What follows is a mix of things from our time here that have not already appeared elsewhere.

As anyone who has been to Kazakhstan knows, fashion is king if you're female and young.  I will try to get more street scenes at some point but unfortunately, with Tougy with us everywhere we go, our street walking/exploring capabilities are dramatically more encumbered this time around than they were in Astana.

It seems the only people in Kazakhstan permitted to wear color other than black, grey, and red are the old babushkas, and they apparently can wear anything and everything at all, often at the same time.

This group of women was sitting outside the maternity hospital when we visited.  As it is not especially easy to be casual about pulling out a big camera and taking pictures of random people on the street, I often hold my camera at my hip, or let it hang from my hand as I shoot on the street and just hope for the best.  Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you just get a lot of sidewalk and trash.

The footwear is among the most interesting things about Kazakhstan, okay that sounds a little derogatory, so let's just say it is among the most obvious differences to most of our lives back home.

Everywhere you go there are high heels, and I mean, theatrically high.  How they do it is as much a mystery as why they do it.  It sure doesn't seem to be for the men, as there appears to be a cultural dictum mandating an outward demeanor among men that is as monochromatic as their wardrobe.

Among the many many things KJ brought to keep Tougy entertained was a book on face-painting and a paint set to go with it.  Tougy has loved it, and on several occasions, KJ has pulled it out and made fun, simple designs for Tougy.

This of course was Tougy's version of Halloween this year.  No trick or treating and no real costume as such, but KJ did a fantastic job with Tougy's chosen design.

Tougy was so proud of her look that she wanted to sleep in it.  Getting the green, somewhat sickly, hue from her face took a few days.

This is an outdoor park that is a 10-15 minute walk from our apartment.  It has a number of rides and things for Tougy to enjoy, and it is her favorite spot to spend time when the weather is nice.  It costs nothing to enter and walk around, and the rides themselves cost 65 cents.

Yes, I think if we had cameras in the back of our heads, we would see that reaction far more often.  Could be the backpack, the colorful shirt, the flat shoes, the blond hair, or the fact that neither KJ nor I look like our Filipino daughter.

As a family, we were in Mega(the modern shopping mall next to our apartment) this afternoon and were up in the food court area when out of nowhere, two woman/girls approached and gave Tougy a small stuffed animal and asked her name.  Of course you can guess they had a hard time pronouncing it, and then were surprised to learn that she was Kazakh.  Seriously people?

It is so nice to see her having fun while we are here.  She really misses school and her friends and has taken to insisting through large parts of the day that she is Tina(her teacher) and that I am Nick and KJ is Liam(two of her classmates).  In this game she bosses us around and reprimands us for all sorts of imaginary transgressions.

All day long we hear "no, I'm Tina", followed by such things as "sit in the circle", "stay on your mat",  "no fighting", "stay behind me", and various methodical activities such as counting and reciting the alphabet while pointing to imaginary things of the wall.

Tougy has an incredible imagination and, among other things, carries out long detailed conversations on her pretend cell phone to friends and family telling them all about our day and her sister, and so on.  We will have to find a way to put some video up soon.

Tougy loves spiders and thinks it is fun when she can get them to crawl on her.  Here she is showing off her latest find while in the park.

There is both an outdoor and an indoor component to Ken Baba Park, and here Tougy braves a rope bridge I never thought she would do, but true to form, she just cruised right through it.

Food was a concern for us in our planning to come over with her though, as is so often the case, we misjudged our little girl's adaptability.  Here we are at a restaurant and she is having tea and pancakes.  She also is a huge fan of Plov.

We brought over pounds and pounds of things for Tougy, among them, a large box of legos.  Keeping her active mentally and physically has been our first priority here.  Today was a rainy and colder day and we enjoyed just having a relaxing lazy day in the apartment, and finished the day with a family movie (The Incredibles) on the computer in bed tonight.

Given the drastic departure from her routine, she has done amazingly well with everything.

She loves 'reading' books and now has about 6-8 that she knows well enough to recite entirely without us.  It is fun to hear her at night in her room by herself reading her books to her stuffed animals.  She has also read several of her books to Nurai during our visits and relishes her new role as big sister.

As I think we recently mentioned, Tougy's first encounter with Nurai was rather traumatic.  A sickly looking Nurai was brought out wrapped in a blanket which we were asked not to remove and she had a strip of tape from one side of her face to the other that crossed her nose and held in place a plastic tube that was inserted into her nose.  Meanwhile KJ and I had large cloth masks that the baby house made us wear that covered most everything but our eyes.

Naturally, I would say, Tougy was a little freaked out and began crying.  The whole scene broke down and we tried to remove ourselves and Tougy from it, only to be chastised by our in-country coordinator for not having prepared our daughter well, and were asked to consider arranging someone to stay with her while we visited in the future.

It was all I could do to not lash out.  Unprepared?  I think Tougy was exceptionally well prepared for most things involving meeting a future sibling, I just happen to think that a large bundle exposing nothing human apart from a snippet of face with tape and a tube fell outside of all of our expectations.  I may not have cried outwardly, but I was sure unprepared for that as well.

In talking with Tougy that night and explaining that Nurai was sick and needed the tube in her nose to get better, Tougy took out her stethescope (yes we even packed her stethescope), and having put tape across the face of her animals, began to play doctor with them and telling them that she would make them better.  Yeah, right, unprepared!

Here is Monkey and his tape job.

And even Tougy's frog hand puppet that she and KJ made that day got a tape strip across its nose.

This was the space in which we first were given to meet with Nurai during our visits.  To think at the time we thought it was awful as it was so public and uninviting.  I think we would go back there in a heartbeat if they let us.  At least it had a big window with a decent amount of natural light.  Our present space is down the hallway leading off of the right side of the frame.

