Why don't I blog anymore?

Why don't I blog anymore?

I don't know.

But I just spent about

10 minutes reading

the 2008 portion of this

blog.

It was fun.

I should blog.

А lot has happened.

Like Macy Jane.

Maybe I'll begin to blog

again....

Cultural differences/lost in translation

So today my sister, Barbara and her husband Mark, brought their kids down for a quick

visit

and also brought us lunch.

Deli sandwiches, grapes, baby carrots, potato chips, Doritos and juice.

Pretty typical picnic fare.

Vitaly says, "Do you only have small

carrots in America?  Ukrainian carrots

are much bigger!"

We all burst out laughing.

Then, we tried to explain about

convenience food.  Sadly, the only

word in Russian for convenient is 

удобный.

I know this word to mean 

comfortable, which while it's close,

just isn't the same.

Jeff's response?  "When you live

 in a country where nothing is 

convenient, you don't really need a 

word for 

it".

Well said.

All decked out....

 Vitaly with the other kids

 With Grandma and Grandpa McGhie

....and headed to church.

Boating with Uncle Marty

I think it's safe to say,

He LOVED this!

Thank you Marty and Caroline!

The Fourth of July-Melba Idaho :)

Melba, Idaho, is a little place.  It's not the 

"don't blink or you'll miss it" 

when you pass it on the freeway kind of place.  

It's more the 

"there's no freeway within 40 minutes and you have to want to be there and be able to navigate through a lot of farmland to find it" 

kind of place.  

Somehow two of my siblings ended up living there and so, in search of a small town American Independence Day celebration, off we went.

It's a six hour drive from Alpine.  With a couple of stops, it was seven.

Vitaly does not love riding in the car.  Also, he does not love wearing a seat belt.

He did okay on both counts, but with a few reminders about the seat belt.

In one day in small town America, Vitaly did the following:

Saw a parade -- not the military-goose-stepping-soldier-Soviet-style-parade more common in Eastern Europe. 

 This was a led-by-the-Boy-Scouts-2-Elvis-impersonators-rodeo queens-motorcycle-gang-anyone-who-wants-to-be-in-it-is-welcome-style of parade.  

He looked a bit muddled when the first handful of candy hit his chest and fell to the ground.  

By the end, he was scrambling with the others for smarties, tootsie rolls, and good old salt water taffy.  

He especially seemed to enjoy all of the classic cars and the rodeo queens.

He's definitely a 15 year old boy.

Carnival games -- There was a huge carnival on the school grounds.  Every little kid carnival game known to man was there.  He played every single one.  

Every. Single. One.  

It was fun to watch and realize he'd probably never done anything like that before.

Rode a mechanical bull -- I'd never actually seen one of these in real life, but that's why we went to Melba, right?  We bought him a ticket, he watched one guy get up and get thrown in about 7 seconds.  

“Нет, нет, нет”! was his response.  

We convinced him the "bull" could be slowed down and let him watch a younger boy ride.  I'm not sure how reassured he was when the younger boy fell off the back of the bull, got smacked in the mouth coming down, and walked away bleeding and crying.  

Awesome.  

Vitaly was up next, and after Jeff's translation of the instructions did great. I'm still not sure how much fun he had though.

Rode a horse -- A real one.  

He liked this much better as was evidenced by the posing for pictures, gesturing for still more pictures to be taken, and the huge (and rare) grin on his face.

Ate a foot-long corn dog and his first ever snow cone -- Carnival food. 

 Enough said.

Chicken chase -- He chased chickens.  He caught chickens.  Did you know if you catch a chicken in the chicken chase, 

it's yours to keep?  I didn't.  Luckily, Aunt Georgette has a neighbor who wanted chickens.  Whew.

Soccer -- There have been very few days without Vitaly's foot connecting with a soccer ball.  Luckily for him, there was a carnival game involving kicking a ball through a hole in a board. Over, and over, and over again.  When I was exhausted and just wanted to sit in the shade he said, 

"Can I go play soccer?"  

Go.  Go.  

Who cares if it's 95 degrees out?

And then....after all of that.  We went to the party house.  Georgette's friend was having a barbecue and we were invited.  In one backyard there was:

A bouncy castle with a water slide 

and an enormous spider man on the outside.

An in ground trampoline.

An above ground swimming pool.

A ping-pong table

 (which Vitaly used to humble any and all takers).

A volleyball net.

A buffet table laden with all good barbecue food.

Five coolers of soda pop (I'm guessing a minimum of 7 were consumed).

A fire pit (s'mores were a hit).

The most awesome viewing point for a surprisingly (only because Melba is such a small town)

 amazing fireworks show, 

complete with live music and huge balls of fire.

And then, because it takes over an hour for the streets of little Melba to clear themselves of all of their visitors, the party people at the party house had set up an outdoor viewing of the movie Tangled.

Yes, it was an exhausting day for everyone.  

We drove back to our hotel and collapsed.  

Melba can throw a good party.  

Thank you Melba and the party people 

(one was my very own brother!--the head party planner actually).

Kherson to Kiev to Frankfurt to Newark to New York to Alpine, Utah...whew!

Vitaly was scheduled to land at Newark airport at 2:00 pm.

Our coordinator asked us to all be there by 1:00 pm -- I guess to be sure that any late arrivals would actually be on time.

Nate and I arrived and found our meeting point.  After greeting most of the other families there, we realized we were the only family hosting for the first time (later we found another).  The others had hosted 3, 4, 5 times and many had adopted several times.  We felt quite nervous and the anticipation about killed us both.

