Getting Outside!

Eat your heart out, Rembrandt

So, I know it's been a while since we updated this, so I should apologize. Even though I've been making a scrupulous effort not to do that, since a friend told us a while back that our blog always started with an apology for not posting. This time, though, it's been three weeks, which really is excessive, so an apology is in order. And now I've managed to stretch it into an entire paragraph, which should really annoy that friend, which was my whole intent here. ;-)

Anyway, what is up? It's hard to post a blog just about language study, so I'm going to skip that, even though it's what takes up most of our time, and go straight to the great outdoors. You see, T-land really is a fantastic place when it's warm. It's beautiful, the weather is great, and there are chances to be outside doing fun stuff everywhere.

When the weather isn't nice, we spend a decent amount of time inside on our computers, and even the boys are starting to get into that habit!

So, when the weather turns and we can go outside, we try to do it as often as possible! We have climbing gyms, ...

parks to hike in ...
and beaches to visit!

Bobbie takes the boys down to the beach at least a couple times a week while I'm at work. It's great fun, and they really, really love it.

And who wouldn't, really? How often can you say you had a chance to get really muddy?

Of course, summer has its downside as well. One of them is "the fluff." We have these trees here, no idea what kind, that produce an unbelievable amount of it. Their seeds pop in the late spring and then all June we get this irritating white stuff floating everywhere in the wind.

I don't know if you can see it here in this picture taken at the playground where we take the boys a lot, but in the foreground it's swirling around.

But most of all everything is great. Just the other day we went with our coworkers out for shashlik. They found a new spot on our side of the river, which was beautiful!

We grilled up some chicken, so that was a bit different (usually shashlik is pork), but it was very yummy! We had a great time, just throwing an American (well, Canadian, actually, I think) football around. The other people nearby were quite intrigued as to what it was!

And of course we had a feast, and the kids played around. Including playing in the sand right next to the grill, and you only get one guess as to whether that ended with us eating sandy chicken or not.

Apparently they got enough energy out to take them all the way down to zero, because the ride home looked like this:

T-land really is a great place to live! We're SO thankful to the one who brought us here for the opportunity to live and work in such a spectacular example of his handiwork.


Thanks for thinking of us, and we will try to keep this updated more often. For now, it's just culture and language study pretty much all the time, so that's the main thing to keep in mind. We're still trying to find a way to get the boys into kindergarten, and we have some upcoming plans that we'll be blogging about soon (a trip to Moscow, some time upriver in a small village with some friends, etc), so we'll keep you posted here on all the latest with the Wandering Family's doings.