HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM TOUGENSTEIN!

If you’ve wondered if it were possible for lightning to strike the same place twice… it looks as if we may actually be coming home empty handed once again.

We are awaiting further guidance from our agency, but at this point it seems clear that Bobek is not in Shymkent, and may not even be Kazakh. Who knew.

No immediate plans to return home though it seems most probable within the week.

Just wanted to make contact with everyone to say that we arrived well and are now safely in Shymkent. As you might imagine given the unusually long silence, the path to Bobek has not been a clearly defined one. We are working through some things and hope to be able to come to you all soon with more information, though that still may be a day or more away. Know that we are thinking of you all and greatly appreciate all of your love and support. Take Care.

Love,
Tougy, Kjersten, and Steve

"Signs point to yes" - or at least so says my Magic 8-Ball.

We have word that the number is in the system, the visas are being processed, my brother is en route to the Consulate, and KJ and I are making final preparations while Tougy is in school for the morning. The plan calls for us to leave home around 1pm to give us time for a relaxed drive down to Boston and hopefully set up a tone of calm anticipation for Tougy. As always it is so hard to leave the boys (our dogs) here at home though I know that they will be well loved in our absence.

Waking up this morning, we began to think about the 'lasts'. The last morning to wake in this house with only one child, the last diaper free time for a while...

Tougy is so excited to be a big sister, and we are equally excited to see what Wednesday has in store for us. Adoption can be such a strange and seemingly random undertaking. To imagine that there is a child living in a government run Baby House in Shymkent, Kazakhstan right now, and that within a matter of weeks, that child will be our child, and that child will come be a part of our family in Boothbay, Maine - what are the odds?

Perhaps they are no greater than for any other child. Of all the children born the day I was born, what were the odds that I would be who I am. Did I have an equal shot at being born to a family in France, or Niger, or Kazakhstan?

I need to remind myself that this is not the time for such thinking, I need to keep packing. We'll talk again soon. Take Care.

Oops, did I say a week from tomorrow, I meant the day after tomorrow!

To no one's great surprise, things have again changed. We received a call from our agency yesterday (friday) morning saying that our in-country(Kaz) person recommends coming as soon as possible. Hooray, we'll be on the next plane out, except, wait... we still don't have our visas/passports back from NY.

Oh yeah, that! Well it seems that they cannot be processed just yet because the LOI confirmation number is still not in the system. They have the number, and New York knows what that number is, it just hasn't shown up 'in the system' and therefor our visas cannot be processed Friday. Of course weekends being what they are, the next possible chance for that number to show up in the system is Monday.

Of course changing your tickets is not something airlines take lightly, nor do free of charge, and so, taking a few leaps of faith, we have changed our tickets and put a somewhat tenuous plan into play that looks something like this:

We pack and plan as if we are flying out of Boston Monday evening. Monday morning we wake up, take Tougy to school as usual, then wait until the NY Consulate opens to see if the number is now in the system. If it is, my older brother(who lives outside of NYC) goes into the city and picks up our passports and visas then goes to Kennedy Airport to fly to Boston.

On our side, we will finish packing, and have KJ's parents drive us to pick up Tougy, then drive the 3.5 hours to Boston to meet my brother and get on our flights.

If the number is not in the system, then we drop back and punt and accept that we may in fact have to pay change of ticket fees all over again and hope that our old itinerary is still available.

Yeah, it has been a hectic 24 hours here, made no better by the fact that KJ is working all day today and I am here with Tougy as I try and make all of these plans and changes. Thankfully Tougy's two new friends Nemo and Shreck stopped by on this cold rainy Saturday.

Was it all worth it, time will tell.

Take Care.

A week from tomorrow we will all be on the first of our three flights en route to Shymkent. Around the house it certainly feels as if we are preparing for the holidays as the UPS truck comes almost daily now delivering the latest finds from Amazon and every corner of the house has some sort of specific pile or another. As Tougy heads off to school or to sleep, we elves get down to the business of planning, procuring, sorting, and stuffing.

