Day 10

It has stopped raining here, although I wore a sweater and my winter coat today. It is hard to believe that I was hot in short sleeves just a few days ago. I think it is supposed to get up to the 60s again next week, but we have some cold 40-degree weather ahead of us for a while. The drastic changes in the weather fascinate me. Every day the wind and clouds move in from a different direction.

We had another good visit with Nikolai. He sat by himself today! He can move from sitting to “crawling” too, although he sometimes gets frustrated when his foot gets caught. It is funny, when he first leans forward from sitting he ends up in a perfect crawl position, and then he straightens his left leg, plops his belly down, and gets down on his elbows before he starts moving – whatever works I guess. He also pulled himself up to a stand using my knees today. We tried to get him to do it again, but his hand slipped and he got frustrated.

It is getting hard to take pictures now because he really wants the camera and every time he sees it and we don’t give it to him he starts to cry – not the full out cry, more of a complaining cry but still, we like to keep him happy. Peek-a-boo makes him giggle out loud every time! About 15 minutes before the end of the visit he fell sound asleep. We have been told not to let him sleep. They try to keep all of the babies on the same schedule, which makes sense when you have so many to take care of. So we were a little worried about bringing him back to his room asleep and tried to wake him up, but that did not work at all. So we brought him back asleep prepared to be scolded – but instead they were very sweet and said he had not slept well for two days and that he just needed his parents in order to fall asleep.