockey game, whereas when I mentioned it to our translator she really did not go out of her way to find a solution. She is very young, text messages her friends all day long and would rather be out with people her own age. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a very sweet girl, she just doesn’t seem to like her job. We are only her second family to work with and she probably sees things in only black and white solutions. I’m not asking her to break any laws, I just want to see and do some things. I want to make sure that our stay does not become the Ran and Stumpy Space Madness episode (sorry if this is an obscure reference to a lot of you, but my friend Marvin will get a laugh out of it).

On a plus side, Terri did get some wonderful souvenirs today and some gifts for family and friends. We hope to find a lot of Kazakhstan items (a flag, tenge, stamps, etc) so we can make a shadow box for the boys. We haven’t found everything we are looking for yet but we have plenty of time, plenty of time, space madness, space mad……...

And hey, thanks for listening…uh, reading.