impromptu staycation

We had planned to spend last weekend in Ukraine. There was an indoor frisbee tournament at a sports complex outside Odessa, the seaside Ukrainian resort town that is just across Moldova’s south-eastern border. While D played, S intended to do some touristing with Munchkin, with the hopes that D would save a little energy to go out with her in the evenings. Among its attractions, Odessa has an excellent restaurant scene and a well-regarded opera house. Unfortunately, an administrative snafu (emphasis on the last two letters) forced us to cancel the trip just hours before our planned departure.

back in the USSR

“Why on Earth would you want to go there?” For much the same reasons that our guest was excited about the possibility of visiting Transnistria, our Moldovan friends greeted the news of our proposed Tiraspol trip with genuine bafflement.

baby book review

There is a real art to crafting a good baby book, especially if one hopes not just to tell a story, but also to captivate completely a very young mind. Though the Gigantic Turnip remains one of Munchkin’s favorite stories, it has become clear that his English-language books do a much better job of stirring his imagination than the traditional Russian tales we have in board book form. It is not a matter of language either; when Munchkin hands D his English-language books, D frequently “reads” them in Russian, and Munchkin still prefers them to the stories actually written in Russian.

48 hours in Moldova

After visiting us in Nairobi, a friend jokingly suggested that we should print concert-style t-shirts featuring the places we have served as a memento for those of our friends and family members who visit us at every one of our postings. In Kenya, we had hosted visitors nearly every month. Moldova, though easier to reach from the United States, has proved a much quieter assignment, and the potential pool of t-shirt recipients has dwindled from several dozen to just two for now. In addition to S’s mom, thus far only our friend Cam has visited us in both Nairobi and Chisinau.

the sweet spot

Living abroad, one has to make adjustments. Sometimes it’s a question of adjusting one’s diet. As S learned during her backpacking days, it can be challenging to maintain a vegetarian lifestyle in much of the world. Other times, it is one’s expectations that require adaptation. For example, in Moldova it is rude to come to someone’s house empty-handed, so no matter how much we insist that people need only to bring themselves, we have come to expect that our guests will ignore our instructions. And sometimes it becomes necessary to change one’s routine or behavior. In Kenya, for example, we never drove anywhere if we did not know exactly how to get there, and at times we took roundabout routes as a safety precaution.

the battle for young hearts and minds

Breast milk vs formula. Sleep training. When and how to introduce solid foods. Having navigated these parental debates and successfully shepherded Munchkin into toddlerhood, we have arrived at the next big parenting controversy, which is somewhat peculiar to our generation: screen time.