Thursday, September 16, 2010

The baby house...outside

While we were in Kazakhstan our blog posts were limited to what we could write up at night and load during our 30 minutes a day (if we were super lucky) at the internet cafe. It didn't leave much time to post stuff that wasn't directly involving the young star of the show! Now that we're back though...and have tons of time on our hands while we wait, and have unlimited internet access (thank you God!) I can finally share some of the other stuff. Actually, all of our photos (thousands of them) that weren't loaded onto the desktop to go into the blog were accidentaly erased but I do still have some of the baby house since I intended to do a post or two on it. Before we travelled I spent tons of time looking over other peoples blogs to catch even a glimpse of where we would be going. So, for those of you who may end up in Semey...

This is the front of the baby house...the main entrance is just on the other side of the car there. Nathan's rooms are the three windows on the top floor right in front.





I was told that these signs say "Baby House" in Russian and Kazakh.



The baby house is surrounded by typical Soviet-style apartment buildings on most sides and is right next to the main down-town part of Semey.  




On the baby house grounds there is a road/path that circles the whole thing, and there are playgrounds scattered around it. If you are here while the weather is nice you can take your child outside to play instead of using the bonding room. We much preferred it...but we were also visiting an 'older' child. Some of the families with younger ones would come out for a walk but in general I think it was easier for them to be inside.


When the other kids went outside they rarely ever played on the playgrounds. I guess it would be too much for the caregivers to look after that many kids scrambling around on this stuff, but it was still sad. They mostly just walked around the circle a time or two...and maybe stopped by the swings for 2-3 minutes.









This is the little shelter at the very back of the property where we headquartered ourselves (at N-M's request) almost every day.  There are two swings on one side of it, and the two slides on the other. That was it.


And our favorite part...the trash area right next to it. They didn't burn every day though! :)

2 comments:

  1. Wow! Based on your description I would have guessed you were in Karaganda! Our son's baby house was surrounded by the identical type of apartments (not too surprising) and also had driveway that went around the outside (we spent lots of time walking in circles) with playgrounds all around. Hope the time is passing quickly. When we were waiting between trip one and two....I was in blog withdrawl so I would pick one pic of Adam and post it as the pic of the day. Made me feel a little closer to him!

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  2. Oh no, that's so sad how little time they had outside. At BH2 in Almaty, we regularly saw our guy's groupa on the playground for at least 20 -30 minutes or so (he was in the oldest group). We saw the younger children and even the babies being strolled around the grounds.

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