She fell asleep in my arms today.

What else needs to be said?

Right, so about my callused feet. I’ve been catching myself looking interestedly at the kitchen grater lately and I … whuh? Oh. Um, ahh, you’d rather hear about the baby? Well ok then.

Yesterday’s visit went well. Chloe was feeling a bit better than the previous day though she still seemed to be a bit sleepy and bothered by her teeth – I gathered this from her attempts to cram her teething toy way into the back of her mouth. Any illusions I might have had of my little girl (or orphanage babies in general) being fragile flowers are gone. Chloe is a sturdy baby with a surprising amount of determination and wherewithal for such a little thing. Not that I have so much experience with babies as to be able to compare but, you know. Based on nothing in particular, here am the facks as I sees ‘em. You should hear her grunting like a tiny longshoreman while trying to pull up to a sitting position. Or chugging her tea or kefir at lunch. Frat boys in the middle of a pub crawl are more delicate. Hide the beer bongs, boys.

So a few things about our daughter: Chloe’s eyes are so dark that you almost can’t distinguish her irises from the pupils. “Doe-eyed,” isn’t that the expression? Her favorite color is orange. She favors her orange cup to chew on, prefers the orange button on her Winnie the Pooh telephone, and is drawn to the orange parts in any pattern or picture. Chloe’s the cutest little girl who ever resembled Tweety Bird (it’s all in the forehead) and Wallace from Wallace and Gromit (a certain toothy, cheeky smile she smiles). Sometimes she’ll glance sideways with a hint of a smile on her face that makes her look like she’s plotting some secret bit of fun that she knows her poor old parents would disapprove of but she’s going to do it anyway. When she’s waiting to get fed, she pounds on the table with her hands and does a side-to-side head waggle like a prize fighter waiting for the starting bell. It’s the best move ever and now I totally do that pound and waggle when Zac is dealing me my Uno hand or I’m waiting for the blog comments page to load up.

We have no idea as to what is Chloe’s actual size. I got a variety of baby clothes sized from nine to 24 months and they all seem to generally fit. The thing that you can’t see from the pictures of her is that she’s almost always wearing three to five layers of clothing during our visits. And no, it’s not because we’re outside. We’re actually in the music room within the baby house, which, though it does usually tend to run a bit cooler than the rest of the building, is still heated to at least 70 degrees. When we dropped off her outfit and diaper for the day in the baby room, she was dressed in snow pants and moon boots. In her playpen, in a room that’s probably about 78 degrees Fahrenheit. She looked like a stuffed sausage.

People in Kazakhstan believe in keeping babies warm and bundled at all times. If you’ll look at the pictures from today, you’ll see that her feet look like enormous clown shoes. That’s because she’s wearing footed tights under the yellow footie creeper which are topped by wooly knitted booties and then on top of those, the caregivers stretched on the cute little (well, they used to be little) mary jane socks that her auntie Sara got for her. It’s the same for the rest of her clothes. She’s wearing a long-sleeved onesie and a padded jacket (a jacket!) under that yellow creeper. I can’t wait to get her home so that I can check her little self out.

Anyway, aside from all that she’s an okay baby – if you like babies, which, you know, maybe I do or maybe I don’t whydoyouwannaknow? She spit up on me today at the beginning of the visit so we both smelled like vomit for the entire two hours and her nose was all snotty and boogery from a cold that’s been going around so I had an armful of that delightful mess when she fell asleep while I was rocking her toward the end. So anyway, did I mention her eyelashes? The most beautiful long fairy lashes …