Gotta love half birthdays!!!

Having a summer birthday myself, I've grown quite accustomed to and fond of a biyearly celebration. So now, every day-after Grandma Pat's (Gigi's) birthday we'll have a second reason to celebrate:) Here's what Rawly was up to on his first (of many) half birthday!

Daddy and Mommy were able to come home for lunch
because it was a parent/teacher conference day.

Spending time with neighbor Sam and wearing a Red Sox cap for the first time.Ira decorating the cake Mommy made and Daddy frosted.


Doing what little tikes love to with pretty cakes. Should Mommy really be that surprised?


Just chillin' on a long board.


With our Wednesday night Bible study group, minus Kirsten:(

La comida de la vida

It was a couple weeks after we arrived here that we first had a taste of spice. The night is still so vivid in my memory simply for the fact that we had tacos. Tacos? you may say. But to me they weren't just any old tacos--they were home! Needless to say, since then we've luckily had countless tasty meals of the Mexican persuasion. Food here is typically pretty bland: potatoes, oil, sour cream, and lots-o-dill (Greek salad and pizza are on the not-so-blah menu). Our friend Kris was as equally excited as I that we started a weekly Mexican food night--one of our best ideas ever. The night has kind of morphed into a dinner and Bible study night, and luckily for us, we've had some DELICIOUS Ukrainian meals prepared by our friend Ira, providing evidence that not all Ukrainian food is a flop.

For two reasons, this year, Cinco de Mayo was probably my best ever! First off, I've started a huge food unit with my Elementary and Spanish 1 students. My nine and ten year olds gave me a group hug when I introduced the idea! Cinco de Mayo kicked off the tasting festivities with Tres Leches and Mexican Wedding cookies. Since then, they've now tried tacos, Spanish/Mexican rice, and refried beans (may I add, most for the first time--how crazy is that?!) When I served up tacos, one seven year old boy just looked at it and asked, "How am I supposed to eat that?" Tortilla soup got dished up this week, along with invitations to multiple 10 year old birthday parties, naturally provided that I make the soup for everyone:)
The second reason for mere awesomeness of Cinco de Mayo is that we hosted a fiesta in our tiny apartment for the staff at school. Our apartment never looked so good! I still have many of the decorations hanging In addition to our fellow over-seas colleagues looking for the good food and festivities, we were joined by many Ukrainian staff members. I put them straight to work making guacamole (of which they'd never tasted it, or salsa, before!!!) Our nanny also said that she never thought that she liked Mexican food until she tried the goodness we had here. I just love spreading good eats around the world! We also whipped up a big batch of horchata (yummy cinnamon, rice milk.) If you've never had it before, you should go to your local "ethnic food" section and pick up a package of horchata mix to have with your next Mexican meal--the process was a little time consuming and labor intensive for our taste.

Can you guess the food?

Here's a little taste of what it's like to search for things in the stores, some things are obvious, some take a little getting used to!
Hint: these are all in the refrigerated section...





























And now for the spices and other baking supplies...

This is curry. Can you sound out the Cyrillic?









Everything comes in packets! Here's the basil.






And now which one is cinnamon and which one is hot chili pepper???







Maybe this picture will help you tell the difference...one of the difficulties with Russian is that there are many "cases" so a word might change in ten different ways, makes it kind of tricky.
I'm frustrated trying to arrange all these photos and text--pretty sure the programs I used ten years ago in high school were designed to be more user friendly...ridiculous.

Oh, but here's the list of refrigerated items:
45% is mozzarella cheese which is our favorite so far
26% is whipping cream (as the picture shows)
72% is butter
2.5% are milk which is the lowest fat content you can find, most people buy tetrapack milk because the bottled kind goes bad in a couple days. Beware, the orange cap is buttermilk!
Keifer is the white and green bottle and Rawls is gnawing on a bottle of yogurt--both words are the same as English if you read them in Russian