Our first moments with Nurai on the day we arrived in country(Wednesday 28Oct).  Tougy was sound asleep through the whole visit in the Ergo Carrier on KJ's back.

When the process is truly blind, this period is the craziest of the whole experience.  Days before this moment, we had been told by our agency that there were two kids that met our criteria (6-18 months, either gender, correctable disabilities) that were available at the Baby House in Shymkent, and that we should arrive as soon as possible.

You already know all we did to get there ASAP, and so we walk in expecting to see 2 fairly healthy kids from which we will have to choose.  Without any sort of advance notification from our in-country team a child is brought to us and it is explained that she is 10 months old.  My first thought was that Tougy came home from the Baby House at 9 months and was walking at 10.  This child weighed 13 pounds,  could not sit up, nor bear her own weight if held in a standing position and her head seemed as unsteady as a newborn.  We were simply taken aback.

There is so much you feel you cannot say in this circumstance as you are strangers to your own in-country team, and are not at all sure who, if anyone, in the room might understand you, or at the very least is reading your body language and tone.

Under Kazakh law for international adoption, you are to be shown more than one child and to have specifically chosen the child with whom you agree to adopt.  Because of this, and for lack of a more polite and delicate way of putting it, it is common practice to first be shown a child outside of your expectations that you would be expected to decline, and then to be shown the child they believe best represents a viable match.

As we held and attempted to interact with this first child, we were completely unsure what to think.  Was this the child they expected us to decline and another one was waiting with a caregiver in the hall.  After all, we still expected that there were two children that matched our criteria, and this did not appear to be one of them.

Upon asking to see a second child, we were told that there were no 'other' healthy children available, though soon appeared a very fearful and scared little boy nearly 3 years old and diagnosed with Atonic Cerebral Palsy.  Our minds raced and confusion set in.  Our Home Study only approves us for a child up to 18 months, plus this boy is 4 months older than Tougy, chronologically.  How could we even consider this?

Of course by now you know that we have begun the process of adopting that first little girl and that already Nurai seems to have transformed so far from that first day until now, but I must admit that it required nothing short of a personal paradigm shift to see the way forward.  Of course a week and some later and it already seems distant history.

So what of the 'two children' that met our criteria?  We were told by our in-country team (upon asking) that there was an American or European family that had arrived here ahead of us and began bonding.  I cannot empirically say that is a lie, but I can say that I know that during the course of our time here, we have been at the baby house within every hour long period from 9:30-3:30 and have seen no sign of anyone else visiting a child.  That they have somehow been doing so out of view is beyond reason.

This was the first photo we took of Nurai.  Looking back at it alone, it seems hard to believe we doubted our path, but when I remember the experience as I whole, I vividly remember the inner turmoil.

On Monday we had a local American doctor come in and help us evaluate Nurai's health and medical needs.  As you can see, our unprepared little girl did a pretty good job of faking it. ; )

Tougy was so concerned about Nurai all weekend and we spent a lot of time talking to her about what Nurai had been through since birth.  To be honest, all three of us spent the weekend trying to better understand the inherent delays of a child born 2 months premature who spent her first three months in a hospital, and the seven after that in a Baby House.

It was in large part due to the shared experiences of so many others who had adopted emotionally and physically delayed children from kaz, that we became more comfortable with our own decision.  Seeing the pictures and hearing the stories of children like Nurai who were now home with families and thriving really helped us to see beyond our initial shock and to reassess our situation and take a fresh look at this beautiful gift of a daughter, Nurai.

I will go that one further - our beautiful gift of a daughter Nurai Alia Anson Morrison!

Any lingering doubts we had going in to the meeting with the doctor Monday dissipated soon afterwards and we left that setting certain of our intentions.

She is a little thing from the waist down to be sure, but we have already seen dramatic improvement in her ability to support her weight that we know she is on the right track.

Somewhere during our visit that first Friday I called her Bounder, and I think it just might stick, so Nurai, if you are reading this years from now and you have always wondered why I call you Bounder, know that it just came out, and that beyond the irony that it represented at the time lay the foundation of my belief and faith in all that you could become.

Keeping a two and a half year old still in a confined space can require the assistance of 'special friends' like Alex the Lion, Mater, Donkey, and Dory.

So this next part represents the journey of Nurai's beginnings starting here at the Maternity Hospital in Shymkent.

This is the building where expectant mothers stay and where we believe Nurai would have been born.

This is the Children's Hospital in Shymkent where Nurai stayed until just before her 3 month mark.

And here is the Baby House in Shymkent where she lived from 2 months and 28 days, until the weekend we arrived some 7 months later.

As mentioned before, the Baby House was moved entirely to its present location just days before we arrived so that this facility may be renovated.  On the day we came by, there was work going on, but not on any great scale that might make the suggestions of completing the project in 4 months(as we've been told) seem plausible.

In fact, looking at it just days after it was emptied, it seemed eerily vacant.  It is hard to imagine kids having run about the place just days prior.

It certainly has space and grounds that the current location lacks.

I was intrigued by the signs that lined the driveway leading to the baby House.

I would love to know what messages they convey, and to whom they are directed, for they look rather foreboding and seem to portend a certain bleakness (apart from this one).  Unfortunately our translator does not read or speak Kazakh, and therefore could offer no insight apart from suggesting they were simply decorations.  Insightful!

So there you have it, a whole lot of information thrown in there where you probably didn't expect it.  We look forward to another Lazy Sunday here with temps in the mid 50's.  I hope you all have a nice rest of your weekend.  (Go Pats!)  Take Care.