More Good News....Gets better and better

Thursday, June 15

We decided to confiscate the Gameboy before bed and there was no protesting which was good. The kids were awake at 9:00 the next morning dressed (okay Sasha was) and ready for breakfast. At 11:00 Nathan came upstairs with his gameboy and was ready to play with the kids. They really get along well. They played right up to lunch and then afterwards we tagged along with Karen and Brett over to town to go to the bank and see a Museum. We never made it to the museum though because we went to about 8 different banks trying to find one that would let us use our Visa to withdraw enough money to pay in cash for our apartment for the rest of our visit. It sure makes you long for the easy ways of paying for things at home. You just whip out your plastic and that’s that. Here everything you pay for is in green, sometimes red or even blue cash here. The money is different colored for different denominations. Also, you have to get used to the fact that everything is in large amounts at the stores. A box of breakfast cereal can be 250 Tenge and so on. Just walking around you need several thousand Tenge in your pocket for just small purchases. We have 10,000 and 5,000 Tenge bills and it looks like serious cash. It really becomes interesting when it comes to making large cash withdrawals at the bank. They start counting out bills and loading them in a cash counting machine then hand you a stack of bills that could choke a hippo. Then we get to recount it all by hand before leaving the teller.

That took up too much time so we decided to go take a look at the park. The kids had fun throwing rocks into the water and the funniest thing to us was they were all like monkeys on the run. They had so much energy and were running all over the place jumping puddles, climbing on stuff and trying to out do each other. I think they covered twice the distance we did. It was wild times. We decided we will have to go back soon and let the kids ride the rides and have that general park experience. It was cool again today and overcast but not raining. It is supposed to warm up over the next few days.

Sasha is itching to go to the outdoor Aqua Park so we will try soon but I have been trying to tell him that if it is cold outside it will be closed. It is hard to be a kid sometimes and you just can’t wait. That is something we are finding with them lately. They will ask us if they can do something and we say “maybe” or “we will see”. Well that is like saying yes to them and later they will say, “You said we go Aqua Park!” We are working on that one. One thing interesting about adding the dynamic of another child, and I know you parents out there understand, is your children suddenly do not remember the rules as well. I must say though when we went to a bank and Nathan started changing the numbers on the marquee that had currency rates of exchange my kids did stand there and watch him do it but not participate…even though you know they wanted too! They looked at me as if to say, not me, not my idea Mom.

We got back to the apartment in time to have some dinner, we all went upstairs except for Stella who wanted to do her English homework before Alona arrived. We left her in the apartment and brought her a “to go plate” downstairs to eat before English lessons at 6:30. But after we got home and the kids were cramming at the last minute the phone rang and Alona was not feeling well so we rescheduled for 2:00 tomorrow.

We did get some really great news from Marina though. We are definitely going to make our June 30th flight. Yippee! And the even more interesting thing is because of the time change we will get home on the 30th. We will leave at 3am on the 30th which is 5pm at home on the 29th and connect through Frankfurt and Chicago before arriving home 4ish on the 30th. We only have a 2 hour connection in Frankfurt which is great since we had a 6 hour connection coming over. We have 3 hours in Chicago which is the minimum for customs but we will not have to come through customs in Atlanta. We just get off the plane and “Hello Family!” That means just 15 days from today and we are HOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just in time for the 4th of July and our anniversary on the 7th. God is good and His mercy endures forever!!!