Category: Language

Wide Awake Podcast

Baby Steps to Ukraine

How do you move your family to Ukraine?
One baby step at a time.
I’m not much of a baby-stepper.  I’m more of a huge-ginormous-leap-off-of-a-cliff-into-the-great-unknown-stepper.  Thank the Lord Jed is somewhat of a baby-stepper.
This weekend we had our first garage sale of what I’m sure will be many more.  This garage sale was affectionately known as “Phase 1 of the House Purge”.  A whopping 4 days after we returned from Ukraine I started rounding up stuff for this garage sale.  I went through every room and found items that didn’t have a home.  If it didn’t have a home, it didn’t deserve to stay at our house.  It was awesome!!!  I LOVE getting rid of stuff.  It’s so freeing.  Less stuff in the house = less stuff for Mommy to pick up.  SWEET.
The garage sale went pretty well.  It rained most of the day Friday, but that was nothing some coffee couldn’t fix.  The nice thing about garage sales is it kind of gives you an excuse to do nothing all day.  Sure it’s a lot of work to set up, but then you basically get to sit around and chat the rest of the time.  I decided I like holding garage sales.  Our friends Eric and Hannah did the sale with us, and except for the 2 hours when it was down-pouring rain and Eric and I were huddled under the front porch cursing the clouds, we had a pretty great time.  Many items that I once had to pick up, I now do not.  Success!
Another baby step we’re taking (that feels more like the splits) is Russian lessons.  We found a great Russian woman who is coming to our house every Tuesday night to teach us.  We’ve had 3 lessons so far and my brain feels like jello.  Why can’t they speak Spanish in Ukraine?  Don’t they know that would make things so much easier for us?  Ah well.  Apparently, Jed has a better tongue for Russian than I do.  Bleh.  Whatev.  I work WAY harder than him and our Russian teacher goes on and on praising Jed’s great accent.  She keeps telling me I need to “train my tongue”.  I’m a wee bit competitive, so this does not go over well.  🙂
I MUST beat Jed at Russian- and I will.  Just you wait and see.
So, here’s to baby steps, tongue-training, and people buying our junk!  
Each step moves us closer to Ukraine.
Yeehaw!

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