"GOTCHA" Day!!

We arrived in Almaty at 5AM on Tuesday morning. It was a very long trip and we were looking forward to getting to the hotel for 5 or 6 hours of sleep until we had to return to the airport to catch our afternoon flight to Karaganda. Then, we thought, we would get a good nights rest and pick up Daniel from the baby house on Wednesday morning. We would then bring him back to the hotel and spend our first day together as a family! It didn't work out that way!

Instead of getting a hotel to rest, we caught a 9AM flight to Karaganda and were dropped of at the hotel to shower and unpack some of our stuff to prepare for Daniel. When we arrived at the hotel, we went up to the room and Patti went to take a shower. There was no water! So instead of taking a MUCH needed shower, we took a short nap and headed to the baby house for the main attraction!

As we entered Daniel’s room, he was sitting in his walker. We didn't expect him to recognize us so we weren't terribly disappointed when he just kind of sat there. Patti picked him up and gave him a big hug and started taking to him. She told him how much we had missed him these past 4 weeks and we had come back to take him home. Within 3 or 4 minutes, Daniel gave us a huge smile!! It was all coming back to him! Daniel has grown so much in the past few weeks. He has 3 more teeth for a total of 5!! I wouldn't be surprised if he was shaving by the end of the summer!!

We spent about an hour at the baby house while our translator was gathering required documents at her office. We then stopped at the grocery store for some diapers, baby food and cold medicine. Then, it was off to our hotel for lots of fun with Daniel!!

The biggest surprise that we had was that Daniel was such a little chatter box!! He was smiling, laughing and babbling away!! This was a far cry from the very quiet and reserved boy that we had met back in March! We didn't know it but behind those absolutely beautiful eyes, Daniel had quite a little personality!! We had such a great time getting reacquainted with him. We played with all his toys and he told us all the things he has been doing while he waited for us to return and pick him up! He's been such a busy little boy! April, 15, from this time forward, will be known as "Gotcha Day" in our family!! What a wonderful day it was!!

Daniel fell asleep around 10PM and woke up at 1:30 for his bottle. The 3 of us were up for the day at 6AM. Daniel didn't want anything to do with his morning nap because there was so much new stuff going on. He didn't want to miss anything! Patti was finally able to get him down at around 2PM. Patti and Daniel are just starting to wake up now after 2 hours.

We very briefly met other adoptive families at breakfast this morning. Daniel is going to have a very busy social schedule as 3 of the families are from the immediate Capital District area!! One of the women's sisters has been following our blog and told her sister to be on the lookout for Daniel’s mom and dad!! We didn't have enough time to exchange contact information so if you could send us an email to babykaz2008@gmail.com, we would love to set something up for a summer get together!

Well, Daniel just woke up and boy is he ever cranky!! Wow!! He is still has a cold and is very congested! We will be bringing him to a doctor as soon as we get him home.

Well, that's about it for now, we have to start packing for our evening flight back to Almaty.

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I tried to post this but it didn't work. I'll post it as soon as I can!

Also the spell checker is not working. Yikes!! My mom is going to find out that my time in a catholic school maybe wasn't worth all that money after all!!