Crawfish is a Russian delicacy

We recently went on a temple trip with Ryan and Sveta and afterwards went to a Chinese Buffet. Sveta got very excited seeing crawfish on the buffet. Evidently, they are a delicacy in Russian and one of her favorite foods. She showed us how to actually eat them.

Sveta's Borscht

Sveta came over and made Borscht for us today. It is a lot of work. I grew some beets for her but they are small so we also found some finally to buy (the big ones).

The cook was reluctant to have her picture taken in the kitchen!

You have to cook meat, dice up potatoes and then shred cabbage, beets, carrots and onions.

Then you cook it with some special spice in a big pot.

Finally after a lot of tender loving care from our cook, it's ready!

It was great! Eric and the kids came over for dinner also and the children even ate some of it.

A short trip to North Carolina

Sveta went with me to get some apples up in North Carolina. We stopped at the welcome center for her to see some things inside and she feel in love with the burning bush! She needed a close up!

After getting the apples, we stopped at another farm where they made some cute animals.

Here are the horses. She also loved the huge pumpkins. She's excited to learn about Halloween and we got a small pumpkin to carve a jack-o-lantern.

From Russia with Love!

Svetlana sent Ryan a package that also included some gifts for us. It's been fun for us to Skype with her a few times and get to know her as well. She speaks pretty good English which is getting better and she has a beautiful laugh. This morning, while we were skyping her, we opened the box with our gifts. She was so sweet to think of us and send things. It took about six weeks to arrive.

She got Ryan and Michael new ties! She's really good a picking them out. They are beautiful ties!

She sent us some coasters with cute pictures on them. Right now I put them on display on our bookcase!


The background for these pictures is a beautiful shawl made from goat hair. It's so soft. I'm amazed at it! She sent me this cute Matroyshka doll. . .

That had ten dolls inside, the littlest the size of a pea.

She lives in Vogagrad and sent some refrigerator magnets with some monuments from her City. These are some huge statues honoring the battles from World War II. One is 170 feet tall called the Motherland Calls. It has 200 steps honoring the 200 days of the Battle of Salingrad (which is what Volvagrad use to be named!