I Think It's Saturday...

I woke up at 5:30 this morning to video call my family... only Huz hadn't checked his email so he didn't know about this, so we didn't end up skyping. I could've stayed up to go running, but I didn't go to bed until 3, so I was sleepy. I put my tired self back to bed and slept for two more hours when my skypephone rang. It was Huz:) Girlies were all sleeping though, so I didn't get to see them. So! This is really exciting! Somehow, a true miracle, my webcam decided to start working. Whaddayaknow?! I don't know how it happened, chalking it up as a true, real life miracle.

Today was pretty uneventful. Okay, really uneventful:) After skyping with Huz, I was ready to be awake. It seemed awfully dark still, though. When I looked out the window I saw that the weather had decided for me that I wouldn't be running this morning. It was raining. So, I did what any person who doesn't have little kids around them would do, and I ate three pieces of chocolate and went back to bed. sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet.

I woke up to a weird tapping noise outside my window. As I groggily tried to pry my eyelids open, I realized that the room was going dark, then light, then dark, then light. Oh goody!!! A mystery:) It's too bad that I'm such a good detective, because this mystery took all of 7 seconds to solve. My upstairs neighbor was shaking her very long rug out her window and it was hitting my window (the tapping noise). When it would get dark, her very long rug was covering part of my window, when it would get light, she would be raising the rug up. Honestly, it was a little weird for a couple reasons. 1) she 'shook' her rug for a really really long time. We're talkin' ten minutes, 2) she wasn't actually shaking it, it was this weird repetitious up down wiggle motion, and 3) it was a really long rug. Long enough to hang out her window and half way down mine.

I stumbled out of bed as one does when they have had too much sleep. It was still dark and off and on rainy. I decided that running was not going to be happening today. The rain never stopped for more than a few minutes and it takes me fifteen minutes to get to the track, then I still have to run, and then another fifteen minutes to get home. Now, sometimes when it would start to rain, it was just a little drizzle. Sometimes, though, it was a down pour. I didn't want to get stuck in the down pour.

So, instead I got ready for the day and decided I would go to the bookstore and then to get some other groceries. I was really looking forward to some fresh vegetable from the vegetable stand by my house today, but it was not open. I'm guessing because of the weather.

I am really grateful that I learned the cyrillic alphabet before I came here. I hung out at the bookstore for forty minutes checking out books and trying to read them (as in sound out the words). It was nice to have something to do. Knowing how to read Russian has saved me, even though my comprehension is way low and my ability to speak it is very minimal, it has really come in handy. Like when I sort of got lost the other night and it was dark and I had to get ahold of Yana, I could read the street sign to tell her where I was, but then I realized where I was and just booked it home. Yana, I promise I won't stay out so late again.

At the grocery store, I decided to by some frozen vegetables (since fresh was out due to the local veggie stand being closed), ice cream (it comes in a BAG!!!), a darling little two pack of oreo cookies, a jug of milk, a bottled water, an oatmeal packet, a green apple (all the red ones were pretty hammered), 2 croissants, and another pastry thing that looked good (but unfortunately was not).

The veggies I ate for dinner with some dirty salt. Dirty salt, evidently, is salt that has not been purified, in other words, not iodized. Hopefully though, it's not really dirty and I wake up in the morning. I'm not much for salt usuall. In fact we haven't ever bought salt ever since the first little blue canister we bought when we got married THIRTEEN years ago. But, I forgot to buy butter for my veggies. They were still good without the butter, but then I saw the dirty salt and thought, why not? Glad that I did. It was way better than table salt. And I only needed a tiny little pinch of it for the entire bowl. And I KNOW you know what I did with the ice cream and oreos. Oh yeah! Good stuff. You can take the girl away from her ice cream, but you can't take the ice cream away from the girl. You better believe that ice cream was the first word I learned in Russian.

Above is a picture of my dinner. I honestly don't think you care, but there is nothing else to take a picture of, and if there's anything worse than a post with a picture of my dinner, it's a post without a picture at all!

Look at that cute little package. Seriously. There are two oreos in there. And that is why the American population struggles with obesity. You would never be able to find anything with that small of a portion back home.


That's my homemade blizzard. It was yummy.



So, here are a few things that I keep forgetting to mention, in no particular order:



*while we were waiting for court to start, I had my legs crossed and was swinging my leg that was on top. BoyTwo came over to me and asked me to please stop moving my legs because it is considered bad luck. I thought it was so cute that he was hoping we would have good luck. I can't wait to see him again!! At the book store tonight I was scoping out some little kid fairy tale books (he said he likes fairy tales). I'm going to buy one and practice reading it in Russian so that when I see him I can hold him on my lap and read him a story. The kid needs his mom. And the mom needs her kid.



*Yesterday after I bought my popsicle, while I was still inside the little store, I saw an elderly man outside fall down. There were several people around him. Nobody moved to help the poor guy. So, I went out there and offered him my hand. I thought I could just kind of give him a little help up pull. Unfortunately, he was way too unstable for just a hand so I had to help him up from under his armpits. He was all spaciba-ing me (thank you) and all I could think was what would have happened to him on any other day of the week? Why did nobody else help him? Seriously nobody even bat an eyelash. It really bothered me.



*I found a recipe for vareniki that looks fairly good and fairly easy. Vareniki is BoyOne's favorite food. Basically, it's a ravioli. BoyOne's favorite kind is the one with potatoes and cheese inside. Excited to be able to try that BACK AT HOME.



*I cried the whole way TO court that morning. I'm pretty sure that nobody knew, I kept that one on the down low. All I could think was that my gain was somebody else's loss. It was breaking my heart to know that she was going to miss out on so much. It was breaking my heart to know that she had already missed out on so much, and at the boys expense.



*A lady I sort of know of through blogging (how exactly does that work? Obviously I don't know her, but we have communicated a little and I follow her blog so I feel like I sort of know her, but I don't really...) is in Ukraine right now. Her ten day wait is over and she is picking up her kids. Yippee!! Congrats to her and her darling family!! I was laughing my head off reading her blog about her adventures, how her new children have their new birth certificates stating that she and her husband are their parents and that she gave birth to them, in Ukraine. Then, I read the part where she was watching the two of them do something and the kids kept checking to make sure she was watching. She commented how sad it was that they had never had anyone watch them do anything, how no one had ever delighted in them and I started bawling like a baby. (I feel so emotionally unstable here! I'm truly hoping it is just the lack of my thyroid medicine...) How truly devastating and tragic that there are so many who have not a person on this earth that watches them and delights in them. Of course I'm thinking of our boys, and feeling so grateful to have them in my life now, my daughters (I am so grateful to be their mom and to be able to delight in them and to have had them their whole lives), the old man that was unnoticed in his need, the lonely babushkas that spend their days on benches and at vegetable stands just watching life happen around them, and all the countless people that fill this earth. How does this happen?!



I keep thinking how this life is a testing period, a time of refinement for us all to prepare to be with Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. I keep thinking about how we all want to do the right things, be in the right places, and do unto others... But then I wonder how often we miss the whole point and pass the old man that just fell down, or don't visit with the old babushkas who sit with their eyes empty each day. I wonder what things I'm missing back home. I know that it's the little things that will take us to Christ. It's just so much easier to see and do the big things, right? It's obvious that we should be chaste and virtuous. Of course we should attend church and learn the scriptures. I just don't think those are the things that will see us to Heaven. Don't get me wrong. I believe with all of my heart that these things are important. Extremely important. I just think they are the things that help us to undersand and teach us WHAT else we need to do. I hope that I will be blessed to see the little things because I believe they are truly the things that matter.



"It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living." President Gordon B. Hinckley