A New Day

We have extra time to write this post because there’s no hot water, so we can’t take our planned showers or wash Alexey’s bottle from this morning. Sometimes “no hot water” means that the hot water isn’t hot. Today, however, “no hot water” means that there is no flow at all. As a result, everybody is using the cold water for everything, reducing its flow to almost nil.

We realized that we hadn’t provided an update on Alexey’s progress for a little while, so...

Alexey is babbling almost all the time, often trying to imitate what we say. He says Mama and Dada in the correct context with some regularity. He understands some of our Russian and some of our English too. Good luck to him if he thinks we speak Russian fluently. He also understands the words “nyet” and “no”. Note that “understands” does not mean “obeys”.

Alexey also seems to enjoy our musical offerings, often trying to sing along to, conduct, play percussion for, or sway to such classics as Old Macdonald, Frère Jacques, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and, heaven help us, the Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole song.

Alexey is eager to learn to walk. While he hasn’t taken his first independent steps yet, he does move along while clutching to the furniture, and stands up with only minimal holding on. He crawls very quickly, meaning that we have to be very alert.

Alexey is now eating more solid foods. He has tried pasta with meat sauce, bread, mashed potatoes, chicken, and some vegetables that aren’t mashed. He also eats baby biscuits. We are happy because this means that he is definitely learning how to bite and chew. He has further demonstrated his biting ability by chomping on our fingers and wrists on several occasions. When overly tired this past Monday, he expressed his opinions by biting Dada’s wrist hard enough to puncture the skin. Dada raised an official protest about this, in turn causing a huge amount of wailing on Alexey’s part.

All in all, we’re very pleased with Alexey’s progress. When we visited the Baby Home on Thursday, his doctor was impressed as well, saying that he was a “kharasho malchik”, an excellent boy.