Beautiful day #33

Yes we are having just perfect fall weather here!!! It's amazing how it can lift ones spirits when the sun shines so brightly and the trees are beautiful shades of orange and yellow! That also means it's not to cold to take Kody outside on our visits and I think I have said before how much he likes it outside and of course way nicer for Pey to be able to play instead of having to be quite and all cooped up in a room!
I have seen enough of Kody's care that I'm counting down days till we can get him with us 24/7! Did I write about this already on here or was it in an email? :/ anyways here goes again if I did... On the weekend the staff aren't at orphanage so we always just go up to his room and ask for him and then take him back up at end of visit. Most of the time he is in a different room and they bring him out all bundled up and ready to go, but last weekend they had all the babies in a great big pack n play type unit in the 2nd room I go in and so I got to watch them and I had to bite my tongue several times as they yanked on his leg to straighten him out and craned him around to put his hat on as his head just crashes on the concrete hard surface etc. etc. It's 6 months past time that little guy gets some real loving and lots of it!!!! Today when I went up to get him his caretaker informed to go back down to wait and she would bring him down. I played dumb and just kept telling her I couldn't understand Russian and she would emphatically use different words to try and get me to leave, but stubborn me thought it was absolutely ridiculous that I couldn't wait right there on him and so I continued to act dumb and blankly look at the door that she kept pointing too and shrugging my shoulders:) she finally being more stubborn than I let out a huge sigh and pulled me to the door and pushed me out and used very explicit gestures how I was to 'sit' 'stay' and NOT be in this room!!! :) It actually gave me some amusement as naughty as it was, but I get so extremely disgusted with this Soviet lifestyle I can hardly stand it sometimes! :((( why why WHY?! Loosen up, be happy, change, get out of the rut your great grandparents set, ENJOY LIFE!!!! It would be interesting to see the suicide rate for a place like this, I'm sure it would be high! It is SOO drab, bleak, morbid, eery, desolate, cold, dirty, last century, and just discouraging here!! Enough rant on that now. We don't plan on moving back here :)
Had a really good visit with Kody this morning. He is starting to coo, get more strength in his legs, be a lot more alert, look at us with recognition, and yes even showing preference to 'mama'! :)) Love you Kody ;-) Was reading on an international adoption site about every 3 months spent in an orphanage will delay a child one month so that would put Kody at about 4 month old, but I really think he is farther behind than that! It just breaks my heart to think of the rough 6 months he has had in his short life already. Everything seems so new to him. I'm not sure but what he never got farther than the crib in the second room I mentioned and once there just to lay on his back and stare at the ceiling. He is absolutely thrilled with toys, he just loves to hold something in his hand and look at it and wave it around etc. You take him outside and he just whips his head around looking at all the new sights and loves the breeze on his face. So many things 'most' children experience and we take for granted our babies all know about.
For dinner we walked down past our medium market to a restaurant that we have seen several times that looked really neat. It had mostly outdoor seating and it was quite decorated up outside with little flowerbeds and nautical scenes. It had a picture of kabobs on their sign and that is what we have been wanting to find here. We had lots of delicious kabobs in Moscow! The other restaurant that we went to that advertised kabobs came out as fried chicken drumsticks. HA We took advantage of the beautiful day and sat outside and actually got it across to our waitress that we wanted kabobs. (who btw really wanted to communicate with us and tried to help us) We ordered pork and she at first said no pig, steak, but then she kind of made motions and did little ears and I'm not sure what we actually got but it was very good! All of a sudden a burst of smoke came floating around the side of the building and upon inspection it was a charcoal grill with kabobs on it, good sign:) We had ordered 4 kabobs and they came out all piled on a plate, off of the skewers with piles of sliced raw onions on top and doused with dill. Whatever kind of meat it was, i'm thinking maybe lamb? it was very tender, moist and really good flavor. We were so impressed to find edible food at a restaurant. There were only two other parties there, but the food that was taken out to them looked really good as well. We will have to try and get the menu translated and go back and order some sides next time! :)
Now Pey is taking a nap and Bill and I are having coffee and cinnamon rolls. great diet food eh?! :) This batch of cinnamon rolls were a huge improvement from the last.. what I did different I'm not sure!
After our evening visit with Kody it will be time to call in Geiger church service and then it will be another week finished in Kryvyi Rih and one week closer to coming HOME! I'm ready! :)
Oh was going to say something about Peyton... several of you have asked how he was doing and I'm not sure what to say. Still have trouble getting him to eat, he's lost weight that he didn't have to lose:( Just the whole experience of being away from home and all the strangeness of it is a constant stress for him. He inherited his dad's terrible problem of canker sores and he's been dealing with that here which i'm sure is because of stress and which for sure doesn't help the eating problem. He's never far from tears and it has taken a lot of encouragement and praise and bolstering up to make it through the days with all of us in one piece, but over all I'm still glad we brought him and he will be glad he came! :) He has always been a 'home boy' and is at his prime at his house with his toys and his mama and daddy with him, so being in all this strangeness for so long has been tough on him, but he really has been quite a trooper with it all! He loves to ride the buses and already knows that when we go to awan we need the 208 or 204 bus and when we go to McDonalds we need the 255 etc.  He takes great responsibility in waving the right buses down and have even got a smile or two out of the bus drivers with his animation :) On the way home from the restaurant this afternoon we stopped at a sidewalk vendor for some bananas and she had a box of peanuts that he wanted so we told her we wanted 1/2 kilo and I noticed him hiding behind me when she was filling the bag motioning for her to put more in the bag HA He is very good at sign language thanks to a head start from Tanya days! :)
Time to go see our little pumpkins....