Presenting our daughter

So here she is, Ava Aceil.

She came into the world on February 1^st, 2007 weighing 6lb 4oz. She met her parents on October 10^th, 2007 weighing about 15lbs and is almost 26 inches tall. She was the second baby brought in, Amber said, “Awww”, immediately went up to hold her and we were essentially done at that point. We looked at the other babies, and played with them, but she had both of our hearts from the start. Aceil is her original name and we wanted to keep it as a middle name. Several of you picked up on the mention of twins in the earlier post, but unfortunately they just had too many health issues.

Now to the good stuff. Ava is, as you can see, adorable. She watches everything around her very intently. She’s fairly quiet, but quite the eater as seen here.

They gave us a full size spoon, and a bowl FULL of food. Olga (our translator), had us wedge the bowl right under her chin and start shoveling. At that point her chin was in her bowl of food. Olga said to feed her fast, because that’s how she is used to it. And eat fast she did. She cleaned out the bowl in no time. She even tried to take the spoon out of Ambers hand to feed herself faster. We may need bigger spoons! Naturally, the approach of a full size spoon into a baby sized mouth, controlled by baby sized hands had its downfalls. We were laughing so hard it was tough to keep up with the pace of feeding. Beth came over and took some pictures, as she and her husband found it pretty funny too. She then drank her formula straight from a cup! They said ‘she’s a big girl now’. I guess they take most of them off bottles at around 6-7 months old. If Amber is holding her she looks for me, if I’m holding her she looks for Amber. It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen (yes, I am a new dad talking about my little girl). She is fond of posing for the camera as well. I will dissuade her from the modeling career.
She’s not a big crawler, though she does ok. She prefers to stand and likes taking steps with help. She even pulls herself up in her crib! According to the orphanage doctor, she’s the only one in her group that does that. So this one isn’t just a proud papa talking, it’s a proud pediatrician too. She giggles a bit though she’s not very noisy. Her only little cry was when she got her diaper changed. They said she’s very quiet but sweet, and when we told the doctor we were adopting her, I got a nod, a smile and a thumbs up; kind of like she was saying ‘good choice’. We think so too. Really quite a bit. Really quite a lot in fact. We love our little baby girl and know you all will too when you meet her (YOU BETTER!). We’re so glad to be beyond the “Baby B" phase and to have a name and a face. Here’s one more picture of Ava being held by her mommy.
And for equality sake, here is a picture of Ava and daddy. Clearly you can see she adores me.

And for some final miscellany… Kazakh sausage tastes like salami, tenge (currency) is very pretty money, showering in brown water really isn’t so bad, chocolate butter is yummy, there’s nothing on TV in Kazakhstan either, if all goes well in court etc you will all get to meet her around the end of November, and go Cleveland.