Kiev Trip (Part 3) and Other Stuff -- Day 773

Well, I have been a bit slow with the entries lately as I have been working on a website about Ukraine, which has taken up a lot of my time.

So back to Keiv. Towards the end of our stay, we found what can only be described as park heaven. Anna calls it train park because it had a big motorized train that you can ride in. And of course we had to take a ride too. Also, the playground equipment was fabulous. It had all of Anna's favorites: swings, teeter-totters, and merry-go-rounds and much more -- plus it wasn't sandy. Unfortunately, we didn't find it until the second to last day there. Another problem was that the park was about twice the elevation than other parks, so Daddy had to work a lot harder to get there.

When I first was trying to find it, I saw a set of stairs -- probably over 100 steps. So of course, I pick up Anna in her stroller and start walking up. When I reached the top my legs were wobbling and at muscle failure. Of course, I had gone up the wrong way and had to go all the way down again. Luckily I found a road so I didn't have to carry Anna down the steps.

So at the bottom I realize I now have to climb an equally high hill -- again -- to get to the park. By the time I got to the top I was bathed in sweat and huffing a mighty wind. The good news was that the park was woth it. I could only compare it to the grand parks of Paris or Vienna. I think we will spend a lot of time there when we go back to Ukraine.

The next day we went home and got on the plane; however, Anna wasn't really in the mood to fly. Great news. When we transferred in Frankfurt, Anna's stroller had somehow broke, so we had to carry her or let her run around. About an hour before our plane took off to DC, Anna just melted down and we were in an enormous line for security because of that terrorist liquid thing.

Finally, we just couldn't do anything more so Anna just cried. But let me tell you a secret about long lines. Crying babies get you to the front pronto. And it just so happened that we all had separate seats on the flight, so after some last-minute reassignments we got the last set of seats together. If we had waited in the line, we would have been split up on the flight back and had to trade around. I'll have to keep the crying baby trick in mind the next time we fly.

On our final leg back, Anna was good until she had to go to sleep. She stretched things out and stayed up for about three hours past her normal bedtime. Then she just melted down again for about 45 minutes. Eventually, we just gave her a lollipop and let her lie down on the floor.

We actually had to teach her to lick a lollipop since she had never had one before. A pretty good run of candy denial if you ask me. She was quite skeptical for about the first ten minutes, but one lick changed her tune. Of course, she never quite grasped the idea that she could manoeuver the lollipop with her hands. Instead she held the lollipop stationary while she wildly wiggled her tear-soaked head with her tougue hanging out. The sucker got in her hair, her eye-brows, on her chin, arms, hands and on her Nya-Nya. Eventually, she fell asleep clutching it in her hand, and she didn't move until we landed some four and half hours later.

So that was it. The trip was a bit on the long side, but Anna loved it and still talks about Kiev. I wonder how much she will remember when we go back.

As for other news, Anna started day school two days a week. The first day she liked it so much that she cried the whole way home because big bad Daddy took her away from her new toys and friends. The day school is a cooperative where we pay a monthly fee and I have to volunteer one day a month to be a parent helper.

My first volunteer day was about a week and half ago, and I can only describe it as one of the most miserable experiences in my life. Fourteen toddlers in a new program that hadn't worked out the bugs was not what I expected. Those four and half hours were more like forty hours of work. Half of the kids just cried for their Mommies or Daddies, while the other ones were just up to toddler no-good.

A little boy bit a girl. At one point the two oldest boys were literally jousting in the play area outside with a large stick and garden trellis. And in the sand box, Anna was shovelling sand into another kid's hair. There was no order. Everyone was running around. It was toddler anarchy.

When I got home I seriously thought about whether this program was worth it, but luckily by the next time things had gotten significantly better. In the future, I am sure it will continue to become more orderly.

One of the benefits is that Anna now comes home with art work. Anna told us after her first day that she wanted to go back to pre-school and make artwork to hang on the fridge. Anna is always talking about artwork now.

Anna is also again getting more interested in potty training. The other day she said she had to go, so I brought her toilet downstairs and she just sat on it. False alarm I guess. So I gave her something to read, a bag of cheerios, and some water to see if that would 'help' out. Anna just sat there getting off and on at various times waiting for the wee-wee to come. Every five minutes she would say, "I think I hear something," then she would jump off and say, "I did it. I went potty." Of course, nothing was in there.

