Week One:

Hi everyone,

This week has flown by us so fast!  Everything from meeting the little one to making this town and apartment “home” for the next month or so has taken up our entire day.  THe hardest part of living here is the language....Russian is soooo hard!  I can’t, for the life of me, pronounce some of the words and memorizing these long/complicated phrases has been hard on my brain.  On the other hand, Mike has been communicating just fine- he’s even cracking jokes with these guys which is pretty funny to see since their culture is pretty stone face and stoic (in general).  Nothing gets in Mike’s way when it comes to talking-  no matter how hard the language is.  Oh, and I forgot to mention, he can read the cyrillic letters without any any problem as well.  

Today is Sunday and normally we can only have one visit but because tomorrow is a holiday (Children’s Day), we can only visit once for the afternoon.  Apparently, there will be government officials visiting the Baby House (the children are putting on a show for them- which we are not allowed to see) and  they don’t want us around.  So today we’re happy to get 2 visits in.  The little one gets really happy to see us and is at his ultimate cutest when we get to pick him out of his crib.  Each time we go into his room, we find him playing with his pacifier, totally content after his nap. When he sees us (Mike and I are usually elbowing each other out of the way to get the first peek), he’s all smiles and laughs for about 15 minutes which then continues unto his feeding time.  This little guys loves to eat and they serve HUGE portions for breakfast and lunch. He also loves his left thumb (a leftie?) as you can see in this picture. Take care and we'll post again soon!