З Днем Народження

 Playing with balloons before everyone comes over.

 This is Arden, she's six months younger than Rawly (she's the next eldest of the staff's "pack-o-youngins" which consists of four other baby girls, another baby boy, and two more on the way.)

 Thanks to Uncle Nick's artistic genius, we had a pin the stache on the Kozac (our school mascot.)

 This is the covered Kozac.  The two winners received a kiss from Rawly after he discovered the frosting!

"Hmm, that wasn't half bad!"

Indian Summer

It's now four am (I've been up since two), not sure if it's the jitters thinking about all I need to do before Rawly's party on Friday: how am I going to make a train cake, what else do I need from the store so that we only make one trip, how can we exchange money to give some to our nanny to pick up somethings from the store?  Too many thoughts--what was I just telling a friend earlier this week about not worrying...hum. I wish I could tell my muscles the same thing!  Outside the wind is fighting to get in through our rattling wooden double windows and a draft in the hall that keeps knocking on the door.  Regretfully, fall is here, and with that, winter is coming.
What sweet relief this Indian summer has been.  Can you imagine shorts in November?  I'm not even sure if you can call it Indian summer since it's so late in the year.  Someone pointed out how crazy it was wearing a wool sweater vest on September first.  The cool weather was followed by the leaves changing yellow or brown (not a whole lotta color here, is that reminiscent of Soviet times?)  We escaped to Greece, so glad for warmer weather and returned to a great gift of two weeks of nice weather.
Generally on Sundays we go out to eat after church.  This week we hit up the new Dominoes Pizza.  And, surprise, surprise, Ken was wearing shorts.  Rawls was barefoot and hatless in overalls, but the two of them were the cause of many a "Babooshka" (what older, grandmotherly women are called) shaking a finger and surely ranting about how he'd get sick!  I've learned to smile:) Rawly was so funny, he sat on my lap while I was feeding him bits of pizza.  What I didn't realize was that he wasn't chewing the pepperoni or "Canadian" pizza (our Canadian friends always laugh when we call it that.)  So as we were preparing to leave Rawly kept playing with bits of pepperoni and ham in his mouth, I caught a few with a napkin and thought that we were good to go.  Little did I know, that he has the Mary Poppins bag of a mouth and that little turkey must have had at least three pieces of each mulling around in there because when we got outside even more made an appearance.  His cheeks are so chubby that none of us had even noticed!  We're always kept on our toes around him and loving every minute of it.

Bricks and mortar make a house, but the laughter of children make a home. Irish Proverb

This is a snapshot, or mental video frame of our evening today.  Hope you enjoy.

I arrive home to this:

Rawly in his makeshift highchair/swing with his eating smock on and dinner ready on the stove!

As the evening continued I couldn't help but sit back and watch in sheer bliss; Ken had Rawly squealing for hours as they played hide and seek, peek-a-boo, kaboom, pretend sneeze attacks, and wrestled.  When I looked at my watch, I couldn't believe that it was already time for PJs and a bedtime story.  A little later we sat down to read Good Night Moon. Rawly reached out and touched the kittens when he saw them (in Greece, he fell in love with all the stray cats!), then later when the book was saying good night to the "gatitos" (as we call them), he leaned down and gave them a kiss.

Thus far, this has been the best night of my life!

Here we are

It's hard to believe that it's already November. Time has absolutely flown by since we've returned to Ukraine. Odd as it my be, coming back has felt comfortable so far! We were/are so grateful to all of you who opened your homes to us, but almost three months of traveling is a lot. Year two, thus far, has been immensely easier than the first--almost comically so. We know the routines, the ebb and flow of life happens, and everything else we chalk up to life "only in Ukraine." Since it's been so long since I've last updated the blog, I felt it best to show you via videos what we've been up to lately. (I will warn you though that I have the uncanny knack of turning off the video three seconds prior to Rawly being the absolute cutest boy in the entire Ukraine.)

Kaboom! September 2010



Rawly meets Aegean Sea October 2010

3:09 pm

I think that we're actually headed in the right direction! It's July 15, our anniversary; a little after 11 this morning we left our “Bee Lazee” campsite just outside of Prince George. Real Canadian Superstore was the final destination on our simple quest for a tarp and Mountain House dehydrated meals. Here are a few observations we made along the way:

Canadian Tire sells camping gear.

Brick sells mattresses.

So what does Home Depot sell? Maybe lingerie?

As we were having a delirious laughing meltdown in the frozen foods section, I wanted to assure each passerby, “Don't worry we have lived overseas—in Ukraine—I promise. Yes, everything is printed in Ukrainian or Russian and we manage to get by.” Here (Canada) we could at least figure out what the French meant from its Latin roots, or simply flip the can around and read the English label!

Where's the camera now? Evidently standing in a little red cooler on top of frozen meat is pretty much the limelight for a 8 month old. Ken and I were stressing out about what we were going to eat...Low sodium, good nutrition, where we would put the cooler if we bought one. Ken asked me, “Does anyone else have this much trouble packing food for a camping trip?” When we looked down at Rawly, he was chillin', quite literally, just bouncing up and down happy as a clam. I was laughing so hard I thought that I was going to pee my pants. And finally the icing on the cake was the song playing on the radio when we got back in the car, “SOS, somebody please help me!”

Canada, Oh Canada!

Unfortunately after we had booked our tickets home for the summer, we learned that we needed to be out of the country for 330 days to qualify for the overseas tax exemption clause (I'm not sure of the actual technical jargon.) Needless to say, that meant that the good ol' US of A didn't want to spend our monies here and our options were either Baja California or British Colombia. Interestingly enough, having a baby has somewhat changed our sense of adventure, so we opted out of our amazing tour of the California baseball stadiums and a stint in Mexico for a tour of beautiful British Columbia. The plan was to make the 15 hour trip from Vancouver (BC) to Terrace where some of our teaching coworkers live. First we took it slow, Eugene to Seattle with an overnight pit stop in Canby/Mollalla to visit old friends. Our next stop was a two night layover in Puyallup where our cousins live. Isaac and Saraya kept Rawly (and us) entertained and introduced him to the Point Defiance Zoo.

Hiking with the bro

Jesse and Nikki joined us on a beautiful hike up the McKenzie to Blue Pool. It almost looks too blue to be true. Rawly enjoyed peeking out the side of the pack and his extra high vantage point atop Uncle Jesse's shoulders. Ken also introduced him to some Oregonian wildlife up close and personal—forest tigers (as we call them).