Echols' Ukrainian Echoes: Mother's Day!

It was my first Mother's Day and it was TERRRRIFIC!! We have a terrific family! It is really fun to be a mom.

Stuart and Karina woke up early and told me to stay in bed. They fixed breakfast and Karina made me a card by hand, translated herself! Beautiful! They gave Mama a pizza stone and a DVD player for Karina to watch her movies in the red room. We then worked in the yard trimming the Russian sage, and Karina took two wheelbarrow loads of twigs to the compost pile. We packed a picnic lunch in the basket and had a picnic in the park for 3 hours playing on the swings and hide and seek. The day ended with our first family meeting. In the meeting we went over family values and expectations. We meet as a family every Sunday night. This gives us time to talk about what is working and not working as a family and what we want to start, stop and continue doing as a family. We post what we talked about on the family bulletin board. We topped off the night with a Mama-daughter extra-bubbly bubble bath in the whirlpool tub! Whew! The bubbles were overflowing! We buried ourselves in bubbles and it took two tub-fulls of water to de-bubble and rinse off! We had our seltzer water in plastic wine glasses and included candles this time. Why not? Life is short!

Mama, Karina, Robert (the beagle) and Big-Kitty all slept together last night. She needed extra cuddles due to an emotional day off and on yesterday. Being a family is a big deal for her. It was good to sleep together. Plus, Papa is still sick, so he was appreciative of the space.

Today, we had a wonderful tour of the charter school, which is small and creative and has 5th and 6th grade together (nice for us!). There were several kids at the school who spoke Russian (bi-lingual) an they talked to her. The kids were doing some interesting projects. It was a nice place to be. We also had a productive visit to the dentist and did a lot of x-rays. Her teeth are in better shape than they appear because the bad teeth are baby teeth still. Hopefully they will fall out. Not all baby teeth fall out, so we are crossing out fingers! The cosmetic issues can be fixed fairly easily.

Mama got a chance to work on volunteer work when we got home, and Papa took Karina to the park later today where she met some girls who befriended her. It is great to see her reaching out.

We have had our first sets of conflicts and mini-melt-downs. First, it was mama and Karina over short-shorts. Papa left the room. The shorts were a mis-understanding. She was wanting to wear them inside them change again before going out in public and Mama thought she was going to wear them out in public. The second conflict is over handwriting and the letter "r" and we will work on handwriting. The joys of home schooling for the moment! Anyway, thank goodness for Google translator and the Russian-English online dictionary!

So far so good! Off to cook dinner... and work on our English goal for the week - 24 words (say it, spell it, write it) - and that means in Russian for us as well as in English for her.