Jenya!

Evan: We got Jenya today! She is either sleeping or she's crying. I can make her smile by shaking her hand and saying "Hello! Nice to meet you!"

Andrew: Today we picked up Mohana. She is very cuddly but feisty. She has a temper. She does not like strangers, including us! She threw a huge fit. The ayah says she and her cribmate Bhargabi are very naughty, but they are friends. They are naughty together. She has black curly hair and is very very cute. There were twelve babies in the room in the nursery and seven of them are going to American families. One baby took a liking to me. Whenever I smiled, he smiled. Bhargabi did not cry at all. She showed almost no expression and fell asleep in Mrs. Ross' arms. Bhargabi is also very cute. I can't believe Jenya is my new sister. She is so nice. She is sleeping right now.

letter to Jenya

10:00 a.m. Kolkata time
September 18, 2007

Dear Jenya,
Today we are going to pick you up from Matri Sneha ("mother's love"). We can't wait to meet you. We bet you will be the best sister ever. We wonder what your personality will be like. Will you be feisty? Will you be cuddly? Who knows? We started this adoption process when Andrew was six and Evan was two. It took three years. You had your 10-month birthday two days ago.

There are four people in our family and you make the fifth. Evan is the little one with the orange curly boing-boing hair and the rosy cheeks, Andrew is the nine-year-old who is almost as tall as Daddy and has kind of long bangs, Daddy is the man who goes to work every day and has glasses. He is the best dad ever, lucky you. Then there is Mom. She has long curly brown hair and glasses. She is the best mom in the world, lucky you.

We are going to take you to Providence, Rhode Island. Your house will be a big yellow house with a bright red car and a green station wagon. Their names are Rosie (the red van) and Oz (the wagon). Your room will be upstairs. Andrew's room will be right next to yours. Evan's will be down the hall. Mom and Dad's room will be right in the middle. The stairs are across from Mom and Dad's room.

We are excited about meeting you, a lot. We are really, really, really, really, really excited about meeting you. We named you Jenya.

Love, Andrew and Evan

We arrived in Kolkata!

MONDAY
(note: I'm adding some photos to the posts of the last few days. Scroll down if ya wanna see them!)

Evan: We are going to get our baby tomorrow. We can’t wait! Her name there is Mohana. But we named her Jenya. We are in Kolkata. We took a plane to get here instead of a train because a train would take 20 hours and the plane took 2 hours.

Andrew: Today we arrived in Kolkata. It is very noisy and I like it. The women here look more Asian than the people in Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. It is so much hotter and humid in Kolkata, I can barely stand it. I can hardly wait to pick up Jenya Amy Mohana tomorrow at the orphanage at 11:00.

Chess! Pottery! Our last day in Jaipur

SUNDAY

Evan: We went on another train from Jaipur to Delhi in the evening. At the Jaipur hotel we went swimming in the pouring rain. The pool was overflowing.

Andrew: We visited two Jaipur Blue Pottery stores. One of them was a big workshop where there was a lot of pottery. I got a tile with an elephant on it. The second one we visited I like a lot more since we had already bought a lot of things. It was an old old potter who was very nice. He is also famous for making Jaipur Blue Pottery famous and popular again. I also got an Indian chess set. I’ll bring it in to school later. It is the king of Jaipur vs the king of Udaipur. I really really like it, and so does Evan.

catching up

Another note from Mom - we're in Delhi, it's late Sunday night, and we have a moment to catch up on our blog posts. I'll add more photos later, and the boys will have more to say soon, I'm sure! Tomorrow we will catch a plane to Kolkata.

Hawa Mahal

SATURDAY
Evan: We went to the Hawa Mahal. It’s a building that was made for the queens to climb the stairs and see what was happening on the streets without being seen. It was plain on the inside and decorated on the outside. It’s made to look like a crown and it is pink. Pink is the welcome color and Jaipur was painted pink to welcome Prince Albert a long time ago.

Andrew: We were going to go to the Hawa Mahal, but it didn’t open for 10 minutes, so we went shopping in a store next to it. There was a boy working there, who went to school six days a week, and this was his day off. He worked there on his day off to get extra money for his family. He didn’t learn English in school. He learned it listening to gossip from the foreigners talking to the shopkeepers. He was very nice and 14 years old. We had a lot of conversation. We also compared the differences between baseball and cricket. It was cool learning about cricket and talking to him and learning about him. That was my favorite part of the day.

