First Ever Camping Trip

This happened a while ago, on Easter weekend to be exact. We went camping, hooray! Now, you might not think it's such a big deal. But last time I went camping family-style I was in elementary school. And I'm not sure Chris has ever been camping before.

Fortunately, we have terrific friends who are seasoned campers 'cause they go camping a lot and also 'cause they have a camper. They also have a ton of gear, doubles and triples of many things which was helpful. And my brother was able to join us. He's just about the most adventurous and outdoorsy person I know. Which is great for real backwoods stuff, but is not particularly useful at a nice family-style campsite. But what's really useful is that my bro is an awesome camp cook.

One thing you gotta know about camping with Russians is that there will be lots and lots of food. The entire day will revolve around cooking and eating food. Since food is so important to the success of the outing, it won't be any ordinary stuff like sandwiches. No freaking way! Instead, there will be some sort of soup (why do my American friends think soup is so complicated? it's just about the easiest thing to cook!), lots of veggies - fresh (scallions, radishes, cukes) and cooked (roasted corn, baked potatoes) and, of course, shishkebabs.

Anyway, the three of us - Chris, myself and M - were total noobs at this whole camping thing. But I think we fared well. M loved it. The first night we tried getting him to sleep in the camper with his friends. At first he was all for the idea. But as soon as the lights were out, he asked to sleep in the tent.

The second, last night, was particularly awesome. I let M stay up late. I wrapped him in a warm blanket and he sat by the fire, listened to his bedtime story, ate s'mores, watched the stars. Then he just sat and watched the fire and listened to the adults talking and fell asleep. It was just about perfect, I thought.

Here's the picture of the delicious shishkebabs my brother made. I fixed a salad to go with them. And we had grilled corn and baked potatoes too. Now, let me say a couple of things about baked potatoes. If you cannot enjoy a real baked potato, yes, the kind with ash on its skin 'cause it wasn't wrapped in foil, then too bad for you! You are totally missing out on things.

Here's the (now, in retrospect) funny thing about this camping trip. We forgot M's warm clothes. Yep, we sure took warm jackets for ourselves. But somehow we forgot M's sweaters and warm pants and, well, even a rain jacket. That's some parenting, I tell ya. Still, the kid did great and was happy and warm throughout the 3-day trip.

Since returning from our first ever camping trip, we traded our giant 6-person tent for a more modestly sized 4-person one. Our friends upgraded their popup camper to a better model. And we vowed to go camping again soon, as soon as we get a camping stove.

Oy Vey, It's Already the End of May!

... and it looks like I've been absent from this here space for a number of months. But not to worry, nothing extraordinary has happened here and we're all doing just fine. Simply put, I was way overwhelmed and reached a total burn-out point. Couldn't stand looking at the computer screen unless I absolutely had to (for work).

But I'm back for now. So let's see, what's going on around here...

First of all, the biggest news right now is that Moebius Noodles, the book my friend/co-author/math wizard/fellow homeschooler and  I've been working on for the past couple of years is out and it's awesome (or so I hear). So GET A COPY for yourself, your friends, your kids' teachers and so on. We've heard the book makes a great baby shower gift. PDF is pay-what-you-want (just remember, we worked real hard on this book and it's awesome) and you can order a hard copy too.

I'll post more updates about the book as things happen. So far, Maria and I appeared in a guest article on the Scientific American blog.

Ok, so that's that. On to the latest house/yard project. We're slowly, but surely turning our backyard into an amusement park. A few weeks ago we bought a used 15' trampoline on Craigslist. It seemed like a good deal - the huge trampoline was in a very good shape, including the safety net. But it turned out to be a GREAT deal, unbelievable awesome deal 'cause, check it out, the people who were selling it gave us a swing set, complete with swings, fort, sandbox, fireman's pole, and a slide. And to top it all off, they gave us a zipline. Yep, they just gave it all to us!

So Chris was very busy the last week or so. First, he had to take the playset apart and get it to our yard. Then he was busy setting up the trampoline. Then he put up the swings. Today was the zipline day. And next week the rest of the playground will be done (hopefully).

Now, I was going to take pictures of Chris setting up the trampoline. I figured, it'd take an hour or two of work tops. But turns out, putting together a used trampoline is very different from all those youtube videos of putting together a new trampoline. So it took us like 3 days, including rust-proofing, cleaning the springs, and lots of hammering. Besides, turns out, trampoline assembly means spending most of the time in very uncomfortable positions, usually bent over. And straining to connect the stupid parts. Not very photogenic.

So the only picture of me that I allowed here is where I'm doing light work - ducttaping parts together (that's also not in any of the videos).

