In which Owen's parents study the effects of gluttony and starvation.
I knew we should have asked for the burrito.
You know what I'm talking about-- the Baby Burrito, the big wrapper of blankets the nurses brought Owen to us in every day. We left it behind. I'm always doing that-- throwing out the wrapper.
And the instructions are always in the wrapper.
As Robin predicted, I jinxed us by bragging to everyone about what a good sleeper Owen is. He didn't want to go to bed last night and, for the first time yet, he got up in the middle of the night. Partly it was due to company. More about that in a bit, but for now suffice it to say he wanted to be a part of the action and wasn't too excited about being shuffled off to Sleepy Town.
The middle of the night bit, however, was pure Puppet error.
It would appear, after today's research in the baby raising encyclopedias, that there is a body weight to formula ratio. Who'd a thunk it? We've been using the same regimen that the Strelos, the Schroeders and the Beyers use. Of course, we didn't factor in that our skinny boy is a bit lighter than those babies.
As a result, we had a few well-intentioned feasts of about 40 oz. of formula when 30 would have done just fine. I kid you not, when we picked the kid up last night you could hear his stomach slosh.
Figuring out that this might not be the best thing to insure our child's comfort, we cut way back. Of course that resulted in a midnight order for take-out. The pizza joints were closed, so we coughed up some more of the precious Nutrilak. You can see a picture of it and the "Binni" cereal Owen eats at left.
We've made a few adjustments and think we have it figured out. No more pushing the bottle away at noon and, hopefully, no more shrieks for it at midnight. If we're lucky, those diapers might be a little less... interesting, too.
Of course, Owen wasn't the only one to dabble in the deadly sin of gluttony. His parents did fine in that department as well. The McCalls made spaghetti last night and, despite some initial misgivings, put a little Kazakh hamburger in the sauce. An hour after eating this deliciousness, we were all pleasantly stuffed and we neither rode the belly rollercoaster nor did we neigh.
(Horse is a delicacy in Kazakhstan.)
The Peace Corps boys were back for dinner and a little Internet access. At 50 kbps, we've got the fastest connection in town. No new pictures of them, but since so many have asked about their cuteness via e-mail, I went ahead and enlarged one of our other pictures. (It's not like I don't have the time...) That's Bryan first and Ryan second. As a reminder, you can visit their website here.
As always, they brought their stories with them. This time we heard about the "Golden Man," Kazakhstan's national treasure. A picture of it is at left. Apparently, in 800 or 900 A.D., Kazakhstan's original natives were an Aryan "Turkic" race. They were later driven out by the invading Mongols, but they left behind a series of burial mounds. Inside of one of these, a skeleton in the golden armor you see at left was discovered.
The Golden Man has since been secreted away in a vault somewhere and can't be seen by tourists. If you're lucky, you can catch a replica. Meanwhile, the rest of the mounds remain, to this day, largely unexcavated. In fact, Ryan tells us that in a nearby village, they've built a bar on top of one of them. Apparently the Soviets weren't too interested in ancient Kazakh history.
This is all very unsettling to a small ethnic group called (and I'm totally massacring this) the Wyrgans. They're a remnant of the original Kazakh aborigines, but a very loosely organized group as yet unrecognized by the state. Ryan and Bryan have met their self-styled "king" in one of the villages. For a bottle of wine, he'll tell you all about his nation's proud history.
In addition to dinner, we gave the boys a DVD to watch, a half-bottle of completely undrinkable (to us) wine, and my court suit. It was quite snug for court and I've reconciled myself to the fact that my size will, from this moment forward, go steadily in the wrong direction. Ryan, my friend, it will look beautiful on you. And we're totally claiming it as a charitable donation on our income tax.
Leaving Kokshetau is all about downsizing. The more we think about carrying our baby and our stacks of luggage onto that winged box of a plane, the less materialistic we become.
"Come back, boys," we told them. "There's going to be an EXCELLENT yard sale in the next couple of weeks."