We also went to the Hawa Mahal. It had an awesome view of the street and a wonderful breeze. We also shopped for bangles (Indian bracelets). It took a long time. We were an Indian attraction. Everyone was looking at me and my brother since they hadn’t seen anyone like us before. I took many pictures of the huge group of boys just staring at us. And lots of families were all looking out of their windows. We also met our auto-rickshaw driver’s son.

Elephant Day!

FRIDAY

Evan: Today we went to the Amber Fort! The Amber Fort has many many other forts to guard. We rode an elephant up to the fort! It was really bumpy. I felt like I was going to fall off. Our elephant was a girl elephant named Jhumpa. All the riding elephants are female because they are more gentle. At the Amber Fort the queen had a wheelchair for when she was wearing too much makeup and her clothes were too heavy. We also saw hooks on the ceiling for the king’s throne to swing from.

Andrew: Today we went to the Amber Fort. We met up with our friends Mr. and Mrs. Ross, who are also adopting from the same orphanage that we are. Their baby’s name is Devi. We were going to take a taxi to the Amber Fort, but instead we all crammed into an auto-rickshaw. Mrs. Ross, my mom and my dad sat on the main bench, and there was a teeny bench facing them that Evan and I sat on (no backrest – ouch!). Mr. Ross sat in the back storage area (no door). It turned out the driver knew a guide at the Amber Fort. We met up with our guide and took an elephant ride up to the Amber Fort. It was soooo cool. Our elephant’s name was Jhumpa. It was a female. There are no working male elephants since they are too aggressive. They do have male working elephants in the city streets, and we saw one today. The Amber Fort was sooo interesting. The second king that occupied this fort had 12 wives. There were secret passages throughout the fort. The fort was beautifully decorated on the inside, and the outside looked ready for action in case of any military attacks. Some of the inside paintings were 400 years old, since they used natural dyes which will never come off. There is a room with a lot of teeny pieces of mirrors in it, it was the queen’s winter quarters, and when you lit one candle the whole room warmed up and lit up.

A Long Day

THURSDAY: Agra to Jaipur

Evan: We had to wait 5 hours in the train station because the train got delayed 2 hours, and then it got delayed more, and they kept delaying it more and more hours. Then it took 6 hours to get to Jaipur. It took the whole day, except for dinner. I didn’t have any lunch or breakfast that day! I ate candy and cookies instead, and a peanut-butter sandwich. The train was a sleeping train. It had a bench and then a fold-out bed on top, with a curtain. It had a little ladder.

Andrew: We were going to take the train to Jaipur and see the Hawa Mahal and go shopping. But our train got delayed for 2 hours. It was interesting to look at all the activity in the agra train station. Then our train got delayed another hour and a half. I got bored. I had seen the same thing over and over again. There were flies and mosquitoes. There was a cow-dung smell. Just when I was feeling completely down in the dumps, a whole family of monkeys came bounding down the train tracks, hanging on to everything. I saw a monkey holding on to a wire. Ahead of it was another wire connected to a candy shop. It slid down the wire and stole a piece of candy. I also saw a monkey eating a banana (and tons of other garbage). Our train got delayed another half hour. Then it got delayed another hour. Once we got on the train it was fine. Looking out the window was interesting. When we finally got to Jaipur, there was no time to anything but go to the hotel and have dinner.

a quick note from Mom

Hi everyone - We're in the city of Jaipur! Andrew and Evan are keeping careful notes on our journey, but we can't post them very easily. Our hotel doesn't have a great internet connection. We'll make sure to post on Sunday night when we get back to Delhi, and maybe before then if we can find an internet cafe.

Stay tuned!

