Ukrainian Christmas 2014

As our kids get older, I notice more and more their eagerness to create family traditions. I cannot say we have many (although possibly we do, we just think of them as our “routines”), but one tradition we do keep up with is our Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner.

Last year, after cooking a ton of food and just being exhausted, I almost planned a skiing vacation for Ukrainian Christmas, just so that I don’t have to cook a twelve-meal feast-haha. After much thought, and realizing that we would rather go somewhere warm than somewhere cold—even though it involves a ton of snow and skiing—we decided to stay home. And because our Christmas and New Year were so relaxing this year, I had a lot of energy to cook for a new crowd of friends.

This year I also planned my list of food well in advance so I could cook a whole bunch of food a couple of days earlier and not be overwhelmed on January 6th. It was a work day for Robert and a school day for Katya, so Robert also made sure to help me quite a bit on the day before.

And again, we managed to have twelve dishes. A special thank you goes to my friends, the Grovers and the Marinellis who came to dinner this year AND brought yummy borsch and deviled eggs.

Alex was taking pictures while I was cooking (without taking the plastic cover off, of course).  We had kanapki of different kinds,

vareniki with mushrooms and mashed potatoes,

holubtsi (cabbage rolls), cooked two different ways—in a crockpot and in the oven, olivye, mushrooms in vinegar (I found these at our supermarket, made in Poland-yum!), garlic-cheese spread kanapki, kovbasa (not really vegetarian, is it?), and two desserts. We also had to count kampot, to make up twelve dishes.

The kids were actually excited to wear their Ukrainian outfits this year. Alex really needs a new shirt and he hopes to get real Ukrainian red trousers soon.

And the whole family annual Ukrainian Christmas picture.

Robert looks more and more Ukrainian with each year-haha.

Oh, and here is the best part! Dessert! We had two different “torti”. Napoleon is our traditional one. I know people ask for a recipe of it, but the thing is…I do know how much of what ingredient to put in it, but a lot of it is by feel and touch and practice (I mean, rolling out twelve super thin layers and baking them is tricky…). So for now the recipe is going to stay with me as my specialty dessert, or you can come and watch me make it sometime.

This new masterpiece is Prague Tort (Prazhskiy tort) made by Robert…AMAZING! Chocolate but not overwhelmingly sweet, typical Eastern European treat.

Somehow we were having too much fun that we forgot to take any pictures with our friends! That makes me sad. I guess we’ll have to have them over again.

I love Ukrainian food.  I still remember all the Christmas/birthday/wedding dishes that I love and miss, some of them are just too difficult to make here (like the ones with kilograms of poppy seeds inside). I hope to teach our kids soon to make at least the most basic dishes, as my grandma, my mama and my papa (yes, he was a great cook too) did.

Looking forward to many more Ukrainian Christmas dinners.

Good night for now.

London With Kids: Art Edition

What? There is more to see in London? hehehe

Somehow a couple of months ago I randomly found tickets for THE “Nutcracker” ballet, performed by the English National Ballet. I have seen this ballet a couple of times-once in Ukraine when I was little and once in Utah when I was in high school.  Our kids had never been to a ballet in their lives, so I thought this would be a good start. Mark was barely five on January 3rd, and that was great because under 5s were not permitted to most performances.

The ballet performance did not start till 2:30 pm, so we decided to use this opportunity in London to go see something new. We took the tube to Trafalgar Square (our theater was nearby) and let the kids run around a bit.

Look at this awesome view of Admiral Nelson and Big Ben.

And look at this awesome Blue Rooster! hahaha Apparently a new statue is displayed on that pedestal for a period of time (it’s very honorable to have your statue to be chosen for display here).

Alex is still learning how to take pictures…of some strange men smoking-hahaha…

….and pigeons on monuments’ heads.

Trafalgar Square is also where you will find the National Gallery—a real treasure! A FREE museum with surprisingly interesting collection. We ate our packed lunch in the sitting area inside the museum and got ready for some art viewing.

Entrance is free, but audio guides cost  GBP3.50 (about $5.50) for each adult, plus the kids got them for free. They were worth every penny, probably one of the best audio guides we have found. Kids had a different narration, obviously, and  a different route to follow. So we went along with them searching for the paintings and listening the adult version of the explanation for each particular masterpiece.

Mark is ready for his art gallery experience.

Again, an illegal picture snapped before Robert was told photography was not allowed.

I cannot believe that all three of our kids did not lose interest in paintings even after an hour of walking around. We walked through many rooms, sorted by period in art history, found most paintings that kids’ guide was pointing out and marked them off on their sheet.

We saw many masterpieces—some familiar to me and some of the ones I had never seen before:

Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”

Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough

“The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein the Younger (Mark’s favorite picture).

“Whistlejacket” by George Stubbs.

The Adoration Of The Kings by Jan Gossaert.

And other number of works by Vermeer, Monet, Rembradt, Rubens, Claude to name a few.

