We had fun celebrating Halloween today!  Kathryn and I made some decorations to put outside our front door using household items.  The ghosts and pumpkins are made of napkins! 

We dressed Amelia as a Ukrainian babushka (old lady).  She was super cute, but didn’t like keeping the scarf on her head.  Kathryn was a bride.  She was in heaven twirling around, wearing makeup, etc. 

You can see from all the pictures that Darryl had a great time with something he recently purchased.  He’s going to blog about that himself.

Like last year, we had a little trick or treating around our apartment.  I got the idea from my sister to have them “practice”.  So yesterday they trick or treated for some crackers for a snack.  It was a hit!  We also decorated some little buckets to hold their candy in.  And after trick or treating they danced around to (big surprise) “Souper Trouper” and “Dancing Queen”.  Amelia’s also become an ABBA fan.

This last picture is when it was all over and time for Kathryn to get out of her costume.

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We want to wish Aunt Bobbi a very happy birthday!  She is a wonderful mother to two darling little boys.  Ryan turned two this summer and Adam was born this past May.  Here are a few pictures we have with Aunt Bobbi.

The first one is in Seattle, the summer of 2007, with Ryan.  The next is this past summer at their house in Cold Lake.  She did lots of fun things with Kathryn and Amelia.  And even helped get Kathryn to sleep at night by reading her princess stories.

We love you and hope you have a great day!

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A few weeks ago I finally remembered to take our old, stale bread out to feed the birds.  We often see people throwing bread crumbs to the birds around here, mostly the pigeons.  It looked like a fun activity for the girls, so I finally remembered when we had some old bread to take it outside.

Amelia usually eats most of her bread, so I try not to let it be too gross.  Kathryn has been known to take several bites as well.  But they also love to throw it to the birds, and I have to admit it is pretty entertaining.  So we have done this several times in the past few weeks.

I realized, however, that I have become a bread snob.  I am always willing to throw the last slices of our bread to the birds, so we always get a nice new fresh loaf.  And the fresh batons (that’s the name of the bread we generally buy) are SOOO good.  Quite a few times now I’ve gotten one that is still warm and so soft and it is just delicious.  Something I will definitely miss when we leave here.  But after one day the desirability goes way down, and after 2 days I don’t really want to eat it anymore.  Good thing bread is cheap (although the price has almost doubled since we got here) and the loaves are not too big.

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Last week I finally made it to a doctor’s appointment.  I had scheduled at least 2 and then cancelled because I couldn’t get a babysitter.  I won’t mention how many kilograms I gained, not that I really know what that means!  Every time I see Dr. Melnik she puts me under her spell.  Most of the time I am a cranky pregnant woman, wondering how in the world I can take care of 3 children when I seem to be failing at taking care of the 2 I already have.  Then Babushka Melnik tells me how wonderful it is to be a mother and how special I am and I don’t need to think about anything else. 

Anyway, she said let’s do an ultrasound for fun and I won’t charge you for it.  Of course I agreed.  We were looking at the baby and the technician asked if we had been told a boy or a girl.  I said boy.  She said it looked like a girl to her!  Now I am not a pro at these things, I can usually just make out basic shapes like foot and head on the ultrasound.  But the doctors/technicians seem to know specific bones and organs, etc.  My understanding is that when they look for a boy or girl, they don’t just look for a certain something or lack thereof, they can tell by the gender organs.  This I assume because when I asked how sure they were with Amelia being a girl, she pointed out exactly what she saw. 

So who knows.  The doctor said we would do another ultrasound at my next appointment to see if we could tell for sure.  Darryl and I still think it is a boy, because, well we just do.  It got me all excited, just for the surprise factor, though.  Unfortunately naming girls is much harder than naming boys for us, so if it is going to be a girl we’d need to get started with some lists.  That’s because we don’t like that many boy names, I guess.  Anyway, we didn’t even have to do the whole list thing, and within a few minutes we had 2 full boy names to use (we’ll save one for the future if needed).

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We recently made a special purchase!  A new viola for me!  It was Darryl’s idea, and he did most of the work.  We thought about bringing my viola back to Ukraine with us this summer, but carrying one more piece of luggage was a little daunting.  In the end I actually forgot to take it from storage.

Darryl had mentioned that he was looking to buy a viola and someone at work had a friend who plays in the symphony here, who had a friend who was selling a viola!  We arranged to meet with her and she showed us the viola and played it for us.  As soon as we heard it we fell in love (at least I did).  Wow, it sounds so wonderful, I can tell it is nicer than my other viola.  My other viola is not a full size, so this one is bigger.  I wondered if that would be an issue, but it isn’t really.  I am so out of practice I guess it doesn’t matter.

The girl selling it just finished a major in music and is buying a new viola to play professionally.  The only thing was she wasn’t selling a bow or case with it.  She told us that a music school sold these items, and we set out to find it.  We almost gave up, but did find it and Darryl was able to later order a case and bow from them.  So the whole process took a few weeks, but now I have a viola!

Kathryn loves it and she has to take a turn if I ever play it.  I love that she loves it.  If only I had a small violin, I’d try to teach her to play it.  Both girls dance around when I play a fiddling song I learned in elementary school.  It makes me so happy!

Unfortunately, I have hardly played it.  One reason is because I don’t want the girls to be hounding me to touch it, etc.  The other reason, I realized, is I don’t want to do something fun until the work is all done.  And it is never done – but that is another subject entirely.

Amanda | 6 Comments »

Back in August (on my mom’s birthday, actually) Darryl and I went to “Souvenir Street”, also known as Andreyevsky Spusk.  It is a narrow street up a hill where vendors sell souvenirs.  Darryl took lots of pictures to document the experience.  First off, a babushka with lots of dogs and the view from the bottom of the street.

There was a whole section, side street actually, of paintings. 

All sorts of sights to see. 

I’ve been wanting matroshkas (stacking dolls) as a souvenir.  But I realized that they must be more Russian than Ukrainian.  We did find some, but Darryl said they were not good quality and they were only in the section that seemed a little more tacky, geared to tourists, etc. 

Kyiv Adventures | 2 Comments »

Happy Birthday to my good friend, Amanda Jo!

I first got to know her in our singles ward (church) in Seattle.  We were in the Relief Society Presidency together.  I really didn’t know her before that, but felt so strongly that she should be in the presidency.  Because my name is also Amanda, I started calling her Amanda Jo.  Her real middle name is Jo, isn’t that cool?  She is totally an Amanda Jo.  I loved getting to know her back then and I had such a great time in that presidency.  “We’re all in this together,” we used to say.

Little did we know that we would marry guys that were good friends from their missionary days in Armenia.  And we would live a few blocks from each other and be in the Primary presidency together!  And that she would have two little boys and I’d have two little girls so we can plan for lots of future matchmaking!

Have a happy birthday, Amanda Jo!  I miss you and we’re now going to have to put Spokane on our list of possible places to move.

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I’ve been pretending I’m a photographer and have been taking various pictures.  Check out some of my latest at http://www.melanchuk.com/family_blog/photos/ and then click on Darryl’s Favorites.  Or if you prefer, you can just go to the flickr site itself.  Feel free to leave comments.

Enjoy!

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