Basketball, The Little Stinker, and Eggs

On Tuesdays Leif teaches basketball to neighborhood kids- a younger group for an hour, followed by an older group. I wanted to snap a picture when more kids were out there, but wasn't able to get outside with the girls in time. It's neat how Leif connects with kids and it's fun to watch them interact with one another.

I haven't blogged for a few days because the stomach flu has made it's round through our whole family. When Leif got it a week ago, we thought it was food poisoning, as he'd had fish earlier that day from our babushka friend. But lo-and-behold it was an awful virus. I'm thankful that Ella got it after Leif and Anneka, though, so that we had hopes that it would end. Both girls today are acting like nothing happened and are as chipper and energetic as ever. Something interesting about sickness here is that people always ask you why you got sick. Examples of what they'll ask are:
"Did somebody open the window?"
"Did you drink cold juice?"
"Were you wearing a hat?"
Our downstairs neighbor came over this weekend to borrow money to purchase her husband's death certificate (or some form of paperwork for him). I told her about Anneka being sick, and she asked if she had a temperature. After I replied, "no", she told me that it was from yogurt. I explained that a few days earlier Leif had had the same thing so it was probably a virus. But she was convinced that it was yogurt (she's not the first person to tell me this). But when Ella got sick that night, I knew it wasn't yogurt. She doesn't eat it.




Ella's favorite place in the world is to be is on Anneka's bed. She LOVES it up there. It's hard to express how much she loves it. And when we take her off, she screams her head off and cries desperately. It's really high up, so Leif or I need to be right there if she's on the bed. I always thought it was a place that she couldn't get to until the other day when I walked into the girls room and saw this (pictured above). Ella had climbed up this stool all by herself and Anneka was trying to help her get onto the bed. That's a disaster waiting to happen!



Anneka, Ella, and I made a trip to our little local store this past week, and Ella rode in the stroller. She'd been sleeping for awhile before while Anneka played on the playground and continued to sleep as we entered the store. Anneka really wanted to open the door to the store by herself and tugged really hard on it (it's heavy). A kind old Buryat man came rushing over to open it for her, and she began to cry really hard. I could tell the man felt just awful. I pulled Anneka aside and explained how the man was just being kind and didn't know that she'd wanted to open it herself. We got calmed down and then went to buy groceries. I got some eggs (they come in groupings of ten typically, packaged in plastic bags (pictured above). I was trying to figure out the best way to hold them and push the stroller and that same Buryat man told me to put them in the stroller by Ella's head. By then she was awake, and I envisioned a gooey mess, but I also felt so badly about the earlier door-opening-incident that I did as he said. And Ella was one happy baby. And amazingly all ten eggs made it home, safe and sound.