Our Apartment

Hello all! Here's little guy's cute booty. I thought you would like it. Oh, and yesterday he we had regular 2-4 visitation in the playroom so he was totally happy to be in his element and he was a maniac and full of energy and we noticed two new things. #1 He sat by himself without falling over for several minutes #2 He full-on crawled. Not just took at couple of knees forward, but crawled probably 2 feet across the mat several times during the visit. Super exciting!... So I am sorry for the lame posts the last few days but I was not exactly feeling myself. Anyone who knows me well, will be shocked when I say that I finally caved after being sick for two weeks and started taking my antibiotics. I know, can you believe I am taking meds? ME? So anyway, I am feeling much better now so I am trying to think of something exciting to tell you about KStan. Let me look through some of your comments. Fabulous Jen commented several times on how happy we look and I have to say that she is entirely correct. Life here is very different than we are used to of course, but there is no place we would rather be. We don't even care that we are totally clueless and confused half the time and are covered in itchy bites and wear the same clothes day after day. Oh yeah, and I have to ask Gulsanna who wins the Twixel prize for guessing all of the languages. Mmmmm...Twixels. So good. I'll get back to you on that one, Aunt Deborah and Nancy. Someone else was asking about our apartment. It's huge. Probably about the same size as 2 floors of our house- about 800-1000ft.- and we have a anteroom (for shoe removal of course!), a kitchen to the left, and then along the hallway to the left there are a dining/living room, a bedroom, and a living/TV room at the end. The TV gets a couple of interesting channels. My fave, of course, is Fashion TV followed by World Fashion, and then the French music video channel. And sometimes the Travel Channel or Discovery or Animal Planet has things in English- you just have to catch them at the right time. The only thing Peter watches is FoxNews. The kitchen is about 3 times the size of ours at home. Not that we have used it to do anything but cook pasta and store our Twixels but it is nice. Peter even tried to have corn as a snack yesterday (yes, it's weird but we are really missing veggies here) and we couldn't figure out which contraption was a can opener. And we've been using a tea stainer to scoop pasta out of the boiling water because there is no colander but we are making do. We don't have AC but we haven't really needed it because we have a cross breeze and we're on the 8th floor- although Peter is absolutely covered in mosquito bites because of the open windows. But it's cooling down a whole lot so hopefully that means the end of mosquito season. Our apt is about 2 blocks from the river which is nice and a 15 minute walk down the pretty riverwalk from all of the shops, restaurants, and the other 2 couples. We have a playground and listen to the kids playing outside our window until midnight. We have a washing machine but have to hangdry our clothes on a rack on the porch and we don't have a dishwasher so we will have a new appreciation of these things when we get home. And for some reason the washing machine is in German so we just push buttons until it starts washing and hope for the best. I did turn an entire load of wash purple somehow so obviously we're doing something wrong. Oh well. And gosh do I miss Bounce dryer sheets. I could hold my jeans sideways and they would still lay flat after laying them on the dryer rack to dry. And let me tell you, Lynden, that your theory of cheap sheets being like nightly exfoliation is totally untrue. Scratchy sheets are just scratchy sheets- not a spa treatment. But overall the apartment has been really great. We have had no problems with power, internet, or water like some others have which is much apprectiated. Oh and we are in one of those buildings with a door lady and she is just supersweet and she always smiles and says hello (zdrast vutye) when we come and go. And there is a minimarket underneath which is nice when we need more water or TP. Anyway, below are some photos. The building with the blue balconies on the other side of the playground is where the Michiganites live. I will blog about food and clothes in upcoming posts- any requests or questions are welcome! Have a good Friday! -m