Like so many other things, the amount of time required to get ready is just greater the amount of time you have, regardless of how much time you have. In this case we have two weeks, and while we certainly are not running around half crazed yet, we know that that moment will hit us.

The new money is ordered, the visa applications sent off, the tickets purchased, and the dog/house sitters arranged. That is the easy part.

Somewhere after the mind frees of all the factual and concrete things we can check off, comes a flood of emotional and non-tangible things to ponder, reflect upon, consider and 'prepare' for, and this is the hard part. Packing a bag is easy. Getting through that first 24 hours in country takes more than having selected the right book or having brought the perfect jacket.

I know from our first adoption that sitting in that first plane seat and putting on that seat belt in preparation for take off is a real moment of truth. At that point, the physical part of getting ready is in the past and what lies ahead are all the emotional roller-coasters that are part of that special package known as adoption.

It is not a complete surprise (after all you got in line for this a year or so ago), it is just that there is no norm in terms of what you will experience. There is no one way of describing what it means to adopt or how it will alter your reality. No amount of reading, discussing, or anything else you can do ahead of time will adequately prepare you for what lies ahead in those first hours and days.

Just as I can't truly imagine what it must feel like to step upon the moon, so too can I not imagine holding another child as my own. That Tougy will soon be a big sister will affect all of our lives in ways we cannot predict, and while we are all talking excitedly about it now, we realize that the reality will involve both laughter and tears.

Will Bobek be a boy or a girl? WIll Bobek look more like Tougy or more like KJ? Where upon the 6-18 month-old timeframe written into our homestudy will Bobek fall when we meet? What history and background might we have about Bobek's beginnings? Where will Bobek be developmentally? These are all questions that we will walk into the Baby House in Shymkent, Kazakhstan on Monday 02 November wondering. Hopefully by the end of that day, we will know most of the answers.

We are set to fly out the evening of the 30th from Boston bound for Amsterdam, then Almaty on KLM. This will make the 3rd such trip we have made. The first saw us return a few days later without a child in July 2007, The second time we flew home with Tougy on Christmas Day 2007. As for the third, we will just have to hold our breath and see. At this point, we have tickets to fly home Christmas Day 2009. Let's hope that we don't have to change that too dramatically.

Take Care.

So it is a grey and overcast day here in Boothbay and we have just put Tougy down for her nap. Of course she is not sleeping yet. She is in her bed with her doll Bobek whom she has lavished her attention upon for weeks now.

At the moment she has just finished pretending to feed it a bottle of milk and is along side it as it lies face down on a pillow with Tougy rubbing its back and singing quietly to it. She has been incredibly motherly these last few months, changing Bobek, going to Bobek when she says he is crying, feeding Bobek and rocking Bobek.

It will be so nice to finally have a name and a gender to replace the fruitless attempts all of us have been making to not ascribe a pronoun to the idea of Bobek. Bobek the doll is most frequently a boy, but if you ask Tougy what the real Bobek will be, she mostly says a girl. Either way, Tougy is very excited about her perceived role as a big sister. Of course when reality hits the road, we anticipate a somewhat less warm and fuzzy reception.

For all that our adoption process with Tougy in 2007 was great in that it allowed us to adjust slowly to the concept of becoming a family, that Tougy will get to slowly transition to a new reality of Bobek an hour a day will be most helpful. Certainly the Kazakh adoption process has its frustrations, but the two months of in-county time has always had great appeal to us.

Now that we have a date, we have begun to turn our attention towards the necessity of keeping Tougy engaged and busy during our life in Shymkent. Packing this time around is sure different. Legos, books, craft projects, and personal comforts for Tougy such as blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals seem to be filling our bags fast.

Though we have talked about it as much as we can, the fact that Tougy will have very few people to talk to during our time in Kaz cannot be well conveyed. It will be interesting to see how this affects her. I anticipate that it will decrease her sense of independence and increase her reliance upon us as well as bring out a shyer side to her. We will see.

