September 30, 2002

After the troubles of the previous night, Evan slept pretty soundly until 7am, when he woke us up with his usual cries and demands for breakfast. Julia was already up and getting ready for work, with breakfast waiting. Kristin checked Evan's diaper, and then Lee fed him a nice bowl of oatmeal while Kristin had breakfast. Kristin took care of Evan while Lee ate and got dressed, and then Kristin had her turn to get ready for the morning's work.

Evan was very grumpy and cried a lot. He couldn't seem to decide whether he was hungry or sleepy or bored. He wasn't interested in toys and when we sat him down for more food, he just pushed it away. We were getting more and more certain that he had some kind of food allergy that the orphanage hadn't told us about: perhaps milk? (We'd put a little bit in his oatmeal, and he'd had little bits on previous days also. He was also starting to show a little bit of a rash after some of his meals.) Lee finally found that he could calm Evan by walking him around the apartment (especially the balcony and the corridor between the apartment and the elevator) in his Baby Bjorn. We figured this was a good sign for the morning's errands, since he'd be in it for most of our outing. Inna and Vitali arrived at 9:15am or so, and we were off! Evan definitely enjoyed being outside the apartment and in a moving car, as he calmed down almost immediately. He also enjoyed seeing Inna and hearing her speak to him in Russian.

Our first stop was the travel agency, where we purchased our plane tickets to Warsaw and Evan's ticket from Warsaw to Chicago. We also changed the date of our Warsaw-to-Chicago tickets because now we were planning on doing that on Friday instead of next Monday. Finally, we made reservations at the Warsaw Marriott. Boy are we looking forward to that! Hopefully, they'll have Internet access, a real shower, and laundry machines! (Not necessarily in that order.)

While at the travel agency, Inna left us to go to our appointment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Apparently, she wanted to save time by doing it while we were at the travel agency. We'd walked by the Ministry building the day before, and Inna told us that we'd end up waiting in line for a long, long time, so we really didn't feel like we were missing out on anything.  

We waited about half an hour at the travel agency for Inna to get back, though the tickets and reservations took nearly that long to finalize anyway. (This was the first time that we had used our credit card since arriving in Ukraine!)

Next, we drove across town to the hospital, where Evan had his required medical exam. (Required by the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, for his immigration visa.) By this time, Evan was completely out of sorts. He had missed his first snack-time of the day, his first nap of the day, and was starting to miss lunch, too! What a horrible situation! Nothing we could do would satisfy him. He cried and cried, sounding truly wretched the whole time. The doctor told us that he was just fine, and that he might have a food allergy as we'd suspected. We need to be careful about milk, eggs, cheese, juices (anything except green apple juice--which he'd had at the orphanage), and nuts. He also recommended that we watch what types of fabrics we dressed him in, as that might also be affecting him. Eventually, Inna took Lee to pay for the exam, and when Lee got back, he found that Evan was quiet! Kristin had offered him the cereal that she'd wisely put into a covered bowl in preparation for the day, and he was greatly appreciative of it.

On the way back to the apartment, Evan was so tired that he couldn't even pick up the cereal himself; mommy had to put it in his mouth.

Inna and Vitali dropped Kristin and Evan off at the apartment, where they played for a while and then had lunch. (Evan was amazingly well-behaved all of a sudden, happily!) Inna, Vitali, and Lee continued on to an Internet cafe, and then to another one (when the first didn't work out). Lee caught everyone up on what had happened since the last couple of days in Donetsk, sent some photos, and sent our return flight information.

When Lee got back to the apartment, Kristin and Evan were both asleep. He had some lunch in the kitchen, and caught up our photos and online baby book.

Evan got up again around 3pm and was again grumpy. We played and ate, ate and played, and he never quite seemed to get out of his funk. So, around 5pm, we put him down again, but he didn't really get to sleep until about 5:30pm, and we let him sleep until about 7pm. When he woke up this time, we gave him a big dinner. We figured part of his problems before were that he was still hungry. This time, we fed him until we thought he couldn't possibly fit any more food in his little body, and he gladly ate it all up. After dinner, he was very quite and serious, but not unhappy. He played mostly by himself, with mom and dad bugging him a bit, actually, when we tried to join in. By 9pm or so, he had had his diaper changed (boy, did that make him happy, especially the part where he was naked (except for his diaper) and playing with mom and dad on the bed. In general, Evan is usually happy when he's got less clothes on. We really got the feeling that this rarely happened at the orphanage. they seemed to use a lot of clothes, surely because they needed to minimize colds and other illnesses.

This evening, Evan finally put his foot down about the photo taking. Daddy was using the flash on the camera since it was pretty soft lighting in the room, and he surprised Evan just as Evan was looking up from a nesting cup. Evan's next look said something along the lines of, "One more flash photo and I'll go right back to that orphanage in Donetsk and wait for the next family to pick me up!" So we cooled it off.

Around 9:30pm, we started out evening ritual and went through the events of the day and what we're be doing the next day. Evan was very quiet, laying his head nicely on mommy's shoulder with the soft blanket over him. Then, we put him in his crib and sang lullabies to him for another half an hour, and he was sound asleep by 10pm, without crying once! Wow, what a day!

We think we may be on to something with avoiding milk and cheese in Evan's diet. It made it hard to find food for him for dinner; Julia's cooking is great, but she uses a lot of onions, butter, milk and cream--like everyone else here in Ukraine, it seems, so we had to be very careful with what we gave Evan. It looks like it paid off, though.