Ok, fine, I'll including this one. Although it's obviously a staged shot (to Chris's great annoyance I never lift with my legs). But M took this picture, so I'm including it.

Yesterday we had friends over for a little trampoline-jumping playdate. It was awesome! We just need loads of Bug Off spray, mostly for parents 'cause kids don't seem to be bothered. Another option for adults is to stay in the house. You see, the trampoline is so giant that it can be seen from pretty much any window of the house. But the best view is from the sliding door which, coincidence I think it isn't, is by our kitchen table.

BTW, if you are wondering about a zipline adventure tour for yourself... Sorry, the zipline we have is not designed to hold adults. I mean, it will hold (it held me), but you get like no speed on it. Plus we set it pretty low to the ground - good for little kids, but a pain for anyone above 5' tall.

The Books We Read This Week

Ok, so the week is not over yet, but I better post these books now so I don't forget to do it later. Since our old car was not driving all that well plus so many of our friends spent their winter break either travelling or being sick or both, we spent more time than normal at home in the past few days. So we read a lot.

I picked up the book of Bazhov's tales last time I was in New York mostly because I wanted it for myself. The language seemed quite difficult for a young child to understand. There are a lot of words that fell out of use long time ago. Kids in Russia might be exposed to some of these words through fairy tales and old cartoons. But my son is not one for fairy tales (he'll ask to read and re-read the Complete History of Star Wars instead) and the only Russian cartoons he is still interested in are Smeshariki, Fixiki and Pin Code. So I was very surprised when M liked the stories, kept asking for more, remembered the names of the characters and even talked about what if he was in those stories. I'm going to try to show him some of the old Soviet cartoons based on these stories.

This is another one of my favorite childhood books. I tried reading it with M months ago, but he wasn't too interested. The language is not difficult and the stories are funny and engaging. I think he was too much into his rockets and space exploration phase though. So by the time we picked up this book again, we've already read about Paddington Bear and Emil from Lonneberga, much longer and more involved stories. As M is getting older, he's becoming a lot more thrilled with mischievous characters yet he still wants them to be cute and cuddly. I think that's why this time around Kuzka stories are such a big hit.

Angelo is the first book that I insisted on not translating into Russian. M didn't like the idea of me reading a book in English. But he became too absorbed in the story after just the first couple of pages. To keep things consistent with our one parent one language approach, I plan on only reading in English during our English lessons. Our evening story time will remain in Russian for the foreseeable future. As for the book, M found the story more sad than happy. I saw him blinking away a tear or two as the story moved along. We talked a bit more about this story (in Russian) which gave me an opportunity to introduce a few new Russian words, such as штукатурка, штукатурщик, херувим, строительные леса, etc.

M liked this book, the Perfect Square, enough to pick up a square of origami paper and scissors and do his own little collage. I hoped for more, but what can I say - M just doesn't like cutting, tearing or gluing paper.

This week we also read two more math books. The first one was 1+1 = 5 and Other Unlikely Additions. I tried it some time ago, but without much success. This time, however, M was thrilled. He insisted we read the book a couple of times and then he retold me the entire story. We even tried coming up with our own unlikely additions. What I liked most was that both number recognition and addition were present, but not central. M used both without even really noticing it since he was so absorbed figuring out the attributes in each picture that really made each addition work.

The last book I want to share is Roman Numerals from I to MM. No, I'm not teaching M Roman numerals. But I wanted him to see how using different numerals affects how we write and read numbers. He liked the idea that numbers could be written as letters. He LOVED the fact that his letter, M, was used for the largest single-symbol value (M = 1000). It didn't hurt that the pictures of cute piggies were so darn... cute. He immediately recognized them from Hogwash and Pigaroons books. I like this book and will try going a bit more in-depth with it in a few months.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I can't believe it's only January 3rd. The past few days have been a whirlwind. To begin with, I cooked a TON of food... again. Yep, after the giant Thanksgiving dinner complete with the everlasting turkey, I promised to myself that the New Year's застолье would be a very modest one - just some cheese and olives and a store-bought dessert. Oh, and maybe just a tiny bit of the Olivier salad. Oh, and Chris wanted red caviar, so of course a tiny jar of that. Plus, to add a bit of color, a small bowl of the beet salad.

Yeah, right! Somehow I ended up with two giant bowls of salads - one with Olivier and the other one - with the beet one. And I baked brie in puff pastry with the secret-recipe cranberry sauce and almonds. Oh, and not to forget, a giant cast iron pot of жаркое. So it was a whole lot of food after all. The good part is I haven't had to cook for the past few days. Which is just as well because we were busy looking for and buying a car.

