The four month mark......

The Moscow Circus was a very nice but we can't post any pictures because they did not allow us to take any. The kids really enjoyed it. Kristina was very interested in the music. They both thought it was really cool and liked it very much when their big brother went up on the stage with the clowns and did a little skit. Keegan on the other hand was a tad embarrassed.

On Tuesday, I took John to his new pre-school. He really liked it. He will be going 5 days a week for 2 1/2 hours a day. A school bus will pick him up and drop him off each day. We know that he is excited to be going to "his own" school but we aren't sure which excites him more - school or riding a school bus. He is going to start this week.

We had Kristina's parent/teacher conference on Thursday. The teacher said that she is so impressed with her and how quickly she is learning new things. She says that Kristina is ready to start learning to read. We are so super proud of her. Kristina has also been involved in an after school tutoring program to help her with her language skills. This is done with a junior high student. We were a little worried about it because it took her almost three months to be sure enough of herself to say new things to her big brother so we were not sure how she would do with a stranger. But again, they say she is doing very well. On a side note.....the school tested Kristina for her reading level. Needless to say we laughed when we got the letter that stated that she scored a zero. What did they think she would score? Because of the zero, she qualifies for additional reading help. Come on now we could have told them that before they tested her. But anyway, she will now get extra help in reading two days a week. That's all that really counts - is that she gets the extra help so she can succeed.

On Friday, we signed John up for kindergarten. He will start in the fall. We won't know until then whether it is morning or afternoon. By then, he will have at least a few months in pre-school so it won't be a brand new experience for him.

My birthday was Saturday and I decided that what I wanted for a present was a night away with the family. So we went to the Mayan Adventures Waterpark in Elmhurst, Illinois. We had a blast.

Enjoy the pictures!

By the way..........we have a camera shy fifteen year old. But we were telling him that he needs to take John to the local water park by us in the summer. John is a real ladies man and had all the lady life guards "helping" him out of the slide. He would hold up his arms and say "help please" and they would pick him up and help him out. We tease Keegan that he is going to need to teach John to say "Hey that's my big brother - want to meet him?"

The kids have come a long way in such a short time. This past four months have flown bye. We have been truly blessed. We actually have been thinking about the kids language. If we were to guess, we would say that there might be about ten words left that the kids still say in Russian, everything else is in English. One to three word answers mostly but they are improving every day.

Thank you for following along with us on this wonderful journey! More to come I'm sure........