Bonding Day #8 and Missing Home

We got a nice smile from Max when they brought him into the bonding room. He also (kinda) reached out to us, which was nice to see. They had him bundled up again with like three layers and a hat even though it was about 76 degrees and sunny outside. We took the hat off as soon as the caregivers had left the room. Of course, people walk through the bonding room every 15 minutes or so, but no one stopped to scold us for having his hat off or letting him play around on the floor by the bench instead of on our clean blanket. He must have liked his head being rubbed because he kept feeling the top of his noggin (maybe he just likes the feel of his hair, which seems like they are letting grow instead of shaving it. He was completely bald when we first started the bonding process.). Here's our first family photo...



And here's some smiley photos without his little hat...

We are definitely missing home. It is a weird feeling for us. We want to stay here to see Max of course, but we are ready to be back home where we do not get stared at wherever we go and there is no language barrier. The people here must rarely see Americans because they all give us the eyeball as we pass by and they are not very subtle about it either. The language barrier is especially frustrating because we are without our interpreter the majority of the time. She is only with us for official adoption business. The other problem is this Cyrillic alphabet. Since there are so many characters that are not letters to us, we can't even sound out the words we are seeing. And some of their letters get pronounced differently. Their H is pronounced like our N and their Z is like our number 3. That gets to be very frustrating. At least when we went to France, Spain, and Italy, we could sound out the word and recognize root words that were common in the English language (or Latin for me). It's not that we dislike the country or that we are miserable here, it is just frustratingly different at times.

But tonight, we went out to dinner by ourselves (no interpreter and no Jonathan and Shannon) and it was a success. We went to the cafe attached to the bowling alley/pool hall and had a pizza and a soda. It was a close approximation of American pizza, so that helped. It was basically a pepperoni pizza with no pizza sauce. Very greasy, but not bad at all.