If it’s the last Thursday of the month….

We must have NO PHONE! But this time since we knew what she was probably saying we went across the street to use the phone and called Alex… So if you're seeing this, we again have telephone!

This morning's routine was pretty much our "normal" – wake at 8am, Genya eat some breakfast (for some reason I forgot myself today!), get dressed – didn't want to go on-line until after JJ called but he hadn't called by 11:00am our time so I called him! He had a busy day and was still doing his normal stuff – homework, etc. Right away he asked me – when are you coming home? I said I didn't know and he said "I want you to come home right now and that's an ORDER!" But he screamed it so he had to repeat it for me to understand! We had a nice conversation after that tho – unfortunately he had two cavities at the dentist at his check-up yesterday – he has the worst luck with teeth!! – but we'll handle that when we get home. I said we had to get Nathan to the dentist anyways! Then Genya and I did some painting and crafty things and then he put together some puzzles. He's quite good at them! Then it was time for lunch. He and Brian had hotdogs and I ate the salad I bought yesterday (had salmon in it so Brian wasn't even tempted).

I had also remembered to weigh Genya this morning – he weighed in at 44.6 lbs before breakfast so yes, I think he's gained a few pounds!

After lunch we tried the internet but that's when we discovered the phone line problem. We were going for a walk anyway so just left a little earlier and reported it along the way. We took Genya out without snow pants tody for the first time. Just had him put his long underwear and the play jeans on – by the time we were back home later tho the bottom about 6" of his pants were all wet from the slop and puddles all around the city! Our jeans get dirty at the cuffs just from walking too. Tomorrow is jeans wash day!

So more about our walk…The nice lady at the store across the street let us use her phone. We then walked to the courthouse area. Since we were there we took Genya's picture in front of the courthouse like we had ours taken – as that's where officially he became our son! Should have gone in and asked the Judge to pose with us – NOT! Lol We had headed that direction as there was something going on at a building across from the courthouse that I wanted to check out what it exactly was and when it was – I figured out it was the Circus and there were two days of shows yet – Saturday and Sunday. We have tickets to the Saturday show at 4pm – but don't tell Genya LOL I bought the most expensive tickets (500r/each) as I figured we'll probably never see a genuine Russian circus in Russian again!! (well at least not for a LONG time!) I'm so excited – that will help make the next days go a little faster!

Then we walked over to the walking street and Brian bought a few souvenir cars at a toy store. Then we went to the People's Market for more bananas. I tell you, Genya eats at least two a day and asks for more sometimes! Isn't the banana like the perfect fruit or something tho? Thought I read that somewhere… Anyway, we are noticing he's slowing down on the consumption of food already. He continues to eat healthy and good portions but not huge ones like last week. He still likes the cooked carrots tho.

I digressed and almost forgot the most amusing part of the day! We had been talking about purchasing another portable DVD player since ours broke the day we got here. When we were on the walking street we were handed a sale flyer for a store (like a Best Buy) that had DVD players on sale. We walked a little further and found another young gal handing out the flyers also so I asked her if she spoke English – she said "no" but we able to figure out I was asking "where is this store?" (we didn't' see an address on the notice). She didn't know but went to ask someone else close – well it was at the end of the street! Could see the building sign if we turned around! We all laughed! So after getting the bananas we headed to there. Like I mentioned before it's like a smaller Best Buy. We were standing by the regular DVD players and a young guy came up to help us – Brian asked him "do you speak English?" and he said no but went to find someone who could. Well he brought back about two other guys who between them all spoke about 5-words but by then we had found the portable DVD players and were looking at them. Then they went off to find the ONE GUY in the store who spoke English! He was in the TV area talking to a couple at the time but they told him to go ahead with us. Well we all – 5 of us at that point – trotted back to the portable DVD area and the English speaker answered our questions while about 6 salesmen plus us three hovered around! It was actually quite funny if you picture it. Well the one low priced one was on sale because it had been repaired – nope, not that for me…have had bad luck with that before! So then we asked some questions about a Sony. It was a fair price (for Russia anyway) and has a 5-hour battery and is very lightweight. I asked if they took credit cards and he said yes so I said we'd take it. Then our original salesman took over and could say "follow me" – got me the receipt, got the DVD player and then told us "let's go" and walked us to the check out. It went pretty smoothly from that point on! We then took another leisurely walk (Genya was getting tired and we didn't even feed him a snack on the walk today!) back to the apartment. We all had a little something to eat and drink and then we opened the DVD player. Well, we're discovering it only plays the Russian DVDs – not our American ones. All in all that's not exactly bad because we can have Genya use this on the airplanes and in the hotel then and save our laptop for other uses. And we're not sure if our home DVD player will play the Russian ones or not – our laptop does but that is brand new. So we'll see about this DVD player – it might become the travelling one for families behind us yet too!

Dinner tonight was hamburger steaks in a mushroom gravy, noodles, veggies and for Genya, cooked carrots. He ate all the carrots, much of the noodles but only about ¼ of the hamburger. Not bad for a 5-yo tho! Then it was bath time and we watched the Russian version of Madagascar 2. (I asked Brian if this is a good thing that I understood about every 10^th word in Russian and sometimes whole segments of dialog?!?) Then it was rocking and singing and to bed for Genya! Our new routine does seem to be working much better!

Oh, and last night's movie selection "Last of the Mohicans"? – after about 15-minutes of the movie it totally stopped and we could not get it going for anything. So that was a bust! We have a few more to try yet but we're not optimistic any of them will work well!