Wednesday - day 7 - More sight seeing.

I told you that I cursed myself.

We went to bed at a decent time last night, because today was our interview with Vienna Star, which is our adoption agency down here. This is the most critical phase of the whole process down here. You don't even get to see a social worker. Here you sit for about 15 minutes with an attorney.

I was asleep by 11:00 for the first time since we are down here. We had a great day yesterday, I'm in dreamland, everything was going great.

Great, that is until I wrote yesterday how great it was going.

My dream of a quiet mountain meadow with butterflies floating all around, was pure bliss. The part about the two midgets and the six pack of coronas was the best part. (uh, but that is for a different blog). Anyway, I'm rambling.

Have I set the mood yet? The rain outside was lightly hitting the windows, it is actually very cool here at night. So we're all bundled up in our covers.

You get the picture yet? Nice and quiet, all sleeping soundly.

That is…

Until the demon spawn awoke at 1:00 am. And none of that cute little baby cooing going on. Nope.

I can not put into words, the volume level coming from this little 6.5 kilogram (at least that's what the medical report says) bundle of joy. For the last few days she has been waking up a little fussy when she is ready for a night time feeding. Not this time.

I swear it went something like this, (deep base monster voice)

"I AM EFFING HUNGRY!!!

I NEED A BOTTLE RIGHT NOW!!!

I CANNOT WAIT ANOTHER SECOND!!!

I AM ABOUT TO WAKE UP EVERY LIVING SOUL FOR MILES AROUND UNLESS I GET THIS BOTTLE.!!!"

After the 2 minutes it takes to warm up the bottle, Amelia decided that she was going to show us. She refused to take the bottle. Can you believe that?

Instead, she continued her tirade, at decibles that only the 200 watt/ per channel stereo that I had in college could reach.

Linda and I were quite the tag team, trying things to get this baby to stop screaming and to get a bottle in her yapper! Nothing worked. I could not be the party that sat by on the sidelines. So I took that baby into burping position. I walked up and down, patting her back. She must have a nice hand print on her back by now.

45 minutes straight. My left arm was becoming lifeless and limp. I lost all feeling. I was delirious from exhaustion.

If any of us even talked for 45 minutes straight, we would be drinking herbal tea and sucking on throat lozenges for the next couple of days.

Finally, the clouds opened up and the light from above shone down on me. I could see the faint glow of the halo coming back.

SHE BURPS!!!

And not just a little baby burp, she rips like five in a row, it would've made any teenage boy proud.

And just like that she takes her bottle, has a couple of ounces and passes out for the rest of the night. We actually had to wake her up for our appointment this morning.

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Speaking of which, we had to all be down stairs waiting for our driver at 7:50 am. Well, of course being the first time with two kids to get ready in the morning we were running around like lunatics. But we were only 5 minutes late.

We all had to be dressed in our Sunday finery. We had to make an impression on every level. We actually went to this meeting with the couple from Denmark. We get to this place and we all have to walk up the 4 flights of steps. Carrying our kids.

They made us all wait for about 20 minutes. My family got to go in first. Our translator introduced us to the attorney. She was a little scary, she shows no emotions. She barely smiles at you. It is very "Gestapo" like.

Anyway, the questions she asks are very straight forward. Anybody with kids can answer them. Her questions focused mainly on James. How have we raised him, what values have we instilled in him. How do we see ourselves in 20 years? I actually answered "old". For a brief second I saw a slight smile on her face.

Then she says, congratulations! So that's it. Our next step is to get her pass port photos taken, and a few minor things, we have to stay here in Medellin at least until Monday, because the baby has to get a shot and we must show a record of it to the American Embassy in Bogota. We are actually a day ahead of schedule.

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Unfortunately today on our trip to the Medellin Zoo my camera stopped working. So I only took a handfull of pictures. We went to the zoo with the family from Denmark. And once again, their little boy, Simon, and James were inseperable. It is amazing, that kid doesn't speak english and his parents told me that the two kids are actually talking about the same things most of the time. I guess 5-year old boy, is a pretty universal language when all they are actually doing is trying to come up with a crazy stunt to impress the other one.

Here you can see the very strict standards the Colombian government has when driving children around.

Pretty crazy, huh?

Somebody told us what to expect when we got to the zoo today, it is kind of like a glorified Long Island Game Farm. You know how zoo's all over the world are trying very hard to make realistic habitats for these wonderful creatures? Well not here.

I was only able to get one picture, but you get the idea. Here is the mighty Black Rhino in all it's glory.

I must say though, all of the animals are up close and personal. The Rhino was probably the furthest thing from the viewers.
There was 2 adult hippos and a baby hippo. They were probably 10 feet away in there pool that is smaller than my swimming pool. Also in the big cat area, they had 2 of every kind of cat you could think of.

There was a gigantic Male lion and two female lions, one of which was in heat and had to be separated into a holding cell. The lions were going crazy, roaring all day long. It was actually awesome.

As sad as it is for these animals, this trip to the zoo was great. When was the last time you went to the Bronx zoo and actually saw an animal that wasn't 500 feet away, lying under some shrubbery?

Anyway, another amazing thing at this zoo is the fact that wild Iquanas roam the park. These things are like the size of a Komodo Dragon. If you look at the bird expression, even it is like "Holy crap! look at the size of that thing!" This one was one of the smallest ones we saw. And they are everywhere. They mainly travel in the tree tops, and we were warned that they tend to, and I quote from our translator, "Drop shit bombs, not like a chicken but a big giant shit bomb." Some of the ones that were in the trees were probably 6 to 8 feet long.

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Tonight, the other family with a five year old boy invited us to go to the local mall with her and her son, Santiago. This mall is incredible. We didn't get to see too much of it because we couldn't get the kids out of the Amusement park area. It has some pretty incredible rides for the kids. We were in this area for about an hour and it cost us a whopping $20,000.00 pesos ($10).

But the best part for me, was dinner at the food court. MMMM! Nothing says home cooking like KFC baby! I can't wait to go back for some Dunkin Donuts and some Subway!

The woman showed us how to get a cab from the hotel to the mall and back. It costs about $5000.00 pesos each way. Which is a total of about $5 U.S. round trip.

Elisa was very nice to us, She certainly made us feel very comfortable here and we appreciate everything that she did for us!
We echanged emails, so she'll be on the Carman family christmas card list.

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That's it for now. Good night and God bless.