A favorite pastime: gathering balls around the yard to put in the grocery cart
Feb 25, 2006
Feb 15, 2006
Feb 8, 2006
A bit of explanation
Okay well I guess I can give a little update now even though I am not caught up picture-wise to the current date. It's going to take awhile, considering that November and December were both big months for picture taking. I'm almost done posting November pictures (all I have left are the Thanksgiving pics, which are coming soon) but haven't started December or January yet. Slowly but surely.
We still love New York, and are still having a great time. We just can't get over how much the city has to offer, even to poor folk like us. Actually, we're not as poor as we once were--I now have three jobs, all part-time and only one with a reliable, consistent weekly schedule. I'm teaching fourth graders with an after-school tutoring program. I teach twice a week and the school I go to is only about a 20 minute commute, which is nothing compared to the hour and a half that many Brooklynites do. The students are 90% from Hispanic backgrounds, which means I get to practice my Spanish sometimes. All of my students speak English, but most of their parents don't. I enjoy the job most of the time but I need to learn to use my voice more efficiently so my throat doesn't get sore after every lesson. This will be a good time to look back and reflect upon: how many times does one get the chance to work in a Harlem public school with kids who are there because, at least most of the time, they want to be there? It's a great experience, added income aside.
Ben is still working on his classwork, and has an unusually light load this semester, which is great for us because he gets to stay with Aaron almost all the time I am at work. He also gets to spend a lot of time writing applications for various programs and seems particularly adept at not spending every waking moment doing his coursework. It's actually a real blessing given that most of his peers in other (professional) schools are rarely around to be with their families.
He's been working on finding something for us to do over the summer, and has applied to places all over the world. If he gets accepted to everything he applied for and we do all of them (which is actually impossible because of space-time conflicts), we would end up in Germany, England, Kazakhstan, Estonia, and Russia for the summer, sometimes with multiple sponsors in a single place. Haha, it's pretty funny to think about. We're just planning on none of them working out and we'll be excited if any of them do. Some of them last just from a few days to a couple weeks (like Estonia, Russia, and England) and others are months (like Germany and Kazakhstan). Check out a map and look at how far away Almaty, Kazakhstan is. Pretty darn far. (Maybe we can swing by his old mission cities, like Orenburg, Penza, and Samara too.) Almost all people speak Russian in urban Kazakhstan so, at least, we will be linguistically at ease there but it will be an adventure for Aaron and me to figure out what to do all day. I guess find some friends and see what they do. Maybe learn something about Kazakh cuisine. Maybe be tutored in Russian or Kazakh. In case you cannot tell, everything is up in the air.
Besides doing applications, Ben reads a lot and goes to class. This morning he work up at 9:56 for his 10:00 class, and, so he reports, basically made it on time. He continues to love his program. This semester's classes are different than last semesters: more business and economics, less history and social theory. German is the only class that has carried over from last semester in fact. Almost everyday he wonders outloud about what he is going to do once he graduates but, still, he doesn't dwell on it too much, or at least he doesn't have any consistent answers. Little has changed and that is great. We're having a blast now, so might as well stick with that. Certainty is overrated anyway.
Aaron has been sick the past few days but otherwise is doing quite well. His vocabulary has really taken off, both in English and Russian. He said "purple starfish" the other day, for example. But most of his new words still come in isolated phrase segments. No sentences yet, which is fine by us. We're pretty sure he has no idea Russian and English are two different languages, but oh well. He'll figure it out someday, hopefully. His immersion into German this summer would probably do little to simplify the language puzzle. Oh well.
Aaron loves to read books and play with his best friend Julia who lives in the next apartment building. He really adores her, it's so cute. He'll ask to go see her several times a day, and if she comes over he gets superbly excited-- JUYA, JUYA, JUYA!!! Today they were sitting down together and Aaron reached over and patted her back and said with a smile, "Juya."