Of course the topic of Bobek has been fairly all consuming of late. Several times over the last few days as KJ and I have been talking, Tougy has said to us "Excuse me mommy, are you talking about adoption?" To which we usually respond, "Do you want to talk about adoption?" which invariably leads to a "Yes!"

At this point, we usually just wait to see where her thoughts are going. Sometimes she will begin to talk about how we adopted her and how we came to the Astana Baby House for her. Other times she talks about how Bobek is in the Shymkent Baby House waiting for his mommy and daddy and big sister to come. And still other times she will begin to list off all her friends who have been adopted - Rylie, Charles, Aila, Jude, Rafa, Rhodie, Zoe, Leeza, and the list goes on.

As she lists off the names of friends she has who are adopted, it reminds us how much the world of adoption figures into our lives these days. Do we even know any kids who were not adopted. Surely there must be some out there.

Over the past few days Tougy has taken to calling Bobek on her cell phone. Remarkably she carries out long and thought out conversations telling him about the long flights we will be making and how we will be coming soon to hold him and to make him smile. She tells him that she will hold him when he cries and tickle him and explains that his room is next to hers and that he will use her old crib.

Man is it difficult to maintain a narrative without pronouns. We most often say 'he' out of convenience and to avoid confusion about whether 'she' refers to Bobek or Tougy, though we truthfully have no idea. The only thing we feel confident with is that we will know our child when the time comes, and we hope that it comes November 2nd.

Presently, that moment is just more than two weeks away. Incredible to contemplate that all of this speculation and uncertainty may well be replaced with a loving face around the time most of our kids are fighting off sleep in a sugar-induced post-Halloween coma late Sunday night.

Our plan, at least at the moment, is to leave Tougy with someone our agency has found in Shymkent for the few hours that KJ and I initially go to the baby house and meet children. It is my hope that Tougy is still so wiped out from the travel and time changes that she never knows we were gone, but in the back of my mind I know it will not be so easy. All other times we anticipate having Tougy with us.

That we will be the three of us together so intensely for the next couple of months will also require some adjustments. There will be no work, no school, no dogs, no friends, no familiar sights and places. It will be very intense, and I imagine will impact our relationships in formidable ways.

It will be interesting to see exactly how Tougy transitions going from two months of intensified attention, to a new era of divided attention and distraction. Like so many other areas of parenthood, and indeed life itself, ours are not the first lives to make this transition. It is a journey of discovery after all.

So that wraps up a few thoughts and stories I wanted to share and want to end by saying thanks to all of you who so supportingly have followed us over the years. My memory is not such where I can keep all the names straight, but I want to let you know that we appreciate the love and support we have received through our journey, both from those known to us and from those known to us simply as Layla, Kathy, mcMary, Thad and Ann, Quaintance, Kari J, Andrea, makandaddie, Winde, Rob and Donalee, Abby, Pat and Alli... the list goes on. Unfortunately, for many of you we have no way of getting back to you as your profile often does not have an email or your blog is private and so we are left looking ungrateful. Know that is is meaningful to us and that we would love to share more, so leave an email address or contact us at steve.morrison@mac.com.

Take Care.

P.S. Just checked the weather forecast for Shymkent and am happy to report that the next 4 days call for nothing but sun and highs of 75, 76, 77, and 76. Watching it snow in Boston during the Patriots game, I will gladly trade.

We have a date!

We will be heading back to Kazakhstan on October 30th - two weeks from today.

Remarkably, we met Tougy on 01 Nov 2007, and we will meet the second child on 02 Nov 2009. With Tougy, we came back home Christmas Day and so have made that our return target for this journey as well.

We have known for a few days now that our LOI was being processed but did not know when we would be expected to arrive. As of yesterday it was narrowed to somewhere in the last week of October, and this afternoon it became known that we should travel on the 30th to arrive Sunday 01 Nov, which I assume means that we will see children Monday morning.

So now the zany fun begins. The emotions kick up a notch, and the reality of the adoption begins to sink in. I promise to be better about maintaining the blog while we are away. I should think that we will be daily again at the end of the month through the end of the year. Take Care.

Stay tuned as big news is right around the corner!