Books

Currently listening to Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. You know you're enjoying a book when it sends you to look up the author or some info about the story. (A Golden Age - interestingly another debute book - also sent me seeking info).

Hotel was a very pleasant surprise - some books with a lot of hype are just here today gone tomorrow - I haven't finished this yet - but it seems to surpass that. But - maybe I'm just biased because the story is set in Seattle :- )

Weather Update

The weather here continues to be hot and awful. We also have smog and smoke - but nothing like what you might be reading about for Moscow. Still, today I woke at 4:30 to a sky that should have been dawning but was instead dense with smoke. We closed all the windows and sweated through the rest of the morning - we learned later that it was from fires in the exclusion zone. Great. The sky still looks gray - but I don't smell smoke anymore and my nose is has stopped sneezing and running - so we opened the windows. i don't know what it will do to any crops - but i'm personally praying for rain just to break the heat and clean all this noxious stuff out of the air.

Pistachio Ice Cream

During my pregnancy - I didn't really have a lot of cravings. On a normal day I have cravings, so I'm not sure that pregnancy really affected me much in that way. As with most cravings that I have, there actually isn't much I can do about it - as we live in Ukraine - except put it on my list of things to have in back in the states. Currently this includes eating a Reuben sandwich, having a regular roast beef sandwich with Arby's sauce from Arby's and consuming a pint of Ben& Jerry's "Pistachio Pistachio" Ice Cream.

Even during our trip to the UK, i stayed alert and checked out each and every freezer section and Ben & Jerry's ice cream machine we passed in the airport - hoping that Pistachio might be among its number. Alas, it was not to be.

BUT . . . The Ukrainian frozen food company, The 3 Bears, must have cued in

on my craving as they have just released a new flavor - Pistachio. While the flavor is not as richly intense and zingy as the Ben& Jerry's - the ie cream is incredibly creamy and delicious. Three bears was already a winner for their tasty "royal sherbert" (vanilla ice cream with chocolate flakes and your choice of dried cherry or apricot bits) - but adding pistachio makes them a definite winner for pint ice cream. Rud still wins on individual cones - especially their Empire Series featuring the Tortufo and Apricot yogurt cones.

While there aren't really ice cream parlors here - (and the ones that are here feature Italian style ice cream) the prefabricated cones are delicious (always advertising that they are made with real milk (what other type of milk is there???? they never fail to be extra creamy), accessible (every street corner in the summer) - and affordable (less than a dollar for the Empire cones - but a plain vanilla or Chocolate will only put you out 25 cents) Summer in Ukraine is HOT but yummy.

The battle of 95

The phrase "fighting the heat" has always been one that I've said without thinking. It has just meant that its hot, slightly uncomfortable, that I would of course be happy if it was a bit cooler. I never thought of it as an actual action, of physically "fighting" . . . until this year.

Unlike Alister, I grew up with heat. We had hot summers but they were also dry and dry heat is always more bearable than humidity. We also lived in a house, surrounded by trees and a big swamp cooler that rumbled away on the top floor in summer months and cooled the whole house.

Philadelphia was hot, but in America there are so many places you can go to get out of the heat even if you don't have air conditioning in your home. I was also working the summer I was in Philly - and there was air conditioning at work.

In Kiev, living in an apartment with a baby, there is only so much you can do and you begin to realize that people do die from the heat, especially babies. Suddenly it hits home that you really are fighting the heat. There is no offensive plan in the battle, it is purely defense, and this in and of itself makes you feel a bit hunted.

A warm front has come up from Africa and covered Northern Europe. And the heat is staying. There is no wind, not even a breeze. At night, running a fan in front of the window all night, the temperature in the room didn't even go down a degree. So far we are losing the battle. On Sunday, the lowest temperature in our apartment was 31 degrees (88F) today it has risen to 33 (91F). We have all retreated to the bedroom. Kiev is not a young child friendly place. I can't pack the baby up and go sit in an air conditioned cafe or mall. There are no baby changing stations, no real acceptance of public nursing - at least you never see it. I did nurse publicly once when my mother-in-law was here and we went for coffee, but we got some looks. But even if we did leave the house -how to get from point A to B in the least and coolest amount of time is also a challenge that needs strategic thought.

