A baby house tour!

Sam continues to grow and change literally before our eyes – he’s doing so well. We thought you may enjoy getting a tour of Sam’s baby house and seeing how we spend our time during each visit.

The baby house is very much the same as Lily Grace’s was in Karaganda, and as most are throughout Kazakhstan. They appear to have been constructed in the post-WWII era, and Sam’s baby house has been kept up remarkably well.

Enjoy the tour!

Steve and Tonya

Witnessing History – Asian Winter Games Torch Relay Comes to Borovoe

Our trip to adopt Sam has been full of surprises. But nothing prepared us for the amazing experience we had this past weekend, when the torch relay for the Asian Winter Games came right through here with a major, high-fanfare stop at a national monument tucked underneath the mountains just outside the grounds of our hotel.

It’s a treat we might have missed, had it not been for the kindness of two men at our hotel who have befriended us – Abdulla and Gani, who invited us to come with them to the event.

In both cases, these men sought us out because they could tell we’re Americans (we’re the only Americans here of course) and they both love America. Gani has had the opportunity to visit the United States for a month, and Abdulla hopes for a time when he can visit.
They were proud to be able to show us some Kazakh hospitality by escorting us through the entire ceremony and giving us a taste of some of Kazakhstan’s oldest traditions.

The 2011 Asian Winter Games is a multi sporting event that will be held in Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan from January 30 through February 6. This is Kazakhstan’s first time to host an event of this scale since gaining their independence from the Soviet Union. 27 countries from the Middle East through all of Asia are participating in this precursor to the 2014 Winter Olympic games in Sochi, Russia.

Torch Relay

The flame of the Games was officially lit in Kuwait (last host of the games) on January 11. The relay then began in Almaty and is traversing the cities and towns of Kazakhstan for 16 days before arriving at the opening ceremony in Astana on January 30. Because this is the region of his birth, Kazakhstan’s most famous Olympic athlete, Vladimir Smirnoff, ran the leg we attended. Smirnoff brought home Kazakhstan’s first gold medal for the 50km cross-country skiing event at the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer.

At least a thousand people came in from all over and lined the road here for hours in -10F weather to wave flags and cheer as Smirnoff ran to the national monument, igniting a gold bowl with fire.

We have put together a slideshow and a video to help give you a sense of this special day here in Kazakhstan. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us to witness, but the warmth and hospitality of Abdulla and Gane gave it a richness we would never have known, were it not for their willingness to share it all with us.

Tonya and Steve

We have a match!

Our official time of bonding with Sam has begun! He is a brown-eyed, sandy-haired nine-month old with an infectious grin and a lot of heart. This little fellow has overcome much, and continues to make great progress with the love and support of his caregivers and now with his new family-to-be.

Our first “legal day” of bonding was Wednesday of this week. As was the case with Lily Grace, we will be unable to share any pictures on the blog until we have cleared court in three weeks or so. So, we will try our best to describe our time with him in future posts.

What we can tell you now is that Sam LOVES picture books, particularly of babies and animals. And he therefore took to his new photo album from home right away, featuring his new Sissy. :-) And like Lily Grace at this point, Sam is not yet talking, and is beginning to make baby talk sounds when excited – like when looking at books. Oh, and without question, his favorite book is Pat the Bunny. For those of you who have this classic, you can picture his interaction with it – patting the bunny, playing peek-a-boo, and “putting his finger in Mummy’s ring”.

We still have most of this adoption journey yet to go, but we are so thankful to be placed officially on a path. Thank you all so much for your prayers and support.

Steve & Tonya

Borovoe, Kazakhstan – Asian Egypt?

Borovoe is a part of the Kokshetau steppe, a mixed steppe with plains, forest and highland. The climate is extreme here, with hot summers and severe winters (as we can attest!). The area is home to several lakes of all sizes, including five on the scale of Borovoe.