I just kept telling her to keep drinking and sitting. Eventually, when crying wolf had clearly been established, she told me that she did it, so I walked over and sure enough she had gone in the toilet. I then went on the internet and scheduled a call from Elmo to congratulate her on working so hard to go to the bathroom.

You should have seen her eyes when Elmo called. She was so happy, but then she asked (15 minutes after she had just gone potty) to take off her diaper so she could go potty again and get another call from Elmo. (It is $2.39 per call by the way.) I told her that Elmo might call after she goes number two, so she just blurts out, "I'll sit on my potty and wait for poo-poo." That she did for about another 30 minutes. Nothing came of course.

Well, on that note, I will have to end this entry. Note: I will probably take this last picture off after a short display period.

Kiev Trip (Part 2) -- Day 760

I think I left off after our second day in Kiev. It was really that day and afterwards that Anna started having fun all of time. We started off finding the parks. Anna called them "sandy parks" because many of them were full of sand. After pushing the stroller up the hill on the first day, I found the funicular which made the trip much easier. Anna, of course, loved the funicular too.

During one of Anna's days at the park, she saw some older boys running around, and Anna wanted to join in the fun, so she just started chasing them. The boys were just doing their own thing, sort of ignoring her and any chasing that may have occurred by Anna was purely coincidental. She just happened to be running when they were running. But she had the biggest smile on her face. Unfortunately after she started to get in the way, the boys sort of indicated that they wanted her to stop bothering them . It was a little sad, but she had so much fun. I just made up some story that the boys were tired and couldn't run anymore. Anna still talks about how she was chasing the boys at the park and she just starts smiling big.

The nice thing about the parks was that they all had swings. Swings are very uncommon in DC. I don't know if it is a liability thing or not, but it was great to have plentiful swings throughout Kiev. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for Anna just to swing for 45 minutes straight with no break. That made for a pretty dynamic time on my part.

On the third day we took a boat ride on the Dnieper, but the real boat fun came about a week later when we took a sail boat for an all-day trip on the river. Everything went well and there were two other young kids on board. One of the passengers on the boat planted the idea in Anna's head that there was a 'boatasaurus' in the hull. Anna probably looked for an hour or so into the boat's interior counting boatasauruses. One of the pictures to the right is Anna looking for them.

The only down side to the trip was that as we were heading back, the wind just died completely and the motor was apparently at the shop. So we were afloat in some of the most placid water I have ever seen. As one hour stretched into two the captain had to call in to be towed back. It took about two hours longer to wait for the rescue boat and get towed in by another boat with a four-horse-power engine. Yes, I said four. The engine was smaller than a lawn mower and had about a quart-sized fuel tank. At one point we also got caught up on a sand bar. Eventually, we got loose but the arrival time of 5:00 pm eventually turned into an 8:00 pm arrival time. All this with a toddler who hadn't taken a nap. All in all, Anna did a great job and fell asleep soon after getting into the car seat for the ride back.

Half way through the sailing trip (before the wind died), we stopped to have lunch along the bank. We called it the island of Sodor, which is from Thomas the Train, and Anna had a wonderful time throwing stones into the river. We will have to take the trip again sometime, but hopefully with a motor in case the wind fails us.

Anna really liked Ukrainian food. There is a dish called vareniki, which is essentially small ravioli-like dumplings stuffed with things like cheese, meat, mushrooms, and cabbage. We would go to a fast-food place called Shvidko that served a variety of them, and Anna would eat most of her vereniki. One of the guidebooks even mentioned that it was the rare child that refused vareniki. How true that was.

We were lucky that in the vicinity of where we were staying we had some child-friendly places to eat. They even had a toy store around the corner where we could pick up assortments of plastic animals for her to play with. It is normally a challenge to eat out once a day or a couple of times a week at a restaurant, but during our trip we were eating out pretty much twice a day for over two weeks. That was a bit rough.

The amount of bribing we had to do to keep Anna in line during the trip was shameful and unfortunately Anna has picked up a few bad habits. But I guess when you are pushing her in a stroller and you are a 45-minute walk from our hotel and Anna just decides that she no longer wants to be in the stroller, you have to do something. Basically, she ended up eating enormous amounts of cheerios and trashing my travel guide. Eventually, I convinced her that whenever we went up and down a hill (which was a lot of the time), she had to sing songs. That worked pretty well, and I even got to listen to some of Anna's music.

