As I type, I have a sleeping baby on me. It's so nice. I should be making dinner, but I couldn't possibly wake her up! She's been sleeping already for over 2 hours. And Anneka napped today, too. Anneka's been waking up bright-eyed and fluffy-tailed at 6-something most mornings lately. It doesn't matter when she's gone to bed the night before or how much sleep she's had. That's just her time to wake up. And I feel like 6:00 here is like 4:00 in North America. Because it's so dark and cold. But anyways, Anneka likes to go into the living room and read books in the rocking chair upon awakening. That's about all I feel like doing at that time, too (well, except for cuddling, but she's not too keen on that).



The schools are all still closed (for an extra week) for the flu quarantine. I didn't know that it was closed on the first day until I got there. It was puppet theatre day and the puppet teacher hadn't known either. She let us come in for awhile and made a little puppet with Anneka and read her a couple of books in Russian. Ella let her hold her, too, which was amazing because Ella pretty much only likes her Mama and Papa right now. I appreciated how nice and welcoming Raica Michaelovna (the teacher) was to Anneka when we weren't supposed to be there. Yesterday the quarantine was supposed to be over, but I called the head teacher, just in case. When I found out there was still no school, I told Anneka, "Let's do something exciting today". She likes all things exciting. She's been asking to go to the zoo ever since we've been reading the book "Goodnight, Gorilla". I'd seen a sign in our neighborhood for a tropical animal exhibit in the art museum downtown, so we went there. Hopefully I can get some pictures off of Rebecca's phone for a blog on that day. Yes, it was exciting.

Leif was invited to a church service at the Lutheran Church last night and then afterwards he planned on meeting with several people for the planning of a Buryat Christian Celebration. Well, what he didn't know is that they had planned on him giving the main talk at the service. They sang songs and then called him up front. haha. He gave a short devotional. The meeting afterwards went well. We're looking forward to this Celebration in mid-March. The last few years we've had it in February and it's been really powerful.