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

Reminded once again

First of all--it's sunny once again in Kyiv! The spring sunshine has brought a much welcomed and brightened demeanor to all the passersby who were milling around this afternoon. Rawly had his four month check up this morning: 44.5 cm head circumference, 8.36 Kilos, 68 cm.
Ken and I were sitting waiting for some friends to come out of the Embassy. As it is there are long lines of Ukrainians outside of the gates who are trying to get VISAS to come to the US. Prior to today, my thought had always been--phew, I'm lucky we don't have to stand in that line. How narrow minded I was. All of a sudden as we were sitting there this group of three or four people started running down the road jumping and shouting "Visa, visa, visa!!!" (I'm getting tears recalling the encounter even now as I type.) The young woman inside the gates was proudly displaying her approved paperwork (inside a plastic sleeve of course *see former blogs for reference.) We get so wrapped up in the me, me, me that I forget about the basic liberties that we Americans take for granted. Besides Cuba, we can pretty much go anywhere our money can take us. It really makes the griping about not having drawers in my kitchen seem pretty vain in comparison. We really have nothing to complain about. I do give thanks to the Lord for our family, our safety, and our shelter.
On another note (quite literally) I'm attaching two videos, the first is of us coming across a filming of a musical group dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothing and singing in front of one of the many beautiful Eastern Orthodox churches, Saint Michael's. The next is of Rawly playing the piano for the first time. Well, it's taking a while to upload, so I'll save Rawly's piano playing for another day.

The Artful Giver

Some of our co-worker friends have started an organization that provides art supplies for an orphanage in Krivoy Rog. They also auction off artwork made by the students (who are using the donated supplies!) There are a couple pieces that you can bid on now...Please check out their website www.artfulgiver.org.
Also, they aren't yet a 501K (non-profit) because they need help going through the hoops. If you can, please help!

Marigolds

It's the end of March and the snow has just melted off the ground! The Spring breezes are blowing today and walks are once again pleasant.
Lately we've had a rough go with our nanny. The poor thing got chicken pox last week. Ken stayed home on Monday to take care of Rawly and I took Tuesday off. We both really enjoyed our time with the wee little one, but needed to be back at work. Fortunately a co-workers' friend was available to fill-in for the rest of the week. She doesn't speak English, so Olga (co-worker) came to translate the first morning. She's really cute and tries to tell me everything in Russian, but luckily her husband knows English, so between him on speakerphone or an electric translator we've been communicating! She writes down a brief descriptions of what they did throughout the day. This is one of my favorites:
i cut marigold on hand and on foot. i see, how on foot on big finger--wound. He marigold break down? Must plaster?
Marigolds, hmmm, it is hinting at Spring but we're still a long way from having blooming flowers...okay, I thought, she must mean finger nails. That morning we had trimmed one of his big toe nails because it had split--there was a little area that looks like a hangnail, so she thought that he might need a band-aid. As I had guessed, the words marigold and fingernail are very similar in Russian, hence the cut marigolds in March:)

Wrapped in plastic

This may be humorous only to those who have lived here, but here's a little background info for those of you living vicariously through us--you know who you are, don't deny it, you have secretly always dreamed of living in Ukraine! Every type of document is stored in a plastic sleeve. A P.E. teacher has even said she gets, "Please excuse Sasha" notes in a sleeve.(Sasha is the common Ukrainian name here for boys or girls equivalent to how we always say Johnny or Sally.)
We were at the American Medical Clinic (which I'm so thankful for the AMC) waiting in the lobby when Rawly filled his drawers. We had come directly from school, so didn't have a change of clothes and wanted to get him into a new diaper pronto so that he wouldn't be messy. Since there aren't really changing tables anywhere, we've grown accustomed to the quick change on our laps...so without thinking, we stripped him down. Unfortunately, his diaper had been folded when he had been changed last, so as we held him up, out came the poo--all over everywhere! About that time, the doctor came out to get us. So I had poop all over my coat and pants and Ken was holding a half naked baby. Shocked, the doctor suggested that we change him in the room where it was warmer. Oh silly parents.
Anyway, the doctor began his examination--Rawly needed his clothes off for that anyway, right? Once the appointment was finished, we put Rawls into his jacket suit (kind of like super thick pajamas) we were trying to figure out what to do with his soiled clothing when the doctor suggested a plastic sleeve. To which he said, "Why not?" Also probably more funny to us because this is a very common phrase that almost every English-speaking Ukrainian uses. So out we went to catch a taxi, soiled clothes wrapped in a plastic sleeve and tucked away.
It took me a lot of scrubbing and washing my pants three times before I was able to get the stain out of my black dress pants--weird.