It was a bit of a stretch entertaining Anna when we weren't doing something enormously fun. She must have read her books a few hundred times. The big hit (predictably) was the Richard Scary book about the airport. We also bought her some Dr. Seuss books while there. An English-language book store carried some children's books, and it was very nice to top off our book supply. When I was looking through the books, I noticed some good Dr. Seuss that I hadn't seen in the US, so we snatched them up. The problem was that there is probably a reason they don't sell them in the US anymore. The Wocket in My Pocket and Hunches in Bunches clearly introduced Anna to the concept of spooky, scary things. She would wake up in the morning pointing at an area of the room and say, "There is a Vug under the rug," or "There is a Waset in the closet." I didn't quite see that one coming.

Well, this post is getting too long and I had better attend to the baby girl. Oh yes, one more thing: Anna took a pony ride at Shevchenko Park. I sent some links to video of her riding earlier, but the second-to-last photo is of a pony, Anna, and Mommy.

Kiev Trip (Part 1) -- Day 750

There is quite a lot to write about, so I will break this up into two or three posts. We'll see how it comes along.

I finally learned how to install our car seat because we had to use it in the taxi to the airport. These things are engineered in a way to maximize frustration and stress and this was no exception. One of my good friends had a car seat that he just couldn't figure out, so he ended up just trashing it and buying another one. Well, that is neither here not there...back to our trip. Though I do really dislike car seats.

Anyhow...Anna thinks riding in a car seat is a special event, so even the taxi cab ride to the airport was a fun start to vacation. On the way there, Anna -- still into boats -- was trolling for boat pictures in the magazines in the car. She located a Business Week, and after flipping through a few pages says, "This magazine is for kids a little bit bigger." Yep, a bit of an understatement, but you can still look for boat pictures in it.

The flight wasn't too bad going there. Anna still can't go to sleep on her own when she is not in her bed, so Daddy usually has to do a bear-hug hold when she is at her most tired. This is also the time when she most enthusiastically trying to set off on her own and walk about the airplane. Anna really dislikes this hug hold but it sets her up for going to sleep as she only then realizes she MUST go to sleep. The problem is that this hold creates a series of screams and shrills that can last anywhere from 5-30 minutes. Fellow air travelers also love this.

Once we arrived in Kiev and were driving in from the airport, Anna decided to give us the play-by-play of her birth. Ok, I need to set this up a bit. Anna likes to look at pictures on our laptop computer at home, so I will often open up a folder of pictures and put it on slideshow. Anna will just sit there at the table and watch and re-live all the times gone by. Well, there is also a folder of pictures when Kerry was pregnant in France, and we have told Anna that Mommy was big because Anna is in her tummy. Also, in that batch of photos are pictures of Frances on our balcony.

Anyhow, Anna has used these (pre-Anna) photos to make up the story of her birth, and here it is. According to Anna, she was under Mommy's shirt naked and was growing in France, then one day she climbed out of her shirt and emerged on the porch that Frances walks on. Here are two photos of Anna's revised birth story to help you visualize it.

It really is nice to look at pictures of Anna with her. She has gotten so used to it that one day I when I was at a coffee shop she looks at a person working on a laptop and she says, "That man is looking at Anna pictures." To Anna the only utility of a computer is looking at pictures of her. It's all about her isn't it?

Once in Kiev, I quickly realized that it was not the most stroller friendly place in the world. Though the city is polishing up well, especially since my last visit in '93, it only takes pushing a stroller around to realize every bump, hill, hole, and step. My first day I pushed Anna with a load of accessories (sun screen, water, stuffed animals, travel guides etc.) up a cobblestone street that had about a 30% grade for about a half mile. My legs were literally wobbling, and I had to pick her up for about 15 series of steps. It was also one of the hottest days of the year. If I have learned anything it is that Kiev is on a series of steep hills.

Finally, after near muscle failure I stopped and bought some water, but as it so happened they had a lego play table at the outdoor restaurant. We sat there for about two hours playing legos, then I went back down the hill to our apartment. So the first day after our arrival consisted of walking up a hill, getting tired, and then going down the hill.

I don't think I have any pictures of the street (Andriyivsky Uzviz), but here is one courtesy Google Image. You can see the road leading up to the church at the top of the hill. It is a really beautiful place, and there is a street fair along the road during the weekends selling all sorts of soviet kitsch, crafts, clothes, and art.

Well, I will end my post here. The next post will talk about more of what we did during our stay in Kiev. Anna (and Daddy) had a full schedule. Mommy worked, but also had some quality 'hill' time on the weekends and after work.