boo! bringin the american traditions to russia!

can i just say that i completely adore my children? they are so dang precious and i just love them a lot. that being said, as their american english teachers, and halloween not being a big deal here, we try to bring them a little bit of our american culture by making halloween a party. and we do. and they remember it. and it's great. we rotated the kids through every teacher, and had different activities for them in each room.

-pin the face on jack o'lantern

-costume dress up (this was mine)

-spider cookies

-and... i can't remember the last one.

the vice principal who is our disciplinary go to stayed in my room most the time, and helped get the kids dressed up. she wouldn't let us put any real costumes on them tho.... but they still had fun!

my babies!

 the middle group 

 this kid is the sweetest little boy in the entire world.

this is alisa. she used to cry and scream bloody murder every day when she came into class. i was always the one that went out into the hall to calm her down, and eventually she came in smiling. she's given me stickers that are now on my laptop. i love her :)

 i don't even know what to say about mative....

 my big boys! plus manya. they're my favorites. i completely love them

 my all time favorite little boy ever. vova, i'm a sucker for this boy. he's super, super sweet

 ludmila! even she joined in the fun!  so expected, and so funny 

 little vlad. i see this kid everywhere

 i don't even wanna talk about this girl's future... 

oh misha.... such a stud. this kid is so dang smart.

and just because i love my children....

 i really wish this picture wasn't blurry because i kind of love it...

the big kids! 

 i love this picture because the kid in the background is braiding my hair :)

middle kids 

 oh, the crazy kids...

i love them 

a couple of my private kids :)

a happy, happy day in russia

october 23. clarie's birthday. an excuse to party. we like surprises here, so no one really said much about the upcoming birthday, but a plan was definitely brewing. it was on sunday, so the girls who don't go to church did a little prepping while the rest of us were gone. church brought a VERY pleasant surprise for us though. a couple of general authorities! Brother Matthew O. Richardson, the 2nd counselor in the Sunday School General Presidency, and Brother Larry M. Gibson, First Counselor in the Young Men's General Presidency (to learn more about what they do, go here). of course those guys were like celebrities to us, plus they're from America and actually speak our language, so we were WAY excited to shake their hands and talk to them. Brother Gibson got a special place in my heart. he gave us all a little card, that's generally for the young men, with a gold dollar to start a mission fund. we talked to him a few times, and you could just tell that he was going out of his way to give us an extra reason to smile, when we were so far away from home.

after church was slightly hectic. Leslie and i rushed out of church saying that we needed to find the stadium where we would go to the tennis open the next day (more on that later) which we actually needed to do, but didn't, and the other girls tried to stall clarie as long as possible. we ran home and blew up balloons and made signs and covered the apartment in streamers as best as we could in the about 15 minutes that we had to get things done. i think our plan worked fairly well. we made blini, and played catch phrase, and ate cake and ice cream, and watched hocus pocus, and played murder in the dark- complete with theme music via the inception soundtrack. i suppose you could say it was a good time. 

and of course, clarie's birthday wouldn't be complete without her shoving some kind of food in someone's mouth. bekka was the lucky winner.

we like to sleep, but we like to do things. solution: each other.

so here's the deal, my roommate heather and i, we're both night owls. we both also really like to sleep. we both also hate sitting around doing nothing. so, we make a good team. we've gone out on several excursions together. sometimes we have a goal in mind, sometimes we don't. i honestly can not express how much i just love wandering around the city and seeing what i find. when we do have a goal in mind, sometimes we find it, generally we don't. so this is my log of our excursions together up until this point.

excursion #1: the trinity cathedral. 

 from the outside, this is one of my favorite cathedrals. i've just got a thing for the whole night sky look

 why wouldn't they have a tower made out of cannons?

 so pretty!

 thank you photographer, for showing 10 feet in front of our feet, but cutting off the top of the building. 

 we tried to find a way to get into this corner building, because it looked awesome and we wanted to know what it was. we never got in, but i think it was just apartments.

 and... the nerdy side of me comes out when i say that this was my favorite thing of that day- when we found mendeleev. that's right. THEE mendeleev. don't know who that guy is? let me give you a hint with the next picture....

 still don't know? he arranged the periodic table, and made every chemistry students life, from that point on, so much easier.

 i kind of love him.

 beautiful, eh?

 i love this. this hat was just sitting on a window ledge outside a building... just hangin out there. that building may or may not have been part of a cluster of buildings... which may or may not have been gated off... which we may or may not have tried to get in. in multiple ways. i'm not at liberty to discuss that.

for some reason, i had a dying desire to see these pillars and what was between them. pretty sure we ended up in one of the shadiest parts of russia here. which is probably why we kept getting a bunch of people staring at us, even when we tried to blend in. it felt a little bit like inception.

this particular excursion started my love for wandering and trying to get into random buildings, when i don't know what they are. did we get to where we were trying to go? yes. did we discover other fun things? yes.

rating: success.

excursion #2: wandering around central.

i feel like this one's kind of self explanatory of what we did. we walked around central with no particular place in mind to go to. and pretty much just did whatever we felt like. no complaints there! however.... when heather and i decide to do this, or just end up doing it, we might just end up doing things that we PROBABLY shouldn't do in russia.... where no one speaks our language.

 kind of a big deal shopping center in st. pete's.

 just a regular creepy alley that we decided it would be a good idea to walk down 

we like our men with bear claws around their loins. and now we finally understand why the band-aids are ALWAYS next to the condoms in the grocery stores.

we sneak into random buildings and do ballet on their stage... 

 then hide in their toy houses...

then run away, but be sure to take a picture of the label on the building, so we can figure out where we actually were, later.

we also might kiss floors if we like the pictures 

 according to russian novels, american kids are nuts about tv, and by tv, they mean pokemon!

 best toy shop ever.

 for when you take your kids under 13 out at night...

and finally.... the coolest store on this planet. very zombies-took-over-the-world-and-now-we-have-to-make-everything-from-spare-parts-ish. i dig it.

 precious.

this is just one of the many random buildings that i happen to love. no clue what it is though. as usual.

fact: successful excursion. 

(except for the part at the end where we got lost and it took us about an hour in the freezing and rain to find a metro,  and only found it after we finally decided to ask someone. minor details.)

excursion #3: mendeleev's museum. or.... not.

being the nerd's that we are, when we found out that there was an entire museum dedicated to dmitri mendeleev, of course we knew we had to go. so, we looked it up, wrote down our directions, and set off. unfortunately, this time, we weren't quite so successful. the stupid cyrillic alphabet made us turn down the wrong road. not our fault at all right? we left late that day and had a very limited amount of time, so unfortunately, we weren't able to correct that mistake. but! our trip was not wasted. because we found.... 

 a cat,

 egypt in russia,

and an old church! called... old town church? something like that.

 it was pretty. and i like it a lot. i think it was one of my favorites so far.

success? yes. we may not have found what we were looking for, but we found something awesome that we probably would have never found otherwise.