One more month left!

I can't believe how quickly the summer's gone by. I had this long list of things to accomplish around the house, and barely attacked it. One thing I am accomplishing, however, is building up a repertoire of recipes to cook when I go back to work. Lidia Bastianich', Lidia's Family Table, has been extremely helpful in this regard - particularly the soup recipes which are delicious, versatile, and can be frozen. I also have Jacque Pepin's Fast Food My Way and Rick Bayless' Mexican Everyday from the library; unlike the Bastianich book, I may just copy recipes from them. No Rachel Ray for me - I want "everyday" recipes that trained chefs cook at home.

Even though I haven't accomplished as much as I wanted to around the house, I have kept Nikita entertained. Although I've taken him to the aquarium and puppet shows, the best place is the library. Everytime we go, I have to find a book on either trucks or trains (as Igor jokes, "because we don't have enough") to keep him quiet and still. But he's just as happy with crayons for drawing. I am impressed how well he bahaves now during storyhour: he sits most of the time (as opposed to wandering around) and listens, and picks up his nametag when called (although he still calls himself Barbit, he does recognize his real name). He even plays nicely with the others, which is an improvement from the beginning of the summer.

Nikita's potty training has been put on hold; he has no interest in sitting on the potty. Instead, Igor has been teaching chess to Nikita. Nikita knows all the names of the pieces in Russian, but obstinately refuses to count the number of pawns correctly. He's fine up until 2 (which he finally claims as his age), but then alternates between 7 and 9.

Another thing where Nikita has regressed is his sleeping. Since January, Nikita was sleeping with Galina in her twin bed, but that changed a couple of weeks ago when he fell out of the bed. Now, he sleeps with Igor and me: we converted removed one side of his crib and attached it to our bed. Although getting him to sleep is getting harder, especially when he's had a 3-hour nap (he fell asleep at 11 pm last night!), it's actually kind of fun waking up with him. This morning, when he saw the white of my eyes, he promptly said, "Dump truck", meaning he wanted the book on dump trucks. I explained to him that the book wasn't in the room, but downstairs. To which he replied, "Mama", in such a tone as to say, "Mama, why is the book downstairs?"

A few days ago, however, he woke up, but stayed quiet because he saw that Igor and I were asleep. Then we he saw that we woke up, Igor spooning me, Nikita crawled to me so that I could spoon him, and said, "Hug".