We made it

We arrived at 11:45 am. All is well. We dropped our bags off at the apartment and did a little sight seeing with N. We saw the gigantic Motherland statue and toured the great war musuem (ww11). All very interesting. It was a nice day but as the sun went down it got colder and colder. We saw a monestary and cathedrals in the braoque style. very beautiful. Then we went out to dinner with N. it was her Birthday! what a way to spend your birthday, being a tour guide.

Friday we headed in early for our apt and all went well and smoothly. N was hoping that we would be able to pick up our letter later that day and visit the kids friday, but with the holiday it was very hard to get in to see people. finally friday at noon we were able to pick up our letter and we headed to Kr. We did not arrive in time to meet with the person we were to see before trying to visit the kids. so we are hanging out here and as most have heard by now spent a lot of our time trying to find internet access here. Hopefully we'll be able to come here and use the computers a little more often. Today is the holiday and so they have work off tomorrow so we won't see anyone until Tuesday. We sort of wish we could have stayed in K and seen some more of the city. so many beautiful buildings and history to see.

so we are not naming places and names until we get home and when we can blog will treat this more like a vacation, hope that isn't too confusing, but we didn't want to go private so family can see pics. so we won't be too specific. Also it takes a long time to upload pics and can only do one at a time so I don't know how many we will get on.

Idaho Kellers this weekend

What good looking Guys!  Troy's Idaho brothers came down for a dental conference, so we all got together on Friday to visit and hang out.  Betsy and the kids came down with Klint and it was fun to see their newest one, Max.  Sheree came with Kim and skiied the whole week and Brady and Jaime came over with their kids, it was fun for all the cousins to run around together.

Morgan has been spoiled having Calvin to hang out with last week (they are only a few days apart) and then Maggie and Kate this weekend (she's right between them in age).  We went to see Home School Musical Saturday, what a party.

Connecticut Kellers in town

We had a wonderful Presidents weekend because our cousins, from Connecticut, came and played with us.  We don't get to see them very often because of the distance, but my kids just adore them.  They are the older cousins and very cool to hang out with younger cousins!  And they were good sports to let Grant take 100 pictures of them while skiing/snowboarding.  They had a rocky start with weather in New York delaying their trip out here by a day and then they headed home with an injured McCall.  He broke his collar bone on the last night snowboarding, he was in quite a bit of pain.  We did hear he survived the flight home.

They did a little night skiing Friday night and this was Saturday... a very snowy day!

Cute Georgia learning to snowboard, she had the cutest outfit, boots and snowboard!  When she got back the second day she was so excited to tell me about her runs down the hill, too cute!

Just hanging out after a full day Saturday.

Beautiful day on Monday.

We had Brady and his kids stop by for some fun cousin time.

Last night with Calvin.  Morgan and Ethan just adored having Calvin around and neither of them wanted him to leave.  

The News!!!

The News!!!  was the title of an email I had this afternoon from Eliana at our adoption agency!  It was the first email I opened and one week and one day from submitting our dossier to the Ukraine government we received our SDA date in the Ukraine!!  (2 1/2 weeks earlier than expected!)  Our date is March 5th!!!  Yes, three weeks from today we need to be in the Ukraine!  We are so excited and shocked and dumbfounded : )  Wow.  I was so planning for May that it has thrown me a little bit.  But we are so thrilled that in a little over a month the kids will be here and we'll get them for the entire summer, well their entire lives, but they will get to meet all their cousins and family this summer and vacation with us.  We have been asked not to tell the kids until we get over there (so anyone reading this please respect that also).  So, I'm now off to plan the next couple weeks of our lives and make arrangements...  Anyone recommend a good tudor?

So far this week

We started the week off with our very cool home teacher showing Grant how to tie flies.  Grant has spent the rest of the week looking through the Cabela catalog at all the fly tying kits and products.  He found it all very interesting and thinks it would be way cool to catch a fish on a fly he tied!

