Mr. Helper

This little man is right at home in the kitchen! He spent all morning grinding bell peppers for his dad's favorite adjika. He nibbled, we chatted, and he provided a running commentary on his safety practices - "See Mom, I'm only putting my fingers in here when I'm NOT turning the handle."

Monastery continued

Well, it wasn't actually a monastery. My mistake. At one end there is a church dating to the 17th century, and the low, white buildings circling the large quad made up the Tsar's residence. Peter the Great lived here when he was young. The church and residence are on a man-made island in the middle of Silver Pond in the Izmailovo district. I'm not sure how people made islands back then. That would be interesting to find out. But for the historically minded, Peter the Great supposedly found an English sailboat on the island and paddled around the pond on it, which inspired him to establish the Russian navy.

A friend of ours has his office in a reconstructed wing of the old residence and he invited us to a birthday picnic for his son.

The grilled meat, eggplants and tomatoes were wonderful. After we ate, Zig and I took a walk around the island and found an exhibition of glazed tiles from the 17th and 18th centuries.

So here are the pictures:

Photos Galore!

Okay, I'm still trying to figure out how to move pictures around in my posts.

The first picture is Zig, his cousin Rob and his aunt Masha. We took the boys to the Victor Vasnetsov Museum in Moscow to see pictures of knights and fairy tale dragons. The next picture is Rob and his dad, Big Sergei.

Then you see Zig with his new Cyrillic alphabet magnets. He wrote "fuselage" and "bread." He told me he wrote fuselage just because he wanted to, but he wrote bread because he wanted me to cut him some bread and put butter and honey on it. The honey here is thick and wonderful. We bought a jar at the market and when we opened it, it had half a bee floating in it. We decided that was a marketing ploy ("our honey's so fresh..."). But who knows?

Then there's the view from the car as we drove through Sergeiv Posad on our way to see the house Big Sergei is building.

The picture of Zig on the swing is right before he did a half-pipe on his bike.

This is where we were today. More pictures of this monastery to follow, so stay tuned...

Catching Up

Okeydoke, here is a bunch of pictures to catch everybody up on Zig's travels.

1) Zig and Arsen on the metro
2) Not so impressed w/ downtown
3) Watching bikers do stunts in the woods

4) Gotta love the artillery pieces

Citizen of the Lego Empire

We visited Legoland California this week.

This was the most fun Zig has had in ages. He screamed the whole time on the roller coaster, but when the ride stopped he yelled "Let's get in line again!" Apparently he was screaming for joy. He says that was the best part of the day. And we did ride it again. I barely held on to my lunch. It was a two-hour drive each way, but well worth it. The last picture is Zig and a friend after a watermelon-eating contest.

Letters

Zig wrote me a letter yesterday!

He started on the lower line and then continued on the top line. It says: "You are fun with me"

Literally: "EooU R FUN WiTH ME"

The F is on the lower line, and the word "fun" continues on the top line. But I can read it! And he wrote it to me!!!

The drawing is him and me in a train.

Here he is enjoying a Richard Scarry book with his Dedo.

I had a blast listening to Zig try to translate all the untranslatable Richard Scarry cars so that his granddad would get the jokes - how does one say "Maybe our next car should be a bananamobile" or "Dingo dog knocked over all the parking meters" in Russian? Beats me, and it kind of beat Zig, too. This is where having his dad around would be nice.

The weather in LA is cooler than it was in July, but not by much.

Take care, all!

Blue Lagoon

This is Blue Lagoon, a former limestone quarry fed by a natural spring just 10 minutes outside my hometown. It's run as a private scuba diving school and not open to the public, so I've never been there before. Enter my friend Tara:

She is friends with the people who own the lagoon and invited us to go swimming with her. It was absolutely amazing. The water is alkaline because of all the limestone, so there is no life of any kind. That makes it super clean and clear.

Zig loved it. He paddled around in his floatie, even in the deep water, and kept saying how nice it was that the water wasn't slimy (or snake-infested, for that matter).

So there you have it. You can live in a place your whole life and miss some amazing stuff. There's a moral in here somewhere, I know it.