Day 8 and 9, I Think

It has poured for the past two days here. It was in the 80s last week and now it is in the 40s and they are talking snow!

When we got to Nikolai’s room yesterday the nannies were saying he had been calling for his papa for the past half hour (saying bababa). Since he has said that since the second day we met him, we do not think he is saying papa but it was sweet of the nannies to say so. They also told us he knows when it is getting close to the time for the visit and starts getting excited. He is definitely the most excited when we first get there and wants to jump around, and unfortunately the first thing we do every day is change his diaper and clothes. This task is now complicated by the fact that we do so in his normal changing room, which has a high changing table with a slippery cover. It is all we can do to have one person try to at least keep him on the changing table if not still and the other try to quickly remove clothes, change the diaper (which luckily so far has only been wet), and add new clothes. We do not attempt socks in that room but wait until he is more distracted in the play room and his feet are a little more still. Saule asked us today if we both plan on returning for the second trip or only one of us, which made me laugh as we can barely change his clothes with two of us I cannot imagine trying to do it alone.

One of the head nurses was in the room today visiting all of the babies. She told us that Nikolai has made a lot of advances since we started visiting, which was nice to hear. Since Nik was so active and vocal from the day we met him, it is harder for us to notice a big change. The one area we definitely see improvement physically is in his attempts at sitting. When we first met him he would be doubled over forward whenever we tried to get him to sit. Now he sits up straight, unless reaching for a toy. He still cannot balance, but is getting better. His version of crawling has gotten pretty good too and he can move quickly, albeit in a fairly unconventional way that generally results in his pants falling down.

We saw Nikolai really cry for the first time yesterday; other times he has just protested or sort of cried without much resignation. He was sitting on my lap and suddenly lunged forward, presumably to get a stacking cup and I did not quite catch him in time. I do not know if he hit his nose on the cups or just got scared but he started crying. I stood up with him and walked around a bit and he quickly calmed down, which was nice to see. He suddenly lunged two more times (once forward and once backward) so I guess he must not have been too scared by the event. We successfully caught him the other two times :-).

At the end of the visit he fell asleep as I was giving him a bottle - so cute.

Other Musings:

We had an elevator adventure yesterday. When we got back from our visit, we got in the elevator and it started to move up then suddenly lurched, dropped a little, and the lights went out. I thought it was going to drop all the way to the ground. Luckily it instead gently went back down to the first floor and the doors opened. I have a bit of a fear of elevators as it is, so I was not about to get back into it after that. We walked up the seven flights of stairs, only to find the doors to the seventh floor locked again! So we went to the sixth floor and had to ride the elevator, which had started working again although the lights were still out, up one floor to get home. I am not worried about getting out in an emergency as the locked door is pretty flimsy and would be easy to break through, but I still want the option to take the stairs on any day that the elevator is too scary (like when the lights are out).

Today the guy came to install the internet, but we were missing a disk so he had to come back in the evening. Despite being halfway across the world, he so reminded me of our IT guys at work. I now have high-speed internet rather than the hourly dial-up (which incidentally ran out the day before yesterday). Because the internet guy was coming, the landlady called us to check if he had come so we were able to ask her if she had a key to the stairwell on our floor. She came over to try the key she had, but it also did not work. She said she is going to get the correct key – so now someone else is working on that. Since the weather is changing, the heat in the city is starting to be turned on, and today was our first day without hot water.

We have been washing our fruits and vegetables in cheap vodka, which is significantly cheaper than drinking water and likely more effective at killing bacteria. We had read that suggestion on someone’s blog and highly recommend it!