First day of School 2016.

This highly anticipated day has finally arrived! The kids were starting their first ever school year in the USA! (minus Katya who had started Kindergarten in FL for one year in 2008:) but we won't count that).

We had a full month of really hot summer vacation here in NC and loved every minute of it. Now it was so weird to be starting school with the weather still in the 90s! 

August 29th, 2016 was the day. 

Katya--8th grade!

Alex--6th grade!

Mark--2nd grade!

The older two get to hang out at the same school this year, BUT the school is so huge that they practically never get to see each other during the day! I mean, 1400 students huge....Each grade has a different slot to eat lunch and on top of that each grade is split into two groups for lunch, so it's possible you have friends in your grade but unless they are in the same group as you, you don't get to eat with them.

Mark's school has about 800 students, but his class has only 20 or so. He has a boy teacher, Mr. Lee this year (how strange! Katya's male teacher in third grade was Mr. Lee as well!!). Mark was super excited to start AMERICAN school.

The most exciting thing for the boys was the prospect of riding the school bus:)) It's so funny! Our bus stops are really close to our house so even Mark can walk to the stop on his own. He has to be on at the bus stop around 8:35 and the big kids are out of the house by 7:20. 

And they chose their first day school outfit themselves. Do you see the common theme? 

Here is our beautiful Katya (who is super humble about her acting past but is so excited for people to find out;))

And Alex, our social butterfly (boy-butterfly), who is not afraid to just be himself.

And Mark, whose British accent is fainting...but who still feels close in his heart to all things British:) 

Wishing them all a great year as this is a HUGE adjustment year for them all. They are strong and resilient and amazing:)

Lyana.

P.S. I'll need to update later on our school experience in the states so far. 

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Robert's Birthday!

Happy Birthday, Robert! 

Robert is always forced to celebrate his birthday during the most crazy time for our family:). One year we moved to Japan and had to have cake on the curb outside on base, another year he had to go to RAF Croughton to help out at the clinic there because it is such a busy PCS season in August. This year, it was a bit more calm, but not really. He had just started his new job on August 15th, so it was all new to us all.

The kids and I tried to make it extra special by taking this huge Costco cake to him at work. It was his first time in many years of celebrating his birthday in America! (thus the US flag:))

And I am sorry, I can't flip it on its side as blogspot doesn't let me.



And to you, dear Robert! So grateful you were born thirty seven years ago, sweetie!



And thank you for always helping me cut birthday cakes (my least favorite thing to do).

Grateful to be along your side on this grand new adventure of ours. So I wish you a great year (since I'll be part of it too:)).

Love you!

Hot August Days in NC.

WHAT? It's possible to be so hot that you don't need wetsuits to go into the water?

This is amazing:) 

Since we had a few very relaxing days in our new house and before school started we tried to get out and explore a bit. 

One Saturday we drove 20 minutes to Jordan Lake. We got our kayaks out and it was fun. 

People told me later that water in that lake is not the cleanest to swim in, but whatever. The kids loved it. This is no Spain, but will work for now. 

Most days the weather was so hot and sunny that it was a pleasure to just go to the pool and hang out there. This is our neighborhood pool. Our rent includes its use, so it's nice. And it's less than a 5 minute walk from our house.



Needless to say in the few days that we had before school started we put it to good use.



One day, we knew the storm was coming, but because I had promised the kids we'd go to the pool, we headed out to the pool, hoping the wind would chase away the dark clouds. As soon as the kids got into the water, we heard thunder, and a few minutes later more thunder. Mark, as my most sensible child, was determined that we needed to be safe and go home. So we did, and snapped a picture on the way home. Lesson learned. Dark clouds here don't just disappear like that did in England. We had a pretty good thunderstorm shortly after.

In the meantime, this is what we had to deal with for the first few days after our stuff arrived.

Actually, I was quite impressed with the speed that we put everything away and got rid of boxes. I think within a week everything we needed was unpacked with a couple of boxes tucked away for further inspection. We have at least a dozen of boxes right now that I left unpacked after looking through them so that we can move them easily next summer.

This is our garage:) on the moving day.

And that's how we were spending our month of August in NC.

Lyana.

Storage From The Memory Lane

This was an awesome day! We received our stored shipment from when we were moving from Florida to Japan. That was SEVEN years ago that we packed our stuff away.... so of course we forgot what we even put in those boxes!

Some of the interesting things were in our memory boxes. For example, this is a letter I wrote to my papa when I was little, probably seven or so. I told him about my trip from Kyiv to Dubno and how I went to the theater in Kyiv three times, and how I went on the metro and the escalator:)




Or here is a journal entry from the journal I tried to keep when I was around ten or eleven and we were spending our summer months in Dubno with Katia and Olia.



And then there were my two dresses I kept because they came with so many memories. This first one was actually a remake of my mom's dress that was made in GERMANY! It was a huge deal for her to buy this dress and it looked a bit different, sort of scrunched up at the bottom but then was redesigned for me. I wore it many times and always felt so great wearing it:)

And this second dress I wore when I was thirteen as well (it's kind of big on Katya though). It's a dress my mom found in one of our second hand shops in Lviv. It became my very fancy dress, good enough to perform my piano recitals in. I loved it.

And then there was this. It said "HORSE" on the box and we just laughed out loud. WHAT HORSE?

Oh yes, the HUUUUUGE horse that Lisa gave us as a present (I didn't remember that fact at all). She actually gave it to little Katya. We apparently decided that there would be no room for a horse in Japan, so we packed it away. Not knowing it would be packed away for SEVEN years, of course.