We still love New York, and are still having a great time. We just can't get over how much the city has to offer, even to poor folk like us. Actually, we're not as poor as we once were--I now have three jobs, all part-time and only one with a reliable, consistent weekly schedule. I'm teaching fourth graders with an after-school tutoring program. I teach twice a week and the school I go to is only about a 20 minute commute, which is nothing compared to the hour and a half that many Brooklynites do. The students are 90% from Hispanic backgrounds, which means I get to practice my Spanish sometimes. All of my students speak English, but most of their parents don't. I enjoy the job most of the time but I need to learn to use my voice more efficiently so my throat doesn't get sore after every lesson. This will be a good time to look back and reflect upon: how many times does one get the chance to work in a Harlem public school with kids who are there because, at least most of the time, they want to be there? It's a great experience, added income aside.
Ben is still working on his classwork, and has an unusually light load this semester, which is great for us because he gets to stay with Aaron almost all the time I am at work. He also gets to spend a lot of time writing applications for various programs and seems particularly adept at not spending every waking moment doing his coursework. It's actually a real blessing given that most of his peers in other (professional) schools are rarely around to be with their families.
He's been working on finding something for us to do over the summer, and has applied to places all over the world. If he gets accepted to everything he applied for and we do all of them (which is actually impossible because of space-time conflicts), we would end up in Germany, England, Kazakhstan, Estonia, and Russia for the summer, sometimes with multiple sponsors in a single place. Haha, it's pretty funny to think about. We're just planning on none of them working out and we'll be excited if any of them do. Some of them last just from a few days to a couple weeks (like Estonia, Russia, and England) and others are months (like Germany and Kazakhstan). Check out a map and look at how far away Almaty, Kazakhstan is. Pretty darn far. (Maybe we can swing by his old mission cities, like Orenburg, Penza, and Samara too.) Almost all people speak Russian in urban Kazakhstan so, at least, we will be linguistically at ease there but it will be an adventure for Aaron and me to figure out what to do all day. I guess find some friends and see what they do. Maybe learn something about Kazakh cuisine. Maybe be tutored in Russian or Kazakh. In case you cannot tell, everything is up in the air.
Besides doing applications, Ben reads a lot and goes to class. This morning he work up at 9:56 for his 10:00 class, and, so he reports, basically made it on time. He continues to love his program. This semester's classes are different than last semesters: more business and economics, less history and social theory. German is the only class that has carried over from last semester in fact. Almost everyday he wonders outloud about what he is going to do once he graduates but, still, he doesn't dwell on it too much, or at least he doesn't have any consistent answers. Little has changed and that is great. We're having a blast now, so might as well stick with that. Certainty is overrated anyway.
Aaron has been sick the past few days but otherwise is doing quite well. His vocabulary has really taken off, both in English and Russian. He said "purple starfish" the other day, for example. But most of his new words still come in isolated phrase segments. No sentences yet, which is fine by us. We're pretty sure he has no idea Russian and English are two different languages, but oh well. He'll figure it out someday, hopefully. His immersion into German this summer would probably do little to simplify the language puzzle. Oh well.
Aaron loves to read books and play with his best friend Julia who lives in the next apartment building. He really adores her, it's so cute. He'll ask to go see her several times a day, and if she comes over he gets superbly excited-- JUYA, JUYA, JUYA!!! Today they were sitting down together and Aaron reached over and patted her back and said with a smile, "Juya."
Feb 6, 2006
Playing with his buddies Anton and Patrick. Anton is the kid I went to Utah to translate for, since he had just recently been adopted from Kazakhstan by good friends of ours and didn't speak any English yet. He's such a great kid, and Aaron adored him also. He called him "ton," but, as Anton says, Aaron says his name in Russian and not English.
We celebrated Aaron's birthday with friends on the Friday after his actual birthday, with cake, ice cream, and friends. We put streamers up, had balloons, and put up an album of Aaron pictures for friends to look at. He seemed to have a really good time, especially when it came to the ice cream part. He didn't successfully blow out his candles, but since then he has requested to practice several times and seems confident that such embarrassment won't happen next year at the big third b-day
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