Good Times and Bad....Adventures in Kazakhstan

Olivia is officially our baby girl! Our court appearance went very well. We were nervous and had to answer a few tough questions, but overall everything was great. After court, we took our translator and coordinator to lunch. Zhanara is our translator (front of the table) and Irina the coordinator (behind Zhanara). Irina does not speak Engligh and the menu was in Russian, but the translator made it all OK.

I can't believe that everything is final. David left Thursday night, so I had to tell Olivia the news by myself on Friday. She didn't seem impressed! I do think it is funny that so many changes are happening in her life and she really has no say or right in any of it. I can't wait to tell her the stories when she gets a little bigger.

When I got home from taking David to the airport, I realized there was no water in the apartment. It was also really hot with no AC. I was feeling really sorry for myself lying on the bed when I noticed an air conditioning above the bed. I can't believe we didn't notice it before. So, now I have air conditioning, but I had to wash up like olden days. I filled a pot with bottled water (instead of river water) and washed my face and brushed my teeth. Luckily, on Friday morning, I had water again. We think the city is trying to conserve energy, so they randomly cut off water to sections of the city without notice.

Then, last night I had a great dinner with some of the other parents who are here adopting. We did a pot luck and met at Sarah and Fred's apartment to celebrate all of the positive decisions we had in court. The food and conversations were so good! The picture you see of us smiling is 5 minutes before we had our big adventure. The elevator was not working when we arrived for dinner, but afterwards, we decided to take it down. It went down, but did not open. At first, we laughed a lot. Then, we got scared. I said "Is there ventilation in here!" We tried prying the doors open, pushing buttons, jumping up and down and screaming "Help!" Nothing was working and then the elevator buttons which had been lit up went out. It was 11 pm and I thought we were going to have to spend the night in there. It was tiny and hot and there were five of us crammed in there. Finally, a lady heard us. She said something in Russian and left. She came back a few minutes later with tools to pry the door open. That did not work. We could hear her talking to some other people and guessed they were saying, "There are some Americans trapped in the elevator!" After about 20 minutes (which is really long time to be trapped in an elevator), Fred decided to jump up and hit the ceiling, which we had already tried to open. He thought if we took weight off of the floor, the doors may open. We thought it was a stupid idea. When he showed us what he meant, the doors opened. I have never been so happy to get off an elevator. I can't believe I've spent so much time here worrying about falling cranes and open, deep man holes!