Robert was reveling in his memory boxes too. He found lots of pictures, letters, stuff that he forgot he had and was so glad he kept. Although some things were kind of like "why in the world would I keep that?" At least he was glad he kept his jacket.

Oh, this was hilarious to find! Apparently when I was ten-eleven, I wrote this weekly comic newspaper for our family! It's amazing:) And creative! And I can't believe that I was this good (not at drawing though..my cat still looks exactly the same). Oh, it was refreshing to read that:)

Finally, these are the glasses that I remember we had growing up. They are beautiful. My mom bought them the year when I was born and I still have all six of them. For now they are sitting on a shelf, but I do intend to use them as they bring me good memories.

I am not able to share any pictures of Robert's memories as he had them on his phone...so I am sorry:).

This right here just reinforced my belief how important it is to keep some things in a special memory box for the future. We were able to sit down with our kids and have them pick out three items each from our boxes and ask us to tell us more about those items. It's amazing what sort of new facts and experiences we were able to share just because of those keepsakes:).

Lyana.

Over The Pond We Go!

On July 30th we left our RAF Alconbury early in the morning and were driven to Heathrow. I could hardly hold back my tears during the 90 minute drive... soaking in the last views of England, the sky, the meadows, the houses, roundabouts. It was tough.

It took us almost an hour to check in our thirteen pieces of luggage:) We were allowed to take FIVE bags eachperson, something like 70 lbs each, but of course we didn't have THAT much stuff:)). I think we had four huge suitcases, one medium-big suitcase and the rest were carry-on size suitcases, some of them simply stuffed with pillows:)). One suitcase was just full of shoes since if you multiply everything by five, that's a lot of shoes needed. Anyway. The biggest adventure was to see if they would let us take our Mac computer on board. Robert had built a special fancy box for it, with a rope handle and everything, but we were worried about the dimensions. After all--nope, not a glitch with it. Easy! We were so relieved as it was going to make our life so much easier to have the computer right away.

Our one surprise was the fact that our direct flight London-Raleigh did NOT have individual TV's. So our kids' dreams of watching three movies for eight hours were crushed. They still had TV's but were showing some questionable shows like "Ride Along 2" which we didn't let the kids listen to. We did let them watch "The Martian" though. Anyway, we survived, and the kids did great despite the lack of individual entertainment.

Customs at Raleigh was a breeze! It's a smaller airport so we didn't have to wait long at all. So awesome. We got all our luggage finally! "Welcome home!", said the immigration officer.

And then we waited for just a few minutes for Dr. Kofford to come pick us up. Somehow we did not lose our suitcases that were not super tied up on the trailer, but I was very nervous about that. He drove us to Dr. Jones' house, whose family actually wasn't there but they were letting us stay there. It was very kind of them especially because they didn't really know us even! Dr. Kofford left and we took Dr. Jones' van and drove back to Apex to get some CHICK-Fil-A! That's right! Our first meal in the states was Chick-Fil-A:)) 

And that's all I remember from that day. It was kind of a blur, a sunny hot blur as we were adjusting to 90 degree weather. It was wonderful to not feel cold though.

Fast forward to Sunday--great first day at church. We are part of the Morrisville Ward here. Right that morning at church we were invited to lunch by the Martin family. People were so generous and so nice. We made some friends right away.

The following Monday we moved into our house. We didn't have any furniture but we did have some blow up mattresses and sleeping bags with blankets. So it was not so bad after all. We were so blessed that this house that we signed the contract with WITHOUT even seeing it turned out to be a great house! At 2200 sq ft it is officially the biggest house we have ever lived in if you don't count our fancy house sitting gig for 10 months in Maple Grove, MN.

On Tuesday or Wednesday we drove up to Norfolk, VA in a rented minivan to pick up our own minivan! We couldn't believe how lucky we were that it took only a few weeks for it to get here! It was a fun adventure. Originally, Robert and one of the kids was going to just drive up there in a rented car and drop the car off there and get the van, but then Enterprise upgraded our rental as they needed a minivan to be driven up to Virginia. So we agreed to do that for the price of renting just a sedan, and we ALL were able to come. That made it easier to drop off the rental as we had two drivers. On the way back we had lunch at Cracker Barrel, which forever became Mark's favorite restaurant-hahahaha:). I just love seeing our kids experiencing their firsts in America:)

Later that week we went to Costco and set up our cell phones, and got our internet figured out with Time Warner Cable and went food shopping...stuff like that. Life was kind of odd those days and we just had to live through that and be grown ups:)

From that Monday, August 1st till Friday, August 5th we kind of had to get by with whatever we had. But on Friday our household goods came!! It was perfect timing and we couldn't believe how lucky we were. We were glad to see our stuff back....But it took the movers 10 hours to get everything unloaded and unpacked! And we didn't even ask them to unwrap everything. Apparently the movers in England wrapped and wrapped everything so much, even boxes, that it took a lot longer on this side to unwrap them. Granted, these SIX guys here weren't prepared to do their job properly actually...they didn't even have box cutters or tools (had to borrow Robert's tools). We were less than impressed with their work, and I didn't feel one bit of pity when I had to ask them to reassemble Katya's bed as they put it together right but with the wrong height without checking with us first.

Phew! And that was done! 

Now we just had to wait for our unaccompanied (stuff we lived with for 7 weeks in England after all of this big stuff had been shipped) and our two storage shipments--one from before we moved to Japan and one from when we moved from Bury to Brampton. 

And that's how we roll...

Moving back from overseas is quite an experience. I am glad it's all over for us. For now. Sadly, we'll need to move AGAIN in a few months, so every time I was unloading boxes with this move all I could think of was...how I will be loading those boxes back up soon. All 13,000 lbs of our stuff.

Lyana.