April:
Hi folks, sorry we skipped yesterday. After a hilarious attempt to teach the neighborhood kids baseball with a soccer ball last evening, we were pretty wiped out. Yesterday was another pleasant but uneventful day. We at Shaslik at an outdoor cafe and then we bought a really nice leather soccer ball to give to Bolat, the man who gave Kai one of his team's balls. We thought the kids might like a nice ball and everybody here has been so generous with us. Last night one of the neighbor ladies came up and gave me a big hug and kiss and Kai thinks he has died and gone to heaven with how much attention he gets from the big kids. One of them is always carrying him around and kissing his many booboos and playing soccer with him. He especially loves all the boys and has taken to running up to one of them to have his hands and knees wiped off and kissed when he falls, not us!
Last night the kids had colds so there wasn't a whole lot of sleeping going on. Grace woke up every 45 minutes all night and at 4:30 am Kai decided he had had enough of trying to sleep with a clogged nose. So, I am going to keep this kind of short because I am a walking zombie today.
This afternoon we went back up to Tekeli to meet up with Aika and meet her parents. Her dad wasn't there but we met her lovely mother and we just talked to them about what the next steps for everybody are to try to get Aika to the states for a little while. It may never happen with the way homeland security is now and we made that very clear, or it may take a while. We set her mom's mind at rest about what she would be doing there (helping with the kids and seeing the States). We would treat this like any au pair arrangement and will be making sure she gets a fair wage as well as room and board and an intro into our world. We'll see. She is a great young lady and we would be honored to have her in our home for any length of time. They treated us to tea and we brought them some gifts and photos of our home and family and friends to keep. We had a really nice afternoon there and Aida was a champion translator. I love that woman, she is so amazing!
OK, more tomorrow, I'm exhausted and Zach's not up to writing tonight!
Oh, one funny thing happened today. We were eating lunch and this woman came in the door (being Vermonters, we forget to lock it a lot, plus the kids stop by to borrow the soccer balls and get drinks and stuff) and kept asking us how much the apartment costs. We could not figure out what she wanted, so she wrote it down for us, in Russian, which obviously didn't help either. Finally we just called Aida and put the woman on the phone with her because she clearly wasn't' leaving until her question was answered. Turns out she wanted to buy the apartment. It's not for sale, but we all laughed at our attempts to make ourselves understood.
love to you all.
