12th floor, no waiting!

That's right, our elevator is back!!! We got a late start to the day today, so we did not do a morning walk (can you tell that we're having difficulty with having to get three people ready in the morning?). We're not sure whether the elevator was working this morning, but when we went out after Max's nap, it was back. Praise God (as one of our English-speaking Kazakh neighbors put it)!!

It was another day filled with eating for Max, but we won't bore you with an inventory (suffice it to say, it was comparable to yesterday). We spent the morning eating and playing and then eating some more. Max went down for his nap at 1pm and it was painless. Not a tear was shed and it only took about 5 or 10 minutes. After his nap, we decided to head back to the park across from the stadium on our way to the pub for pizza. We tried to keep him moving since he doesn't really ask for any food if he's distracted with going for a walk. We went down past the sculpture garden...

...all the way to the World War II memorial. We had driven past the memorial a few times, but had never seen how cool it is until we saw it up close. It is a large obelisk with a Kazakh warrior carved into it with his sword raised. At the bottom (to the right in the picture) is an eternal flame. The first picture is the one I took, but today was pretty overcast and it is fairly dim. The next picture is one that was linked on my Google Earth and it was a clear, sunny day when it was taken.



Dinner at the Alehause Pub was good. Max ate graham crackers and animal crackers until the pizza arrived. Then he polished off a slice and a half of that and he thoroughly enjoyed his first taste of pizza. Just wait until he tastes GOOD pizza from LaRosa's back home. On our walk back to the apartment, we ran into the Joneses and their new little girl Marina. She is adorable and we had a nice chat with them for a little while and we have plans to meet them tomorrow evening. We stopped at the market to stock up on things since the elevator is working (for now). It was such a pain lugging everything up that we wanted to take full advantage of a functioning elevator. They also had MaxiBons back in stock, so all in all, it was a great evening!

We have two video clips for today's post. The first one shows how much Max likes to walk (especially when holding on to something). In it, he is moving some furniture around to properly align things in fung-shui. When everything is just right, you'll notice him making a gesture that we see about a thousand times a day (MORE!!...he also asked for more while lying in bed tonight). The second video is Max just having some fun walking around in his train jammies. It's a short 9 second video, but that laugh is tremendous!