So now we have a new certified pre-owned car. Hooray to us! Our old car which we bought genuinely new back in 2002 (when we were young and naive) has seen better days, much better days. We haven't been taking it on highways or anywhere outside of the 30 mile radius from our house for about a year. We'll be sad to see it go (when and if we sell it) 'cause it's been a great car to us even though pretty much everyone we know told us from Day 1 that it was total crap and we made like the biggest mistake of our lives.

Nor was buying our first car as much of a pain and a time-suck as buying this one. Seriously! I hate the entire process now and hope to not have to go through it again for the next 10-12 years. And by then we'll have bullet trains and moving sidewalks installed everywhere anyway.

Ah, I forgot to mention the gifts our very lucky son got for the New Year! A very indulgent Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa, got him this awesome thing. Needless to say, M is in love! He spent what seemed like the entire New Year's Day alternating between driving Sphero around the house and driving us up the wall complaining that Sphero wasn't charging fast enough. For now M uses Sphero mostly for flipping virtual cupcakes to Sharky the Beaver in the augmented reality game (at the end of each round Sharky says "sugar coma" which apparently M finds super funny; he also pointed out that Sharky must have lots of cavities).

M also got more lose Legos, something he really wanted for his ambitious construction projects. But at this point nothing could compete with Sphero.

Finally, this week we are back to homeschooling. Seems like our winter break lasted forever! But more on that later. For now, Happy New Year to All and to All a Good Night!

Last Christmas Cookie

... has been eaten and I'm just now getting around to updating the blog with all the Christmas related stuff. Yep, we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas. What's more, we also celebrate my most favoritest holiday of all, the New Year (so stay tuned for that one). And yes, there are gifts for M for each of these holidays. So we try to keep it very low-key in terms of gifts - 1-2 gifts for each holiday and nothing over the top. More about gifts later.

This year we had the most elaborate run-up to Christmas ever. Last year everything was very low key because, with Chris deployed, I just didn't feel like it. Nor did I have much time for things other than a tree and a gingerbread house. But this year, oh my!

First, we made the gingerbread house with the lovely kit from Trader Joe. This is my favorite gingerbread house to date and I do hope they sell it next year too. It didn't have weird ingredients, was super-easy to put together, looked very nice and cost only about $7.

Once the gingerbread was up, it was time to go get the tree. A couple of years ago, when we had a very snowy winter (yep, we do get those in the Piedmont area once in a while), we went to a nearby tree farm and cut down our own tree. Which was fun. But this year we waited until like three days before Christmas to get the tree and knew that all the good ones at the farm were already claimed. So instead we bought ours at the farmers' market.

Next, it was time to bake Christmas cookies. I had very ambitious plans for baking sugar cookies, gingersnaps, and making chocolate almond bark. Except I also planned on cleaning the house. So in the end I had no energy for the big production. Chris and M did the sugar cookies and I put together gingersnaps. BTW, both were Alton Brown's recipes and turned out delicious!

A couple of days before Christmas we already had gifts for M, but not for each other. Since our car required some expensive repairs just before Christmas, we didn't feel like getting anything pricey. Instead, we all went to my favorite thrift shop. And, much like Alton Brown, this thrift shop never fails. We bought a couple of nice ornaments for our tree, a Rumertopf unglazed clay bread baker for Chris (he said he always wanted one) and a hand-carved wooden chips and dip tray for me. All for like $7.

The day before Christmas we went to our good friends. M had a lot of fun, as usual, playing with the boys. And the adults were able to have an almost uninterrupted conversation punctuated with good wine. Which sounds idyllic except I had to leave the party 'cause of the most horrendous headache ever.

Ah, so what did M get for Christmas? He got three gifts. Two were Lego Education kits - Simple Machines and WeDo robotics. These are not cheap, but we got them free as part of the OurMilitaryKids.org grant (for M's participation in the JrFLL Lego club earlier this year). And the third gift was the Angry Birds: Star Wars game I finally downloaded to the iPad.

So the Christmas day was spent building with Legos. The first thing M built with Chris's help was a crane. But he got bored with that quickly and insisted we built and programmed an alligator with a light sensor. The gator turned out to be the Rebel gator and bravely fought against several Imperial troops and Lord Vader himself.

P.S. I was also busy putting together a 72-hour emergency food supply as part of my Challenge on eCentify.com. M got totally into this (he loves anything that has to do with stockpiling for difficult times ahead) and built this "emergency surprise tower" of food. Notice, he remembered the tea tin (so you can make tea, Mama), fruits (so that we can make fresh juice) and a kitchen timer (so we know what time it is).