We’ve enjoyed showing you the sights in this part of the world, and have put this post together about Borovoe’s granite rock formations, unique to this area and unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

If you’re unable to see the video embedded above, just click this link to view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkwhaLBdMV8

The two most notable rock formations are Okzhetpes and Zhumbaktas. Okzhetpes literally means "inaccessible even to arrows" and has a peak that locals say resembles an elephant calf. The Zhumbaktas (“riddle stone”) formation, sits as an island in the lake, and resembles a sphinx.

We understand that most of you have had your own slice of Siberia back home! From what we’ve heard, you had a beautiful blanket of snow, and hopefully little to no ice to keep you from enjoying it. If you have pictures, we'd love to see them.

Till next time –
Steve & Tonya

Adoption Update

We wanted to bring all of you up to speed on where things stand regarding our adoption process. Here’s a recap:

We received a Letter of Invitation from the Ministry of Education of Kazakhstan to travel between the dates of December 10, 2010 and March 10, 2011 with a request to arrive as soon as possible. It then took a couple of weeks to receive our visas for travel.

Kazakhstan is in the process of converting their adoption program to become a “Hague” program, which involves more rigorous standards (hard to believe they could be more rigorous). They have therefore not been processing any new dossiers for several months, while they prepare to bring this new program online – probably in the late spring. In short, we are one of the last families (if not the last) to be adopting under the old system. That’s why they wanted us here ASAP – so they can get all of these “old system” cases done.

We left the States on December 26, arriving in Kazakhstan late the night of December 27. FYI, it is 12 hours ahead of Central time here – so if you live in the Central time zone, it’s always easy to know what time it is here! We’re your voice from the future.

At this time, an official match with a child has not yet been made – we are hoping for a match by mid-January, and are encouraged that this will happen.

Following this timetable, the mandatory bonding period would begin in mid-January, then court, and we would anticipate returning to the United States in early February while various paperwork steps are completed. Steve will then return about 4-6 weeks later to bring our child home.

Given the transition from I-600 cases (like ours) to I-800 cases, we are just thankful to have been invited to come and given this wonderful opportunity.

The most difficult part of the journey for us has been being away from Lily Grace. We are grateful to our family for doing such a great job taking care of her – she has adapted well and is on her own great adventure. We have experienced first-hand the blessing of technology, as we are able to have video calls with her via Skype.

So, our blog will continue to have those riveting posts on frozen lakes and borscht and who knows what next, as we endeavor to make the most of this time of waiting and preparation. :-)

Thank you for taking this journey with us – your support has been incredible, and we’re beyond blessed.

Steve and Tonya

In Praise of Borscht

We LOVE borscht, a regional beet-root soup found throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. So much so that it’s one of our all-time favorite dishes to eat here in Kazakhstan. It's hearty and warms the soul. Now, if this comes as a surprise, it should. After all, we, too, had “the list” during childhood – those foods that we absolutely, positively would NEVER eat. Brussel sprouts - check. Canned spinach - check. Cabbage rolls – check. BEETS OF ANY KIND – CHECK. So it has been nothing short of a revelation how delicious a soup based on beets can be.

Here’s how the scholars describe it: Borscht (also borsch, bortsch, borstch, borsh, barszcz, or borshch, Ukrainian: борщ) is a soup of Ukrainian origin that is popular in many Eastern and Central European countries. In most of these countries, it is made with beetroot as the main ingredient, giving it a deep reddish-purple color. In some countries tomato may occur as the main ingredient, while beetroot acts as a secondary ingredient. Other, non-beet varieties also exist, such as the tomato paste-based orange borscht and the green borscht.


Borscht variations: Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Chinese, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mennonite, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish.


Who knew? We didn’t, and we guess that’s the point. For us, borscht is more than borscht – it represents taking the blinders off and trying new things. There are all kinds of pleasant surprises out there, just waiting to be discovered.