It was fun to see everyone's posters welcoming "their" kids to America and to recognize so many of the faces on the posters.  (We hadn't even thought to put Vitaly's picture on ours).

We waited FOREVER for the kids to come through customs, talking with the other families and feeling very excited and nervous....would he recognize us from our photos?  

would we recognize him?  

what if I had no clothing with me that fit him (ridiculous because I had 4 sizes of everything)?  

shoes?  I had no shoes for him.  

what if I don't actually speak Russian anymore????

what if I never did, and everyone there was just humoring me??????

Agh!  why was Jeff in Amsterdam, or Paris, or wherever he was????

When Vitaly finally did come walking down, we held up the poster through the glass and waved. 

HE SMILED AND WAVED BACK!

Hooray!

He's about Nate's height and slightly thinner, so clothing won't be a problem--hooray again!

We walked over past the roped off area and he immediately came

over to us and greeted us each with a nice hug.

Hooray again!

We had our photo taken, signed off that we were taking him and away we went.

Most families just went out to the parking lot to their cars, but Nate and I were starving (I was actually shaking a bit because I was so hungry).  We have a lot of experience traveling internationally, we're always hungry when we land in America (maybe just anticipating US food and restaurants??) and thought that Vitaly would be starving too.

We told him we were going to eat something and then head back to the hotel.  

His response?

Я хорошо ел в самолете

I ate well on the airplane!

We were starving, he didn't want to eat.  

I decided I must eat before the hour+ cab ride back to the hotel 

and so we ran up to Chili's.

I told Nate to order something small and we ate in a rush,

trying to remember all of our Russian 

and learn a little about Vitaly while we tried to eat without be too rude.

He was really quiet and I started to worry that he either couldn't understand us or 

didn't want to talk to us.

We finally got in a cab and headed out.  He seemed tired and so I told him it was okay to sleep.  He really didn't want to and was fighting to stay awake, but the warm car and long drive won out.

Both boys slept for about a half hour.

At the hotel, I had set out piles of clothing for him to try.  He took them all, found something 

to wear, and after showing him how the shower worked, which bottle was shampoo, etc, I sent him to shower.

He came out bright-eyed and smiling.

But every towel in the bathroom was dry....still trying to figure that one out.

By now it was already close to 7 pm and with our 7 am flight I thought we should eat dinner,

go on a little walk, and go to bed.

We went down to the restaurant and I was relieved when

Vitaly ordered a nice big pasta and chicken dinner.  

We also ordered some bruschetta and he happily tried it.

Suddenly, he went really still and and stopped saying much.  His dinner came and he took one bite, said it was still hot and just sat there for awhile.

I asked if he was okay and he told me that he'd been sick

and had thrown-up on the airplane.  :(  After a couple bites of bruschetta he started

feeling sick again.

So, again, Nate and I tried to finish our food as quickly as possible.

We took Vitaly's dinner and some rolls up to the room and put them in the mini refrigerator, in case he started feeling better and got hungry in the middle of the night.  After a kinda scary walk through a kinda scary part of NY, 

he happily put on pajamas, climbed into bed and after watching about 2 minutes of soccer on TV

he fell asleep--before 9 pm.  

He slept until I had to wake him at 4 am.

We went down to try eating again and he managed some yogurt, a croissant and some tea.

And then we were off to the airport.

On the plane, Nate and I were bumped up to business class.  Vitaly was on the second to last row of economy.  I did my best to get him bumped up and when that failed, I did get him moved to the 32nd row instead of the 45th.   Then I had Nate trade him seats--which he did willingly.

As we sat down, Vitaly suddenly reached in his backpack and showed me the letter he had received (on the airplane from Kiev!) from us and then he brought out a cross-stitch and told me it was a gift for our family that he'd made.  But he needed to fix something, so he put it back in his bag.

We talked for a little bit, but my 3 nights of too little sleep were catching up with me and soon I fell asleep.  When they brought our food Vitaly declined anything and I felt terrible for him.  I kept thinking how exhausted he must feel in addition to feeling sick.  He'd traveled from Kherson to Kiev by bus (12 hours).  He'd been to the embassy to get his visa.  A couple of hours later,

he was on his way to the airport.  A two hour flight to Frankfurt.  A 4+ hour layover.  An 8 hour flight to  New Jersey.  And now, an 4+ hour flight to Utah.  

All while he was feeling sick and worried about throwing up.

When we finally arrived, I needed to go get Sage and Jake (who cut his hair while I was gone!) from my brother and sister-in-law's house.  It was a 30 minute drive in the wrong direction.  Vitaly slept a bit and then again on the hour drive to Alpine and home.

And then he declined lunch.  

I made him eat one breadstick.

The weather didn't cooperate and it was cloudy, cool, and a little bit rainy, so no swimming the first day.

He did play soccer in the back yard with the kids (Sage's Facebook update "Vitaly has MAD soccer skills!") and they took him exploring around our house.  Later we had to go shopping for a few things for him (like shoes for tennis lessons the next morning) and then home for dinner.

Which he ate a few bites of.

After some evening tennis at the park, he came home and finally got to go to sleep.

And that is the end of the story for now.....his first full day in Utah starts with a  6:30 am wake-up for a 7 am tennis lesson.

P.S.  I still speak Russian :)  

Today is The Day

We're in NY,

meeting Vitaly in

just 6 short

hours.