The Mystery of the Armenian Restaurant

Last night I had an unlikely experience with Annabelle. First, you must understand that the girl loves her bottle, I mean LOVES her bottle. She sees it coming and gets all wriggly and snoopy dance on me. Last night, I went to give her the 10 pm bottle which she always takes. She sort of sucks it in this sleepy half trance with her eyes closed. Anyway, last night, she would not suck on the bottle. I put it in her mouth and she would open her Margaret eyes for a millisecond and then she would fall back asleep. She was SO tired. I even lifted her out of her crib and changed her diaper and nary a glimmer of eyeballs showed. The girl was tye-erred. I knew it would cause some problems with her schedule and sure enough it did. She was up at 3 am looking for love in all the wrong places. Then I had to wake her up at 7:30 finally, thinking if I didn’t her whole day would be off. But it was off anyway. She was agreeable enough though. She’s a remarkably easy going kid when I get my end of the deal right. As you can see in the movies below. This is her typical state of activity:

Day 28_files\Happy Screeching belly.MOV

Day 28_files\Happy Screeching Belly with Blanket.MOV

I’m still struggling with the baby food vs. bottle aspect of feeding. Her schedule at the babyhouse was an 8 oz. bottle every 3 hours, starting at 7am through 10pm. That totals 6 bottles and 48 oz of milk. Now she’s on formula and several moms have written to me telling me she should be getting around 32 oz. But I’ve tried to substitute the baby food for one of the meals and it doesn’t work well. She loves the baby food, will get full on it, but it doesn’t “last” for 3 hours of fullness. She gets hungry about an hour and a half later. Then if I give her the bottle, her feeding schedule is screwed up. I’ve cut back her bottles to 6 oz per feeding so that helps, but she is used to that oh-so-full feeling of an 8 ouncer. Ah, well, I think this is a very normal problem and not one I really worry about, just trying to find my way.

The Brookes’ called in the morning and asked if I wanted to try the Armenian restaurant for lunch. It’s the one remaining “Must Try” restaurant and we’ve made 3 attempts now to eat there but every single time it has been totally booked. So today I got a babysitter. For those of you in the US, you may not be familiar with this creature: I’m told this is an elusive and rare creature to find in the US and when actually spotted, is extremely expensive to engage. I was therefore thrilled to find that here they are easily available and grandmotherly to boot at $5 bucks per hour. (Kaz: 1, US: priceless) I guess I can’t get used to that. Anyway we headed over the Armenian restaurant. But unbeknownst to us, our translator still hadn’t made a reservation so we got there and they couldn’t have been less interested in letting us eat there. It was very interesting though to see the patently shady types that looked like they were from central casting for the part of “mobster”. Slicked back hair, shiny Italian suits, watchful, narrowed eyes all lounging around out front. I am now fantastically curious about this restaurant. What makes it so popular? What kind of clientele does it attract? In my Hindi-soap-opera-buffy world, I imagine they aren’t actually booked with reservations but rather some big Russian mafia meeting is taking place at this restaurant and any minute they are all going to come spilling out of the restaurant with mac10s spraying (in slo-mo of course).

Well, on a more prosaic note, we ended up back at the Rainbow room which was appropriately deserted at a weekday lunchtime. I consoled myself with 2 pivas (beer) and the only menu item I can eat there – vegetarian pilaf. (for those who don’t know, I am a vegetarian so there aren’t a lot of options in this horsemeat-on-a-stick country. (yep, horsemeat is the national meat of Kazakhstan.)

After lunch, since it was a really lovely day out, I went home to pick up the pumpkin belly and then the brookes’ and I went for a walk down to the Horny Husband monument.

We’re going to actually make reservations on Thursday for the Armenian restaurant so stay tuned!

In the last couple of days Annabelle has started doing this odd thing that I think might be the start of the “how the crap do I crawl” stage of her development. She lies on her tummy and bangs her right foot on the floor, using it as sort of a propeller. She can actually make a 360 degree circle over time doing this.

Day 28_files\Right Food Pound II.MOV

Day 28_files\Right Food Pound III.MOV

Here are some other photos of cute girl.

I call this picture and the next one her “Lana Turner” poses. Totally coquettish vixen. “What am I cute, little ole me?”

This is the girl right after her bath all clean and ready for bed in her sleep dress (thank you Lisa!), surrounded by the multitude of toys at her disposal

Look at that precious face. As my dad says “she’s as cute as a puppy” – which in my Dad’s language is his highest compliment.

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