:)

Sept. 12 in Agra

Evan: Today I went to the Taj Mahal! It was really amazing and cool. Some people thought that I am more interesting than the Taj Mahal because people were looking at me instead of the Taj Mahal and taking pictures of me! The Taj Mahal it has water right below it for its reflection. It’s a tomb for the emperor and his wife. I’m about the size of an M&M to the Taj Mahal. On the way back a person that drove a bicycle rickshaw and other people were chasing us down the road to try to get money. A bicycle rickshaw is a bicycle that pulls a bench that pulls humans, and sometimes it carries cargo. The end.

Andrew: Today we went to the Taj Mahal. It was so amazing that when I first saw it, all I could say was “WOW.” It was sooooo cool. It was humungus and I was the size of a peanut M&M bit in half compared to it. My parents were the size of whole peanut M&Ms compared to it. Random fact of the day: the emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his beloved wife, and was going to build an identical one in black across the river from the Taj Mahal to be his own final resting place, but this never happened because his son got tired of waiting for the throne and imprisoned him and murdered him.

Our train to Agra got postponed two hours. It was fine, though. It’s just that time seemed to move like a snail. The train ride was very interesting. I saw tons of cool animals like water buffaloes, cows, goats, and hogs. It saddened me to see how many poor people lived along the railroad tracks. Some families lived in shacks the size of a small car.

Today I had the best meal so far. It was lentils with naan.

Sept. 11: Last Delhi Day

Evan: On Tuesday we went to the Red Fort. It’s a fort that the emperor built a long time ago. A army soldier with a big machine gun came up to me and pinched my cheeks. Because in India they have black hair and no rosy cheeks. About 40 people a day come up to me to pinch my cheeks and they ask my name and how old I am instead of asking Mom and Dad.

Andrew: Tuesday we went to the Red Fort. The Red Fort was built by the same Mugal emperor that built the Taj Mahal. (He had some pretty good architects!) The architecture was absolutely amazing. They had a huge throne stand, but the throne isn’t there, since in 1739 Iran stole the famous peacock throne and still hasn’t given it back. We went to the National Museum. They had awesome collections of coins and weapons. They also had awesome statues and pretty cool paintings. They had an amazing life-size sculpture of an Indian war elephant with tons of armor on it, and a lot of the armor was studded with gold. in the coin room, there were huge coins and small coins, all different sizes from many different periods of times, from now back to the very beginning of civilization in India, like at the Indus valley.
There are some very nice kids in bad situations. There’s this one kid that was so nice next to the Red Fort, selling postcards. My mom didn’t buy anything from him, but I thought he might be able to sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. He didn’t go to school because he didn’t have enough money, but he had great English.

The bicycle rickshaws are absolutely amazing. They carry a couple people or huge amounts of cargo. There was this one huge amount of cargo on a bicycle rickshaw, tied with string, and a guy was hanging on the back hanging on to the string. It was so funny.

A lot of the people in India have fancier cell phones than my mom and dad. Everybody asks my brother’s name and thinks he is so cute. Around the hotel, I’m known as Evan’s brother. (No fair!) Sometimes big huge tough guards with machine guns come up and pinch Evan’s cheeks and shake our hands. It’s sorta funny.

September 12: Agra

Evan: Today I went to the Taj Mahal! It was really amazing and cool. Some people thought that I am more interesting than the Taj Mahal because people were looking at me instead of the Taj Mahal and taking pictures of me! The Taj Mahal it has water right below it for its reflection. It’s a tomb for the emperor and his wife. I’m about the size of an M&M to the Taj Mahal. On the way back a person that drove a bicycle rickshaw and other people were chasing us down the road to try to get money. A bicycle rickshaw is a bicycle that pulls a bench that pulls humans, and sometimes it carries cargo. The end.

Andrew: Today we went to the Taj Mahal. It was so amazing that when I first saw it, all I could say was “WOW.” It was sooooo cool. It was humungus and I was the size of a peanut M&M bit in half compared to it. My parents were the size of whole peanut M&Ms compared to it. Random fact of the day: the emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his beloved wife, and was going to build an identical one in black across the river from the Taj Mahal to be his own final resting place, but this never happened because his son got tired of waiting for the throne and imprisoned him and murdered him.

Our train to Agra got postponed two hours. It was fine, though. It’s just that time seemed to move like a snail. The train ride was very interesting. I saw tons of cool animals like water buffaloes, cows, goats, and hogs. It saddened me to see how many poor people lived along the railroad tracks. Some families lived in shacks the size of a small car.
Today I had the best meal so far. It was lentils with naan.

