While donating blood got into a conversation with a Bonfils staff member over politics, volunteering and education. Specifically, he turned out to enjoy watching videos of Putin finding him interesting and funny. Later, with a typical American self-awareness, embarrassment and apple-pie-ishness he complained how the world history in American schools is still biased towards American participation in key world events and wars. I had to reveal the level of knowledge (or ignorance) the majority of Russians of well post-school-age still have about the USSR's involvement into WW2, the allies' involvement and the amount of help offered to USSR during WW2 - even Von Zobel's grandma's name and story came up, and the fact Russia still has a whole separate WW2 dates, history and even a V-Day.
Chinchilla Sr started daycare, 3 days a week . It goes unexpectedly well so far: girls in his class come to him in the morning to ask: "What's your name?", "How old are you?" or "Do you like my dress?", the teachers are learning Russian, Chill is giggling at the teachers suddenly switching over to Russian for him (as in "Net!", "Nel'zya" & "Ne trogai!" - being the first things they learned), Chill seems to have taken monopoly over the communal watering can and enjoys watering their little garden, and when I come to pick him up - he beams, runs to get his lunchbox and the bottle from the classroom, packs himself in his car seat, grumps "Gde min'-min'?!" ("Где ремень?!" - where's the seat belt?) as he's looking for the seat belt and fastens himself, demands "Mom, give me juice!" and as soon as he gets a pack of organic juice - he's all ready for the trip home. He has started to twit more on the way home about things he did that day.
He also had his 3rd Birthday celebration; two actually - the latter smaller one was for family only. This year he did enjoy running around and doing activities with other kids at the kids center, blowing out the candles on the cake (so much he accidentally did it a couple of times for the co-Birthday boy we shared the party with) and playing with the balloons. Chinchilla Jr. surprised everybody at the party by dancing with a balloon in each hand - as if it was his Birthday :)
Another unexpectedly good thing was that I did not lose shape much after Europe, and went back into my morning 5K routine pretty quickly. Thinking about increasing this number to 10: gradually, very gradually...
In the end of this month I crossed out the old goals for this year and wrote down just 5 ones, but more precise and much, much more crazier ones.