Grant also made the Jr. High Musical.  They are doing Suessical and Grant is going to be one of the Whooville people.  It was his first audition and he did a wonderful job.  He took choir this year and he had a great teacher!  They did a lot of ear training, which Grant thought was too hard for 7th grade, but he has improved so much. 

Tuesday night Morgan finished her book and wrote her book report and as a reward we went to Woods Cross High Schools performance of Beauty and the Beast.  They had some curtain problems that night, but the kids were amazing.  They did an awesome job and Morgan loved Lumiare and Ethan thought Gaston was the Best!  Our neighbor was Belle and she did a wonderful job and ... Cezarini in our ward was one of the cast members, she was really cute and Morgan was excited to have her picture taken with her.  Morgan also had numerous pictures taken of her in the Belle cut out!  She loved the dress.

Thursday was our last day of school this week so we had valentine parties and Morgan's class has been studying Medieval Europe and they had a really fun Medieval Market today where they sold things they had made in the market.  Morgan worked really hard and made a bunch of puzzles.  She was so thrilled that they all sold!  I'll ask her what her slogan was, but it was something like Morgan's amazing puzzles will puzzle you mind!  She had a little jingle to go with it, super cute.

Ethan stuffing his pockets with all his winnings from his classrooms Valentine party.

Campout

Last weekend Troy and Grant went on a Scout camp out, just up at the fairgrounds in Farmington.  Not too far away, but a very cold 20 degree evening.  As you can see food seemed to be the main object of the evening as there were many pictures of cooking and eating food taken by Grant.

The next day there were tons of activities planned.  From different types of sled races, putting puzzles together, shooting sling shots and I'm not really sure what the human chain laying in the snow is.  Practice at saving a person stuck on or in ice?

I'm back... in case anyone was wondering

Our computer died a couple weeks ago and I've been going through withdrawal, maybe more of a depression with this sinking feeling that I've lost the last couple years of pictures.  I don't know how I'm so hard on computers.  Every two years my computer crashes and the hard drive is totally destroyed.  They are never able to salvage any thing.  I'll I really do is email/blog, listen to music and upload pictures.  I have very few programs running or even on my computer and I don't down load lots of stuff or play games.  So, we had backed up all of our pictures on our ipod (it's how we retrieved our pictures last time the computer crashed), but in trying to reload them the computer the program being used destroyed them all.  So sad, but it's made me even more happy that this past year has all been blogged!  And I do have pictures uploaded to lots of different sites, it's just finding everything. 

 So, it wasn't too busy these last two weeks, but I do need to catch up so when my hard drive bails on me in 2011 I'll have my blog.  Our last week in January consisted of Grant's basketball games, Grant getting he lower braces on and being in a lot of pain, Grant trying out for the Jr. High production of Sussical (he has a beautiful voice and he's improved so much because of his choir class, it's been hard, but his teacher is amazing with the kids), Grant thought that "tryouts were a lot easier than he was expecting", he made the musical!, Morgan tried out for Alice in Wonderland at Rogers theater and is Ditzy something at the mad hatters T party!, I joined a book group and dropped pottery (it was too hard on a Saturday, that is our day with Troy - next year).

Anya
Ivan

This week, Anya emailed some older pics of our Anya.  A very nice surprise.  Monday marked the kids (Marina, Ivan and Anya) being gone for 3 months, January went by really fast.    Some how we totally missed groundhogs day... did he see his shadow?  Grant has had play practice all week as they are figuring out parts.  That combined with activity days today I totally forgot to take him to basketball practice.  As for yesterday, the Ukraine government accepted our dossier!  Dun da da dum...  I've had the 4th circled and had been counting down when last week it hit me, we won't really hear anything on the 4th they are just submitting our paperwork.  I need to circle March 4th or something... hopefully we will hear something by March 4th.  So a new count down has begun.  

Ethan took 30 pictures of Grant's game, but they are so blurry you can't even tell who's who.  This is the best we got of our star player... sitting on the bench.  He had a couple good rebounds and made two out of three of his shots this last game!  Well done Grant.