So if you ask me, yes, I recommend the National Gallery for a great place to visit with kids. I would love to spend a few more hours there on my own listening to paintings’ explanations.

As we came out of the gallery, we realized that we’d missed all the rain! Lucky.

We walked over to the Coliseum Theater, our ballet venue, and found our seats---way, way,  way on the very top of the balcony-haha. But the kids did not mind! We could still see everything on stage (you just couldn’t beat the price of the tickets).

Ready for a two hour performance?

A nice videographer from Brazil offered to take a picture of us before the performance. We never pass up an opportunity to have a family picture taken.

And….drumroll….the kids loved it!!! Even Mark sat through the whole first hour without a peep, had snacks during the intermission and got through the second hour without much noise. I LOVED the second part—the one with mostly dancing and beautiful music. I didn’t expect everyone to enjoy the ballet this much, but they did! (Robert did not fall asleep either).

It was five o’clock when we were finished. We were going to walk over to Mother Mash near Regent Street to retrieve Alex’s forgotten hat from our previous visit (we were hoping it was still there). But as we crossed the first street we saw a restaurant called “Chipotle”.  Inside I asked if this place was part of the American chain “Chipotle”, and they said it was! We HAD to eat here. Oh that reminds me, I should write their review on Tripadvisor. Stuff was so nice and accommodating, I don’t see that sort of customer service here often. I later found out they were mostly Spanish, and that probably played a role in their personal bubbly approach. We stuffed ourselves with our stuffed burritos—kids said it was their new favorite place.

Here is Mark telling me, “I would like another quesadilla, please”.

And here is me probably telling him, “Would you like some of my salad, if you are still hungry?”.

Okay. Seriously, I have no idea what we were talking about. I just like candid pictures sometime.

As you can see our day turned out to be a great success with minimal whining and spent money. We even found Alex’s hat (it was his special hat that I brought him from Prague, that’s why we went to great length to find it) and drove peacefully home.

Well, take care for now. I’ve got to go get ready to take a train to London again…this time to pick up our passports with, hopefully Indian visas stamped into them.

Lyana.

Our Quiet Days And One Loud Last Day Of 2013.

I just love having all of our kids home…Although days when they are at school have their own perks, I now am learning to cherish the time when they ARE home with us.

Robert has a cushiony job—he gets either Christmas or New Year’s week off plus all the Federal holidays at this time of year.  So basically, he was able to be home A LOT. This year, he had the week of the New Year’s Day off. So we did our Christmas thing, he went to work for Dec. 26th and 27th (with barely any patients) and then had ten days off. Nice!

We did a lot of relaxing.

Reading books is still part of the routine with Mark. He is the only one who has an armchair in his bedroom, although his bedroom is the size of a train compartment, or a small bathroom by US standards, hahaha.

Robert is reading “Hobbit” in the evenings with the big kids, and they are almost finished. We’ll need to pick another cool book to keep going.

Katya and Alex got only a couple of days to skip their piano practicing.  Both of them made a big improvement this year. It’s incredible to me to see that both of them are so very talented with piano, and that if only they gave 100% every time they practice, and did it for a bit longer, they would be playing  a lot better than they are now.  It’s something that they will have to realize themselves…and I hope they do soon.

Lots of playtime in our house. And lots of mild colds (besides that one scary episode of high fever and sickness from Mark a few days before Christmas).

Mark is still learning where to find tissues in our house…apparently.

These two have been playing a lot better than they used to a couple of year ago. Alex does have to tone his roughness down a bit, but I can see how good it is for both of them to play and disagree and try to find compromises.

I am going to try to focus now on giving older kids more responsibilities in regards to teaching Mark things. So now Katya is in charge of teaching Mark how to properly fold his clothes to put his laundry away, and Alex is going to help Mark to remember to put his coat, shoes and backpack away when they come back from school.

Here is Alex helping Mark do his “tin words”, his reading words assigned at school. By the way, I cannot believe that Mark is actually reading! He cannot read all words yet, but he is very good at sounding everything out.

Yay, I got a picture of al three of them grinning! My sweeties.

Here is another sweetie, wearing a hat (?).  That’s Robert trying to cross off items on his “to-do list of things that are way overdue”.

On New Year’s Eve we had a neighborhood get together. It was so much fun! They are all such wonderful people, very friendly and helpful. I am glad our neighborhood is tight.

After munching on yummy food, we all went outside and exploded some fireworks. Oh, the kids loved it!!!

“Please, mama, can we stay up late?”. And they did. Sort of.

Mark was in bed by 10pm, Alex by 11pm and Katya got the privilege to stay all the way till 12:20am, downstairs, with us, watching Gary Barlow entertaining London and then the magical London fireworks! Click here to watch. This was probably the best fireworks show I’d ever seen.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!!  We are back to normal life around here…as soon as we are done eating our delicious Ukrainian Christmas dinner.