And so we sit in the bedroom, the ceiling fan running, another fan blowing on high over frozen water bottles, and the cat panting under the bed.

Saphira is miserable. Her activity time now consists of a cold bath, or sponging her with cool water. The heat has succeeded where tiredness and a string of visitors in Northern Ireland didn't - it has made a very unhappy, crying baby. And such a mournful cry. The heat has also put us back on a 2.5 hour routine where as we were almost up to 3.5 hours before. This is normal, apparently, as breastfed babies drink less, but more often, to cope with the heat and get the high water content that they need to manage the heat.

Today we left the house at 7 am and just sat under the trees until 8:30. Already it was getting hot and so we came back to our closed, dark, hot apartment.

The sidewalk in front of our home - normally a busy thoroughfare of activity throughout the day was empty yesterday - not a soul from 9am until after 6:30 pm. The market is only open from 9am until 7 - and so the question is also how to take care of the shopping - fresh veggies and meat - with a small baby in the heat? How to do the shopping in the supermarkets in the evening with a baby who knows it is time to sleep for the night at 7:30? And how to put a baby to bed in the heat when she likes to be swaddled and wakes herself up without it, when the temperatures mean that any added layer of fabric is a torture?

So we sit and strategize our next line of defense in the battle over our apartment.

Traveling with infants

Well we did it and are none the worse the wear after a day of getting caught up on naps. Saphira now has her first stamps in her passport and can, after completing 4 flight segments, be considered a seasoned flyer.

She did very well - the only time she cried was when she hit her head on a seatbelt while we were trying to get into the seat.

Even Airport security was a breeze as GATWICK had a special line for handicapped people and those traveling with children - so it was 1) shorter, 2) everyone in it had tons of stuff too so we weren't holding anyone up.

The only pain was we were carrying a car seat and they are a bit awkward -especially when juggling luggage! But it was much cheaper to rent the car seat for 1 month ($10) than get it from the car rental company for a week ($45). Ironically, to carry it over on Ryan Air cost $15 - more than the rental, but the combined cost was still less than getting through the car company - so worth the hassle. However, Ryan Air has sunk to least favorite discount airline.

I was very pleased to discover that I didn't pack unnecessarily for Saphira - we used everything!

England and Northern Ireland were blissfully cool and mostly sunny - so it was almost tragic to leave that and return to 35C temps and scorching sun here in Kiev.

So far - a one time occurance.

Heat Wave

Alister's Parents have been here the last week and it has been a scorcher - up to 35 C. While they like escaping to sunny spots from NI - this, I think, was a bit much. Our apartment wasn't really the cool sanctuary either as indoor temperatures crested at 30C. There are drawbacks to a 14th floor apartment.

With the Heat bearing down - we took advantage of their presence to install a ceiling fan in a our bedroom. Alister's Dad was invaluable in the installation process and he got a peek at Soviet wiring - no multi-colored wires and a bit of guess work.

The fan - even on its lowest setting - makes a huge difference and will be wonderful through July and August - our typically hottest months.

Our cat, meanwhile, had a close encounter of the "whack" kind. He has been jumping up (to our dismay) on the bedroom wardrobes. We didn't see it, but we heard sounds similar to his jumping followed by a very upset cat running into the hallway and arching his back at our bedroom - his eyes fixed on the fan and his whiskers quivering. None the worse for wear as far as we can tell - it has made him more cautious - he tested the bed gingerly with one paw before jumping up on it and spent the next half hour staring up at the blades going round and round before he decided it was safe enough to stop watching it and at least lay down on the bed. We'll see how long it takes him to try jumping on the wardrobe again - but I hope its taught him his lesson.