It's been a week

Last week Will was slowly moving our belongings downstairs. He was carefully finding or making places for everything, putting things away as he brought them down. We actually started living here last Thursday. Then, on Saturday, our friends came to help, and all the rest of our stuff descended like an avalanche. We've been working on digging out since then.

The new apartment is sparsely furnished. Therefore the avalanche effect and piles of things sitting around on the floor everywhere. It's really nice, though! Our old apartment was fully furnished (over-furnished!) and full of clutter. Less is definitely more here.

Oh, a funny story: Jaan and Raia keep asking questions about which apartment belongs to whom and such, probably just trying to get set in their minds that we've actually moved. Recently, they were talking about who is upstairs now. . . "[Landlord's daughter], and a man, and a woman, right Mama?" I answered, "Да, и малыш." ("Yes, and a baby.") Since they still call Raia Ляля (another word for baby), they've been very insistent that our Baby #3 is Малышка. They instantly panicked at my answer. "What!?!?! You left our Малышка up there? We thought Малышка was in your tummy! Go back and get him right now!" We've also convinced them that their imaginary and very scary crocodile, Yezh, stayed in the old apartment. Knocks on the door are a little frightening, though, because they seem to expect him to join us any day.

It has been terribly hot all week, record highs. I'm so glad we're not up on the fifth floor! Even down here it was bad. Just yesterday the heat wave finally broke with a wonderful rainstorm. Let's pray that the summer will be cooler now. When I was pregnant with Jaan, I did pray for that, and God gave it to me. Maybe this year can be like that, too?

We'll probably be spending next week at our dacha! We've been making short trips out there, but it will be very fun to stay for a while. It's officially too late to plant a garden (Trinity/Pentecost is past*), but we've gotten some seeds and plants into the ground already, and we're going to keep adding to them.

Several people have asked about our address. The one in the sidebar here is the right one now. It won't matter if you sent mail to the old one, though; we'll still get it. The American Social Security mail continues to come to "Wilburn H Hunsucker III, G. Kovrov, 601911 Russia." That's name, city, zip code, and country, nothing else and all in English. One time someone at the post office added a handwritten note that had our building's street number, then "3rd entrance, 5th floor, can't remember the apartment number."

(*Interesting note: I just read Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, my own subtitle: How the Generals Bungled Everything. There was a footnote explaining "In pre-revolutionary rural Russia, the peasant's life was regulated by the Orthodox Church calendar; generally the peasants did not know the times of the year by month and date, but simply by saints' days, many of which marked the start or finish of phases of work in the farming cycle." He also points out that they didn't know anything about the holidays; they just marked the seasons by them. A good bit of that is left in gardening lore today. Not many people know what we celebrated last week, but everyone was rushing to get their gardens in before it.)