Last Delhi Day

Evan: On Tuesday we went to the Red Fort. It’s a fort that the emperor built a long time ago. A army soldier with a big machine gun came up to me and pinched my cheeks. Because in India they have black hair and no rosy cheeks. About 40 people a day come up to me to pinch my cheeks and they ask my name and how old I am instead of asking Mom and Dad.

Andrew: Tuesday we went to the Red Fort. The Red Fort was built by the same Mugal emperor that built the Taj Mahal. (He had some pretty good architects!) The architecture was absolutely amazing. They had a huge throne stand, but the throne isn’t there, since in 1739 Iran stole the famous peacock throne and still hasn’t given it back. We went to the National Museum. They had awesome collections of coins and weapons. They also had awesome statues and pretty cool paintings. They had an amazing life-size sculpture of an Indian war elephant with tons of armor on it, and a lot of the armor was studded with gold. in the coin room, there were huge coins and small coins, all different sizes from many different periods of times, from now back to the very beginning of civilization in India, like at the Indus valley.
There are some very nice kids in bad situations. There’s this one kid that was so nice next to the Red Fort, selling postcards. My mom didn’t buy anything from him, but I thought he might be able to sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. He didn’t go to school because he didn’t have enough money, but he had great English.

The bicycle rickshaws are absolutely amazing. They carry a couple people or huge amounts of cargo. There was this one huge amount of cargo on a bicycle rickshaw, tied with string, and a guy was hanging on the back hanging on to the string. It was so funny.

A lot of the people in India have fancier cell phones than my mom and dad. Everybody asks my brother’s name and thinks he is so cute. Around the hotel, I’m known as Evan’s brother. (No fair!) Sometimes big huge tough guards with machine guns come up and pinch Evan’s cheeks and shake our hands. It’s sorta funny.

Delhi Day

riding in an auto-rickshaw!

Evan: Today I saw a rug being made. It’s made by hand. They tie many many knots. They use three tools. One was kind of like scissors, and one of them was like a knife, and the last one looked sort of like a paint brush except it was spiny on the end and it was made of metal. Millions and millions of knots are in rugs.

I got an Indian necklace and we also got three paintings. There’s a lot of traffic in Delhi. We saw women in saris ride on the back of motorcycles and sometimes bikes.

Andrew: Today I had the best breakfast of my whole life. The best part was foamy Indian bread (called idli) with some sauce that was very good. I also had watermelon juice and lime juice and many other foods. We went to the American embassy to file some immigration paperwork. Then we went shopping. We got some Indian paintings. I think it’s funny how the people bargain. At first, the lady said 900 Rupees for each painting. We ended up getting three paintings for 550 Rupees! With bargaining, you can get awesome deals. I had a delicious Chinese lunch, very good chicken, noodles, and rice. We went around in auto-rickshaws. We barely were able to all squish in. There’s one open side (no door), and the driving is nutty. An auto-rickshaw has three wheels and is very little. (My dad says it’s a tricycle on steroids.) The traffic is completely weird, and this is how it goes: cows go first, and then whoever beeps the loudest, and whoever can weave through all the traffic. There are many, many motorcycles and a lot of bikes. I went swimming at the hotel and had a good time.

I am soooo tired!

We're very very very tired, but we're HERE! I didn't get any sleep at all on the plane. I can't wait to pick up Jenya. I love the food. Some of the people are way, way poor here and it saddens me to see how poor they are. Some people live in shacks made of tin. Evan says it is smelly and hot. There are many people in traditional saris and sometimes they are riding on the backs of motorcycles. The shopkeepers are very nice. So far we saw monkeys and cows wandering around. We hear there are goats too but we haven't seen any yet.

We can't wait!

We can't wait to go to India tomorrow. We're going there to get our baby sister named Jenya Amy Mohana. First we're flying to Delhi. Then we'll go to Agra and see the Taj Mahal. And then we'll go to Jaipur and see the Amber fort and we could even ride an elephant! Then we'll fly to Kolkata and pick up Jenya. I wonder what picking her up will be like?