The Waiting is Nearly Over

Baby is almost here. Almost, but not quite. We are at the hospital frequently these days checking the heart beat and other vitals, but this boy is hanging onto his occupancy to the maximum of the gestational period. These few facts we know for sure. He is a boy. He is 3.5 kilos as of May 3. He is very active. And, he has his mother's sense of time.

We have been in our apartment since February though we are still waiting for furniture, curtains, etc. These things take time. Of this I had no idea. My thinking of home ownership was something like this. Find home, buy home, paint home, and move in to home. We really like the neighborhood. It's a busy street Mon-Fri, but on the weekends it is very quiet. The park up the street is always full of parents with newborns, toddlers and youngsters. The fish shop next door is inexpensive and exotic, in an Eastern European way. The bread shop is always open and also sells cookies with dried apricots which have become a pregnancy appetite staple in our house, along with chocolate and ice cream. To her credit though, Masha eats at least 2kgs of fruit a day. She is a healthy expectant mom.

Winter here lasted about an hour. I think it has snowed more frequently in the last week of April than in all of February. The chestnut trees have started to blossom and the apricot petals have fallen laying a rose-lavender carpet in the yard. The air has been filled with their sweet honey smell for weeks now.

Masha has been off of work for a couple of months but I continue to work and truly enjoy going there everyday. I have a wonderful class of children who are all very enthusiastic learners from Tuesday to Friday. Mondays are generally not very productive. We have a big unit of study on right now about Peace education. John Farrell who I met in Nice did come to Kiev and spent a day at the school.(See November’s post for more on this.) The children and the parents thought he was amazing, which indeed he was.

Political protests have sprung up again in Kiev. This means bus loads of Ukrainians pouring through the city like ants after a rainstorm. Each party is represented by a flag; blue and white; orange; red and black; red and white. They camp outside in tents in the parks and the city’s squares. From an outsider’s point of view it looks like peaceful democratic protest in action. To the Kievite, these people look ridiculous, sleeping in tents in the park and marching up and down the streets 5 days a week. That’s right, they don’t protest on weekends. An election is coming, apparently, the 4^th since 2004. Ukraine has not had a stable working government for nearly three years. And, while Ukrainians wait to see what happens next in the ongoing political chess game, Masha and I wait too for the imminent arrival of our first child.

The picture at the middle right is Masha at a European Spring Festival event held before Easter. The square was on fire with hundreds of small flower pots lit on a variety of welded structures. The most amazing was a huge chandelier suspended by a crane 30 meters above the square.

The pic at the top is us moving in to our apartment in February.

And that is the news from here.