Quiet day today. After a late start, one of the hotel’s drivers took us out to the Unico Mall, which has a lot of outlet shops and a different selection than ChipiChape.
We spent about an hour at the mall, which included stopping for a milkshake which I shared with Andres. It was made with about 10 scoops of strawberry icecream and about 200ml of milk. Needless to say, a spoon was more effective than a straw!
We stopped at a toy store to buy some small toys for Nicol to play with – it upsets Andres when she just wants to play with his cars, so we decided to try and find her something she could play with herself.
When wandering around the mall, we did have one lady stop us (smiling) and hitch up Nicol’s socks, which were a little small for her and had fallen down a bit. We’ve come across this before – babies are generally rugged up beyond what we would normally consider reasonable given the warm weather and socks are considered especially important. We’re just glad we had socks on her at all – if we didn’t I’m sure we would have received a severe talking to from a few ladies!
One of our main purposes for going to the mall was to get some cash for our lawyer, who had requested half their payment up front. The lawyers charge a standard fee for the services they provide to adoptive families going through the court process. Half the fee is about 1,700,000 pesos and given that ATMs will only dispense up to 400,000 pesos at a time, I needed to do 5 transactions to get all the money required! ATMs typically dispense 50 mil (50,000) peso notes with some 20 mil and 10 mil notes as well.
The nice thing about most ATMs I’ve come across in Colombia is that you enter your card, then remove it before you start the transaction. There is no concern that the machine will “eat” your card – you can retrieve it at any time. I also like the little booths you can lock yourself in to complete your transaction, away from public view – we’ve seen these a lot in South America.
We got back to the hotel in time for lunch and then had a quiet afternoon, we all slept for quite a while – especially Andres who always seems to be tired. I’m not sure if it is the disturbed sleep from Nicol’s crying or the change in diet or what.
Nicol was quite restless when trying to get her to sleep and constantly grizzled. Andres was also rather hyperactive and noisy – which wasn’t helping Nicol’s sleeping, but was also frustrating us. He really does seem to be physically incapable of being quiet. I ended up letting Andres stay up and do some colouring in for a while (on the promise that he did it quietly!) … since he really didn’t seem like going to sleep and I was getting sick of snuggling with him while he tossed and turned. It ended up being after 11:30pm before he finally fell asleep! Not sure what caused it, whether it was the daytime sleep, the lack of exercise (he refuses to walk anywhere and is not getting regular trips to playgrounds like he normally does), or perhaps something he ate for dinner … or maybe it is some combination of these things.
Either way, I think we need to limit his daytime sleeps, even if he is really tired and grumpy, we need to only let him sleep for a short while before waking him up (it’s like poking a bear when you do – he does not like being woken up!).
Two theories on Andres’ tiredness – the altitude can do that to you, though Cali is not excessively high. The other possibility is a little stress in coping with an extra family member – he not getting as much time to himself while you are there. Just a thought.