For those of you who would like to give borscht a try, here’s a recipe we posted on Just A Pinch. If you try it, let us know what you think!

Steve and Tonya

Guldana Zholymbetova, Freedom Ambassador

When we learned that we would have to wait until mid-January for our official adoption process to begin, we feared extreme boredom would set in. That has not been the case, and one great reason why has been the opportunity to meet Guldana Zholymbetova. At the hotel dining hall, the tables are assigned – we’re table 49 – and Guldana’s table was next to our table for several days until her departure earlier this week. (Since Guldana speaks English – one of the few folks we’ve met who does – we surmise the staff seated her next to us as an act of mercy).

Guldana is a professor, the Dean of Jazz – no we’re not kidding – of the Kazakh National University of Art. Don’t you know there’s a great story here?

Guldana had been invited to bring some of her students to Borovoe to entertain during the New Year holiday. These young people – singers and a few instrumentalists – were very talented and a real treat for us to see.

However, it is feisty, determined, outspoken Guldana herself, and her life story that captivated us. Guldana’s music career has taken her all over the world, including to the United States 44 times –“more times than our President!” – she proudly boasts. She is a classically-trained pianist, having spent many years studying in Almaty, then several years of graduate work in Moscow and on to participate in international competition.

But Guldana was harboring a secret musical passion that was born when she was a young girl in her hometown of Karaganda (the city where Lily Grace was adopted), where her father was the director of the local music school. Karaganda was one of the sites of the Soviet Gulag – prison camp – system, which housed thousands of political prisoners during the Stalin post-war era. Among those prisoners were German musicians, and her father recruited many of them to be teachers in his school. And those musicians introduced Guldana to – jazz! She was drawn to it right away – partly because it was forbidden (when you meet Guldana, you can see why this makes perfect sense), and more importantly because it was unstructured, it was free-form, and to use her words, “it sets my soul free.” Add in a 1973 first encounter with Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, and Guldana was hooked for life.

She had to keep this love to herself – playing or listening to jazz was forbidden in the Soviet Union – but she dreamed of a day when she could become an ambassador of jazz music for all of Kazakhstan. Though she met resistance every step of the way – change comes hard after all – Guldana has perservered, establishing the Jazz Department at the music university in Astana and introducing a new generation of students to this distinctly American artform. Her students give concerts all over the country, playing for free, on a mission to spread awareness. A jazz club has opened in Astana due to her influence. And her student jazz bands have traveled throughout the world as music ambassadors for Kazakhstan, and recently toured the United States. (To see a clip of her students playing a recent concert in preparation for their trip, click the link below.)

“Since independence, our country has been absorbed by the search for a national idea,” says Guldana. “For me, that idea was established long ago by jazz music. Jazz is freedom, democracy, it represents a new idealogy – it reflects the health of our new nation.”

Steve and Tonya

Jazz band from Kazakh National University of Art


Guldana helps us fill out our Russian "menu sheet"

Happy New Year from Borovoe, Kazakhstan

As local legend has it, when God created the world, one people was bestowed with great forests, green fields and wide rivers and another people got beautiful mountains and blue lakes. But the Kazakh people were given only steppe. It hurt the Kazakhs' feelings and they began to ask the creator to give them a scrap of wonderful nature. In the north of Kazakhstan, between Astana and Kokshetau is this oasis, named Borovoe.

We are fortunate to get to stay here, about a 30-minute drive from Schuchinsk, where the baby house to which we are assigned is located.

Borovoe is known as Kazakhstan’s Switzerland. While its mountains are really large hills, the area lies in stark contrast to the surrounding steppe. Borovoe is a popular summer vacation destination, however, is also striking in winter. The birch and pine forests blanketed with snow, the interesting rock formations, Siberian musk deer foraging – it’s a magical place.





We’re certain that Santa lives nearby, and we expect to see his reindeer-pulled sleigh swoosh by any moment!

Wishing you a very happy New Year,
Steve & Tonya