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.