Summertime for Sam

Since the past few posts have been about Ben, I thought it was high time to give you an update on Sam's summer. In his own words, here's how Sam is enjoying his vacation:

Almost all summer I've been watching Dad play Metroid Prime 3. When I get a chance to play video games, I play Battlefront II. When I'm not playing video games, I play with Legos. I built the Imperial Landing Craft and the Batmobile. I like to play with pretty much all the sets I have built.

I've been reading a lot of books this summer. The Way Things Work is a book that tells about almost everything, about how it works. It's really cool. Calvin and Hobbes books are really weird. Would you expect someone to do the things Calvin does? I think I've read 20 Calvin and Hobbes books. I really like them.

I like playing with Ben. Well, not always because he's kind of a grumpy kid and he's kind of mean sometimes. He's also really fun sometimes.

I think summer's really fun, a lot funner than the school year. When school starts I think I'll be looking forward to summer again.

Ben's Library Card

Apparently this is the face made when one gets one's very first library card. I think it's best if none of us stop very long to consider why this is the "appropriate" face to make.

Russian Lessons Continue

I guess that this shouldn't be a surprise to me, but it feels like everything in my life right now revolves around the Russian language. That's probably because most things actually do. We don't have any firm updates on our adoption paperwork right now - apparently somebody from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is on vacation through the beginning of August so we're unlikely to hear any updates until next week. So for now we wait patiently and hope that we'll get an update soon.

We did get a cool email last week from World Partners, though - copies of several pages of our dossier translated into Russian! I asked if we could have a couple of translated pages to put in our daughter's baby book and I have to admit that they're lots of fun to have. Since most of our postings lately have revolved around our anniversary, here's an excerpt of our marriage license in Russian - cool, eh? Seeing those pages and pages of apostille and homestudy and letters and certificates all translated helps me appreciate the effort that went into those 11 weeks of translation!

Ben continues to amaze me with his Russian. He knows all of his Russian phonograms (here's a picture of him with his self- appointed "favorite" phonogram. It makes an "f" sound) and he can sound out basically any word in Russian. And he has learned his numbers 1-100, although we're still working on recalling some of the trickier numbers quickly. Ben says that the coolest Russian number is 100 - it sounds like "stohl".

And even though I can't match Ben with Russian phonogram skills, I have been getting some practice writing those crazy letters as I label the gifts that we're bringing. I know, I know, we're still months and months from leaving, but little projects like this keep me sane and make me feel like the process is moving forward. A few weeks ago Bath and Body Works was having a humongo sale, so I purchased a dozen sets of body wash and bubble bath and lotion and then Teacher Ben wrote down the names of the products and I copied them onto labels for each bottle! We figure that all of those products tend to look pretty similar if you can't read the English labels, so a quick Russian translation would be helpful for the wonderful women who are currently taking care of our little girl!

And now all of those bottles are neatly labeled and sealed in Ziplocs, ready to be packed away in, oh, probably six months when we actually travel. Sigh. Well, at least I am enjoying the illusion of preparedness :)