November 30, 2010

Breakfast... We discovered these tough yet yummy rolls at the breakfast... they work perfectly for Kimi as it takes her a long time to eat them and it lets her really "gnaw" on something, since her fingers were usually her first choice... they work so well... we even put a couple in a bag for later in the day while we are out and about. It keeps her occupied well, plus its food... and she needs that... just not whole buckets at a time!
Playing in our room... during our consulate appointment... there goes Maria trying to put the colors together... see the stacked yellow ones?

The baby doll, that Maria loves so much!

On the way from the play room I had maria and Jerry had Kimi... well... i detoured one way and apparently jerry didn't see me... because he never showed up... we went to look at the water fall. So Maria got a few more pictures...



This is a silk embroidered piece that i just think is BEAUTIFUL!!! It even hsa branches in the background that are fainter than the one in the foreground... like out of focus... just lovely!! But very expensive!! Maybe 2-5 thousand? Can't remember exactly... we saw so many!

Some weird snack that we received on the airplane... they smelled bad when i opened the bag, but after deciding they were not a critter and just some kind of (maybe fried?) bean we tried them... the girls loved them and i thought they were pretty good after all... jerry was still scared of them, i think.

Having a snack of cheerios again... out of the stacking cup. Its a little more challenging for her to get them out of there...
Maria's are in her bib pocket!



Finally it was time to go for our "swearing in" at the consulate... we got on these big buses and road to the consulate office about 40 minutes away... it was most critical that we closed the curtains so there would be no puking from our seats from little girls...

Both Girls fell asleep on the ride over... after all... it was exactly nap time!

Downstairs from the Consulate offices! This was as close to the offices we could get a picture! They take your cameras from you before you enter the office!

Some seriously tall buildings!

From our hotel room again... Such BIG apartment buildings!!!

Getting Kimi to laugh!!! Its so hard to get her to laugh and get some decent pictures of her!!! silly girl! But isn't she cute when she smiles!!!?



At night these boats with very BRIGHT advertising, cruise the river... you can read the advertising from way up in the hotel... obviously i did not do a very good job at focusing on it though...

Consulate.

Today was our consulate appointment. Unlike Kazakhstan we don’t actually go to our consulate appointment. Our Guide goes for us! Isn’t that funny!? So from 10-11:30 this morning we needed to remain in our room so that Cordelia could get a hold of us if she needed to. We had breakfast at about 9:15 and then we just played in the room the rest of the morning… Kimi kept running around grabbing stuff like a crazy! She was sooo wound up! We had to stick her in her bed a couple of times to get her to calm down and stay out of trouble! Finally when our time was up, we went down to the play room to play. There were other people in there so, you guessed it, Maria just sat in my lap and Kimi ran around laughing her crazy laugh. However she was getting in trouble in there too, she kept trying to grab other peoples’ things and babies and just generally being a pest to everybody in there… in super high energy! So to calm her down Jerry would get her and just hold her for a few minutes at a time… it didn’t really help, when he let go she went just as wild as ever.

So we finally decided to come back to the room and feed them something before we had to go to the consulate for our “Swearing In” ceremony. Finally we went for that… the White swan has some big tour-like buses that it transports people around in and I think there were two buses of people today. Jerry sat a little closer to the front with Kimi, hoping to help the motion sickness, since our drive was about 30-40 minutes. I sat with Maria… we both closed the curtains to their windows. Maria fell asleep with in a few minutes and slept the whole way there… The consulate was in a building that looked like it just had a bunch of offices in it… like travel agents and airline companies. Kind of weird. It was on the 5^th floor. I of course had to surrender my camera. But I knew that ahead of time. While we were standing in line, we chatted with some people behind us… we learned that we are a topic of conversation among the adoptive parents apparently… The fact that we adopted two girls in the same trip is a pretty novel idea, I guess. The Chinese are especially surprised.

The Swearing in ceremony is rather anti-climatic if you ask us… we both said “that’s it?!!?” It was basically swearing that the information we have provided the government for this adoption is true to the best of our knowledge. Humm… I would hope if it wasn’t someone else would have figured it out by now. Anyways, I thought it was weird… and maybe a little propaganda-ish even. Anyways the Visas will be ready on Thursday afternoon. These Visas allow the girls to enter the USA as immigrants and as soon as we pass immigration, they become citizens. We will be delivering sealed packets to the immigration officer at the airport, where they will open the packets and I am sure do some stamping and signatures then the girls will officially be citizens. In about 8 weeks we should receive their citizenship certificate.