More on the first 24 hours as Family of Four (less one)

For our first full day as a family minus one we don't really have that much to talk about – surprisingly! Everything went pretty well. I had made pancakes for breakfast and Nathan Genya ate well. He loves to have juice and bananas. For his morning snack he had a banana, yogurt & juice. For lunch we had peelmeni (the Russian stuffed pasta you boil in bullion) – they were delicious and he ate about 5 but also ate some of the veggie dish I had made (didn't like the red peppers), apples in peanut butter (liked the PB also) & milk. Afternoon snack was banana, juice and a cookie. For supper I made "fried" chicken and potatoes, boiled carrots for him and a vegetable medley of carrots, red peppers and cucumbers sautéed together for us – well he at it all and loved the red peppers tonight! I think he out-ate Brian! And it's a pleasure to have a child of mine eating most everything I put in front of him (lol, JJ!) He didn't want to try the applesauce I made this afternoon as I cannot find it easily in the stores (even tho I know it's in Angarsk!) Then for a snack while he was watching the movie tonight – Wall-E – he had some of the animal crackers we bought here.

Have I mentioned lately it's still really cold here! Only in the negative 20's Celsius now… but we did go outside twice today. First in the morning to the little (very little) park in the lot by our apartment. There is a man-made ice slide that he enjoyed going down on his little sled. I even tried it! It zipped! Then this afternoon, after I got back from the market, we went to the little bigger park across the street by another set of apartments. They had a much bigger ice slide that he loved! He had me go down that also and once was enough for me…it went even faster and longer at the end! Since we had been outside about ½ hour by then and were getting cold – but we wanted him to sleep better tonight – we took a walk around the half-block we were on. He held my hand nicely the whole time – his other hand on his sled tho! He was talking the whole way and I thought it was about all he was seeing – the cars, people, etc – but I think I caught the words "cold" and "home" in Russian somewhere in there and he probably was complaining the whole walk! We stopped in the store across the street and bought a treat – the cookies he had for his snack. He behaved very well in public for us!

JJ called him twice today already – they have conversations where I don't think either know what's being said but they're bonding! That's the important thing… We are reaching some levels of understand some of the time! Genya is a little chatterbox and story teller so we often don't know if he's asking for something or telling us a story. And we have to be careful when he says "da?" and we answer "da" as we don't always know what we're agreeing to! The words I had put on a chart on the wall we don't use much and we're saying others over and over so I have to make a new chart soon! He loves to repeat what we say – we've been working on numbers 1-10 but tonight I started doing the alphabet song – well it is surprising how many of our letters sound somewhat like numbers so we would say numbers instead of repeating letters. But the best was when I did "J" and he said "zay-zay" and then kept it up! Now I think "zay-zay" is real to him and he's liking to say his name!

He took a nice bath again tonight and loved the lavender lotion I rub in him at pajama time. He sat very well the whole movie too and tonight let me rock him for one verse of "Jesus Loves Me" but then he wanted to lay down in the bed and all is quiet so I think we maybe wore him out! I told him we'd all be here again tomorrow so hopefully that's registering.

Otherwise the day was mostly him chasing around with the balloons (until he wanted to know what my knife would do to it – yeah, it popped!) He took it well. Brian also finally got him to color while I was making dinner – he had resisted doing that with me all day. He colors VERY NICELY – stays in the lines for the most part. I'm thinking maybe they didn't do that in the morning and that's why he didn't want to do that with me in the morning today?!? We will learn and adapt.

The Holmes are leaving Sunday so we'll be on our own here – I'll miss Judy's daily phone call so I better get some emails from others to pick up the slack! (hint, hint). Their passport times are NOT going to be nearly the same as ours as they were able to process in Angarsk under the old system – we are going to have to use Irkutsk and the "new" system… we keep praying it goes quickly tho. But hopefully we learn some timeframes tomorrow…

So until tomorrow – da svadeniz!