Day 3 - Tour of the Baby House

Today the director of the baby house gave us a full tour and history of the facility where our daughter currently resides. This particular baby house, The Delphi (The Dolphin), is considered one of the best in the country by Kazakhstan's First Lady (who has visited on more than one occasion). We witnessed first hand how well cared for and loved these children are by those responsible for them while they are there.

LMS was a little quiet today. She was very happy to see us (apparently bragged with excitement to her group when she saw us), just quiet. We spend most of our time looking at the abundance of family photos I brought and coloring in the coloring book. Tomorrow we get to take her outside and play...with snow thick on the ground, this should be a great time.

Following our visit at the baby house, we lunched with our coordinator and then went shopping at the mall. The mall...more like an over priced indoor flea market, was entertaining in itself. Each level by merchandise category. The first floor was lined with cell phones for sale (no shortage here. I've never seen so many cell phones on display). Up a couple of floors was fur coats and hats. EVERYONE where's fur here.

This evening, we shared a make shift happy hour with 2 other American families wrapping up their adoption process followed by a fun dinner out with one of the families. Each of us are adopting children from different facilities. The first family from another baby house in the near by town of Rudney and the second family (who we dined with) from the older children's facility here in Kostanai. All three families are working with different agencies, but when there are rumors of another American family near by, you tend to seek them out!