Meet Otis Charles Rachman Jacobson

Obviously, we are going to start with important stuff. Otis is great! There’s a whole bunch of pictures below -- more than you could possibly want to look at. The main event today, besides how we are beginning to fall for the little guy, was doing Dr. Aaronson’s (our international adoption pediatrician) various tests and questionnaires to make sure he is OK. Here’s the summary:

• He was born November 1, 2004. So he’s almost nine months old.
• His mother was 23 when he was born. It was her first pregnancy. She gave up her rights in the hospital in Almaty. Apparently, she is from north of here and came to Almaty because she was not married to Otis’ father, and didn’t want to deal with the social difficulties of carrying to term at home.
• We have not gotten an “official” weight, but he seems to be about 20 pounds.
• He’s very responsive to what’s going on around him, happy, vocal, with good upper body strength, but pretty crappy at coordinating multiple movements, e.g. sitting up on his own or standing holding onto the table. This all appears well within the normal range of what’s expected of his age; normal is great for an orphanage kid.
• He has very definite ideas of what is interesting or not. One of the tests suggests you try to get him to pick up a coin or raisin to test fine motor skills. ZERO interest. But see yesterday re Sagat’s nose.
• Likewise, he loves being talked and sung to. (Thanks, Scott, although David’s, never mind, my voice will never match yours.) We were supposed to take “affectless” pictures from various angles with a sticker on his forehead so that Dr. A. could look for various problems that are indicated by feature placement. The pictures were hard to take. Our camera makes a tiny beep just before it flashes. David took the sticker pictures. Every time David tried to take a ¾ or profile, the camera beeped, Otis turned, saw David, and smiled. So much for an affectless profile!

Well, in this case, a picture (or 20) is worth a thousand words.

Other random notes:

• We moved. This morning we went off to the Ramstore to buy diapers; when we returned Sagat was waiting for us with the news he had found us an apartment. Initially he told us we could check in tomorrow, then switched to, “Check out now.” At which point we had twenty minutes to checkout, move our stuff to the new apartment and make our appointment at Baby House #3. When we returned at the orphanage, David discovered he had left his prescriptions in the minibar fridge, which necessitated a long, hot, uphill walk back to the hotel, where luckily they were recoverable.
• We are now staying in a medium-sized two bedroom apartment (by NYC standards) for about $2K per month that gets you exactly what it would get you in NYC – a third story walk up in a cool neighborhood (next to the National Press Club), with terrible wiring and indifferent air conditioning. All things considered, a good deal compared to the $15+K/month that we were going to incur at the oilmen’s’ palace (“palace” = distinctly relatively speaking).
• We ate the weirdest food ever tonight. This includes the night that Ralph and Lisa Linden joined us for an evening of sampling Chinese food preparatory to an HR&A Christmas party when we ordered "duck cake with blood" to see what it was, only to discover that it was a disk of jellied duck blood. Tonight’s menu included: salami and provolone salad with mayo; a salad of sliced tongue, sliced cucumbers, fried mushrooms and shredded chicken with mayo (is a theme developing here?); mutton stewed in cream with walnuts, dried fruit and way too many cloves; and baked chicken doused in the brine from the olive jar, with four toothpicks hidden in it, accompanied by sliced boiled potatoes topped with pickles and melted cheese. Sidebar: If you order a Gin & Tonic here, you get charged separately for the gin and the tonic, with the tonic costing twice as much as the gin.
• We have loved all the calls and e-mails. Half of Jones Day calling from Elliott’s office (?) was a particular highlight.
• We will soon be sharing our bonding time with a couple from Michgan and a young single woman from Tucson, who is accompanied by her mom.