Going to Kherson (and dacha photos)

Tomorrow we're leaving for a little over a week. We'll be visiting a mission called Agape that works with orphans. I actually first read about them in a Christian newspaper soon after we moved to Ukraine (as usual, I love to see how little our children were a few years ago!) and have been interested ever since. Last month Will went to a training session that they had in Khmelnitsky. Now we're going all together to visit them in Kherson. On Monday Agape is putting on a special day for children from local orphanages that we can help with. The rest of the time we hope to spend time together and get to know them and their mission. Please pray for safe, smooth travel, good fellowship and lots of wisdom to know if these are the people we should be working with next. Thanks!

And then, for no reason at all, here are photos from Saturday at our dacha:

In our grape vines

Working hard

Watering

"To your health!"

With friends

Most of the youth are out of town, but we invited the few who were here out for dinner and s'mores and had a great time together.

And that's all for now. You probably won't hear from us until next month (unless Will already has a post scheduled to go while we're away?).

DIRTY dacha day

Bogdan was initiated into the joys of mud today. I realized that at this time last year, he wasn't even walking. He enjoyed our dacha then, but couldn't really get involved like he is this year. Asya carefully mud painted him all over, and he loved it. He kept signing for me to sit in the basin with him, but I'm afraid that I didn't oblige him in that one.

The dacha chairman came by while there were wallowing and commented on how "original" these children are. We often laugh about how our neighbor drives his grandchildren out and carries them from the car to the hammock. They sit and read or play quietly, and then he carries them back and drives off. Their feet don't ever even touch the ground. And our children greet him painted black and yelling, "Grandfather, we're Africans!"

Warming up here

Last time we went out to our dacha, it was still quite cold. Now it's starting to feel like spring! (Although, I must admit that my children are underdressed in the photos below; they suffer enough from me trying to keep them looking respectable in the city, so I let them undress as much as they want to at our dacha.)

Clearing around the peonies

Bogdan found a butterfly!

Playing dressup with dacha clothes.

Enjoying kvas.

Delicious lunch!

Planting spinach.

There's going to be a whole clump of it in the corner by where Bogdan is sitting in this picture.

Looking at Bogdan's huge earthworm.

Last time I wrote about how tired Bogdan was after his dacha adventures  This time Asya was the tired one. After walking home and getting a bath, she came to the supper table and announced, "It will be best if no one teases me tonight."

COLD dacha day

Our children have been begging for a dacha day, even though it's been cold and grey almost non-stop. I had said that we would go after Papa returned from the summit in Kiev. Then it turned out that he had to go to Kiev again. It got to the point that they were actually climbing the walls at home:

Just a cute photo that has nothing to do with anything

So, yesterday we finally went! Unfortunately, someone stole the electrical wires from a bunch of dachas, including ours, which complicates cooking a little. (In Russia the dacha community we were a part of actually collected the wires every winter and only put them out in spring. I guess that isn't as weird as it might sound.) It was so cold yesterday that we were all quite content to spend most of the time huddled around a fire anyway, though.

Convinced that he needed to blow it out

We put them to work early.

We got creative and silly, trying to keep warm

It was all very fun and satisfying, and we didn't quite freeze. Well, Will and I were satisfied with our outdoor time. Everyone else was very grateful, but they are already saying that they want to do it again next weekend.

Oh, on the way out, we took a taxi, and Bogdan hadn't been in a car for so long that he was terrified of the speed that made everything seem to be rushing at him. Before we moved to this apartment, we rode in a taxi almost every week to get to church. He's already forgotten what that is like. On the way back, he walked almost the whole way with his own little legs for the first time ever. I left with him, to get a head start before dark. Walking along the paths with just him was the highlight of the day (of the month!) for me. He was exhausted afterwards, though. After barely dragging through a bath and supper, I told him that it was time for bed; he flopped down on the floor, right where he was, ready to go to sleep.

September birthdays, part 1

Asya's birthday was yesterday, but I'll write about Jaan's first. His special day came at the end of our dacha week. The days leading up to it had been rainy, but the sun came out for his birthday. First there was a...

...special breakfast.

The beginning of the treasure hunt

After breakfast I started them on a treasure hunt. They had to do eight tasks to get to Jaan's present.

One of the tasks

"Climb as high as you can." (See Jaan?)

A treasure hidden in the dark, scary chicken house

Spectators

"Fishing in the swamp"

He finally found his present hanging from a string in "the swamp." (It's really not swampy; tall, pretty grass just grows there, so they call it the swamp.) Jaan had been saying for ages that he wanted a flashlight for his birthday. Then, he happened to see a real Maglight in a store in Zaporozhye, and he kept talking about it. He thought it was an impossible dream, but Papa made a special, secret trip the day before Jaan's birthday.

A birthday s'more, instead of cake

The next day he also took a cake to Sunday school and celebrated there, but I don't have any photos of that. And now he's EIGHT!

Bogdan's nature study

We spent a wonderful, beautiful day at our dacha on Friday. It was especially fun to see Bogdan enjoying it all. He was very busy, taking it all in.

Tasting a grape

Touching an apple

Listening to the birds (and singing with them)

(Thumb break)

Watching his siblings

...and a spider

Smelling the roses

Another dacha day

We had a great day at our dacha on Friday! Our neighbors had said that we have tons of apricots almost ready. Well, yes, they're almost ready. Not quite yet. The cherry tree was covered in ripe fruit, though, so we picked cherries instead of apricots.

Later in the day it rained hard, so Will opened "the garage" as a play place. There's a small building at the top of the hill that the previous owners used as a motorcycle garage and turkey house. Our children didn't know that it had a secret entrance for turkeys. () They discovered that, and carefully cleared out all the bottles that were stacked in it. Then they spent the rest of their time working on it and crawling back and forth through it.

My helper

Another helper

They're so weird! (and so dirty!)

He's weird, too

"Белые belly boys"

Crawling out

Crawling in

We sometimes say that the man who built all this was a real miner. There's a basement under the house that could be used as a bomb shelter, along with a tiny tunnel that he made to get his chickens from their home to the greenhouse, this secret turkey entrance, and a place where he was working on digging deep down into the hill for a root cellar.

Tired boy

It would probably do permanent damage to a Russian baby's spine to sleep like this, but Bogdan seems to like it.

After the rainstorm, we almost had to wade home. I should have taken pictures of everyone's feet when we got here!

Bogdan's first dacha day

We had a good visit with Will's sister, Anna, even though she got really sick while she was here and each of our older children threw up a few times in sympathy with her. Once she recovered, we had a dacha day together.