nothing to report

Not much has been going on around here at all. (the reason for my lack of blogging recently)  I just haven't had much to report. The guys have been working on the ceiling of the church building all week. I am going tonight so I will take pictures of the progress. 

         Adele' has really taken well to potty training. A week and a half ago I just couldn't see when she would ever learn. But we started rewarding and since, she has done very well. To me it seems more difficult to potty train in the winter when kids need to be bundled up, and then when they have an accident you have a lot of laundry. So I wanted to try to get her trained in the summer. But I was really afraid I might have been jumping the gun. She hadn't been waking up dry at night or anything, but she is 23 monthes so I decided I had better bite the bullet and go for it. I am glad I did. She started waking up dry after we started potty training. Last night she even went while we were watching a movie! We aren't getting through church without accidents yet  though,  so everybody has been warned.  It has been interesting to learn about Russian culture in this area. They don't have money to buy daipers, and cloth is a lot of work if you don't have a washing machine. So they actually rarely put daipers on their kids. A friend told me that her two girls were trained by the time they were a year old. I know some people in the States have tried to potty train their kids straight from new borns, but they still put daipers on them. I am wondering if maybe we untrain our kids by putting daipers on them, and make a lot more work for ourselves.  Russian people just let their kids go on the floor and wipe it up. I am intrigued but not sure If I am brave enough to try it with our next one. Daipers here are actually much more expensive then they are in the States.  And we don't have all these nifty coupons for CVS and Walgreens, you people make me so jealous.  

              In other news Andrew is now closer to 40 then 30. He had his 36th birthday Teusday night. We had a nice little party. Which he enjoyed. He doesn't like to make a big deal. So we had a good time. I successfully made a black berry pie. Pie crust is not my thing. Someone (I don't remember who) told me butter is the secret. And it sure did the trick. Only I baked the shell before filling it with fruit and then discovered I couldn't pinch the crusts together, as one was baked and one was not. Oh well, he enjoyed it.