The past few days have fun but we are so ready to come home!! There are more things we’d like to do and see here, and obviously we enjoy our time with Nathan but we kind of losing our minds now.

We are feeling very stretched in trying to come up with things to do for three hours a day on the same little square of ground. If Nathan spoke English we would come up with all sorts of games and talk about what was happening etc, but with the language barrier, if we can’t act it out we don’t do it (or it doesn’t hold attention for long).

Matt has been great! He decided to “plant a garden” so he took little N to dig up weeds and replant them in a certain spot. They dug and built support stakes and watered for two days at least. They also collected other stuff (petals, bits of other plants) and ground them up to make various potions. Very creative and very entertaining!! Eventually, as the workers here were making their daily rounds and sweeping the dirt the garden got destroyed, but until then it was lots of fun!

Next to the baby house there is a little magazine and almost every day we go in to get some drinks or cookies. The apple juice boxes are a big hit with both boys. Interestingly, N-M calls it ‘sook’ which is Russian for juice. (We are finding that he has a combination language of Kazakh and Russian - no pressure or anything - we just have to learn two new languages!) One day we brought these little stick cookies with a vanilla sauce to dip them in - big hit.

I stuck these pictures in so you can see how big the 4T clothes are on him. Hugely long and the waist is gigantic too -- thankfully the elastic keeps them up!

Despite the fact that it was not cold, our kiddo was dressed in these awesome tights for the past two days….too bad we have to leave all the clothes here when we pick him up. :)

Check out the sweet little daisies on my tights!

Hmmm...maybe those tights weren't so bad. At least they were blue!

In spite of our readiness to come home we are really feeling more like a family. Yesterday our coordinator, Olga, came by for our first court prep session. We were outside watching Up so the boys kept watching and Clint and I went off a little way to talk. Wish I’d had my camera because Nathan was lying with his head in Matt’s lap and they were both just as sweet as could be.

We have some work to do now in preparing our speech for court but it feels good to be close to the end. The main thing we were told that will come up is how we communicate. Since he’s older and has an established language other than ours this is a big deal for the judge but everyone here thinks we’re doing well. We all know lots of Kazakh now and Nathan is picking up English very quickly. His favorite words are still things like cookie which, not surprisingly, he learned very easily! I’m sure that once we’re home with him he’ll learn really fast and this won’t be an issue for too long.  

While we‘re on the subject of judges, guess what…. we have the hard one! We aren’t worried - we know God has this - but we can’t wait to be done.