The weather has been incredible. Highs in the high 60s and low 70s. You just don’t get any better than that in Ukraine – in October!! They say (who is “they”, anyway?) that this means the winter is going to be unbearable. Well, we’ll find out. For now, we will just enjoy the wonderful weather while we can.
Today was a short, half-day of school, and our Friday night Bible study was cancelled due to many illnesses in the group. So we were left with a long, peaceful afternoon with nothing planned for the evening. A RARE thing around here. So we took advantage of it and hit the outdoors with the littles (Seth and I, anyway. The others were at the grocery store). Even Ethan has grown to love going outside. And that’s pretty amazing since he is the one who before would not let his feet touch the ground. Seriously. He would whine and cry outside. The only way we could have him in the yard was when he was sitting in a stroller. Now he runs around the yard and actually plays. Pretty amazing. Also, we noticed that he is now almost as tall as Eli. Granted, Eli is not tall by any standard, but Ethan used to be so much shorter. He is growing and some days it seems that we can see it happening.
The kids have changed so much since we came home in August. Mary has done an awesome job with their school this season and we can see so many improvements that it is really hard to believe. Even Eli is getting to where he will sit a the school table and does not want to get up when it is time to stop. Having Katie here has made this possible. One set of hands simply cannot do everything with five littles. The amazing thing is that in this case, 2 hands plus 2 hands seems to equal more than four hands. When you add Alona (the Montessori teacher that comes to the house twice a week) into the mix, Mary is able to get so much done with them. We also found a store where we can get teaching resources (for Montessori, specifically) and we can actually afford them (the prices are much less than in the States). God is really blessing this part of our lives right now. We really dread the day Katie leaves. Besides the fact that we just like having her around and have grown to love her even more than we did before, she has been an integral part of the success with the development of our children during these months.
Here are a couple of pictures from the afternoon.
