Alaska Women

Stories of two women I know:

My one friend A. looked out her front window one day to see a black bear on her front porch, getting into garbage. Without blinking an eye, she grabbed her son's bicycle helmet, opened the front door and hit it in the head to get it to go away.

My other friend L. looked out in her backyard to see a bald eagle attacking her son's pet duck. Wearing a robe and slippers, she ran out into the yard, screaming and waving her arms, until it flew off. She then rescued the duck, and it is now recovering in a nest made by her son.

ONLY IN ALAKSA!!

By the way, my friends totally kick butt.

Time to get to work

So....Apple Branch Pantry now has a business license, a bank account, an Etsy shop, a Quickbooks account, and a Facebook fan page.

AND...nothing to sell. I'm really itching to get this party started!!! Come on Saturday! I want to make jam. :)

The world is my oyster

My plan lately has been to get up early--before the kids--and have my "me" time in the morning. However, this has been a total crap shoot, since the kids usually hear me and get up anyway. New plan is to put them to bed earlier, and we'll all just get up earlier. This way, I get "me" time in the evening. This evening has been a success--it's 7:45, and both kids are down for the night. Dn. John is at my uncle's, doing their weekly woodshop time together (they are building coffins). He's not due home for another hour and a half....so the evening is mine, and I have no idea what to do with it.

My first thought--as always--is to clean up, but I really think that is a waste, since I can clean anytime. I had originally set a goal to get our 2009 photo album done this month; I am finished up through July, but I have the August, September, and October pictures printed. I think I will stick in a movie and scrapbook on my living room floor.

Other projects...well, there's always stuff to do for my new biz. :) I'm having a lot of fun getting things set up. My friend Juliana is designing a banner for my Etsy shop (www.applebranchpantry.etsy.com), and I'll be glad to get that posted. If you want to check out the shop, I would wait at least a week, since there is nothing for sale in it right now. My first big canning day is this Saturday--I plan on making strawberry jam, blueberry jam, blackberry jam, and strawberry sauce. Depending on how many blueberries I have left over, I may make blueberry sauce also. Next week will be raspberry jam, raspberry blueberry jam, and BBQ sauce. I have to wait for my rhubarb to get bigger before I can do strawberry rhubarb, and rhubarb vanilla jam. I am also going to make pina colada jam sometime. That will probably be during week three. :) I also had a request for raspberry chipotle sauce, and many suggestions to do hot pepper jam. If you have any other ideas, please send them my way! I figure I need to do two batches of everything to get started, and then just maintain after that. I plan on doing some seasoning mixtures too. (I am having a blast--can you tell??)

Wonderful Reading

Safely Home to Heaven

A Letter from an Orthodox Nun to a Former Calvinist

The following letter from an Orthodox nun to a troubled layman is a warm, sane and usable remedy for anyone troubled with doubts about the mercy and compassion of God.

Dear P.,

Christ is Risen!

I was glad you called this weekend and let me know how you are doing. It sounds like you have a pretty good case of Calvinist-Jansenist indigestion [1]: uncomfortable and debilitating, but not inevitably fatal. A lot of western converts to Orthodoxy—Americans, Germans, etc., suffer from this to one degree or another, especially early on in spiritual life. Our gerondissa at St. Paul’s calls it the Medieval Sickness, a combination of moralistic nitpicking, pride,secretiveness,lack of faith in God, and lack of belief in the compassion of God. It makes one pretty joyless, prone to ill-considered and short-lived bursts of ascetic effort (often as not alternating with equally ill-considered and short-lived bursts of carnal distractions of one sort or another), often melancholy, often judgmental. If you know much about the early history of New England colonization, you can see that the Puritans represent the acme of this spiritual type.

Those who have this mindset tend, by nature or training, to see God always as the stern, unappeasable Judge, whose dealings with man are always based on law and justice, and who demands of us an exact fulfillment of rules and rubrics. And we, in fulfilling these, do not really hope for, or believe in, the transfiguration and renewal of our souls and minds. At best, we hope that our scrupulous fulfillment of the Law will induce God to overlook our flaws and sins which we, in our heart of hearts, feel remain always with us, unforgiven, unchanged, and unchangeable. In such an atmosphere, one’s spiritual life is not really a journey into communion with God through repentance and deification, so much as a dreary pendulum of efforts to appease an inscrutable and implacable God, interspersed with the outbreaks of resentment and frustration this causes us. Naturally, as you have observed, this leads either to a mental breakdown, or to the abandonment of participation in church life, which we come to feel is not “working” for us. This is not an Orthodox view of God. And having this false image of God makes having an Orthodox experience of God difficult.

People born in what remains of the Byzantine world don’t suffer from this as readily as we do. (They have other crosses to carry, of course.) And unless they’ve dealt with it in working with westerners, they don’t always find it easy to understand. Greeks, for example, can be rebellious, worldly, egotistical, materialistic, avaricious, cunning hedonists, but they have a basic optimism and confidence in the goodness of God, the beauty of the world, and their own worth as immortal persons, which makes repentance less complicated for them. Even if they have turned away from the Church, in their hearts they still have a fundamental understanding that God is a loving Father, the Theotokos is a longsuffering Mother who will come to their aid if they turn to her, and the world of creation is ultimately a place of meaning and beauty. In a funny way, they enjoy a sinful or worldly life, while they’re living it, more than we do, because they enjoy life more than we do, and they repent in a more child-like way because they can still touch a child’s belief that home—the Church—really is the place where “when you go there, they have to take you in.” The dread Pantocrator, gazing down in majestic judgment from high up in the dome of the city cathedral is also Christouli mou, “my little Christ,” who really listens when you run in to your neighborhood church on the way to work to cry and light a candle because your daughter is in trouble at school. The untouchable and all-holy Mother of God is also Panayitsa mou, who really will take your part before the court of heaven because, just like your own mom, she’ll always stick up for her children, no matter how badly they’ve behaved.

Once, a man was being chased by the police for having committed murder. He ran to our monastery, banged on the gates to be let in, and claimed sanctuary there. (Under Greek law, he would be safe as long as he remained inside the walls.) He cried until they let him in, and then demanded to see Fr. R., saying he wanted to go to confession. Fr. R. came down, took him into the catholicon, and closed the doors. Soon the police arrived, having traced him and found his car down the road. They also banged on the gates wanting the man brought out. Fr. R. came out of the church, wearing his epitrachelion, and told the police they needn’t wait. The man was with him, but had business to finish with God first, and when they were through, the man would come down to the police station and turn himself in. The police asked who would stand surety for the man’s appearance. “The Apostle Paul,” Fr. R. said. The police left, and after a while the man came out of the church, peaceful and changed in his countenance. The sisters fed him, and he drove away to turn himself in. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced.

That is the Christian soul of a man, and a culture, at work. The man knew he was guilty of a crime at law, but he knew also that his heaviest burden was the sin that lay upon his soul. Instead of committing suicide, or taking thirty hostages in a shopping mall, he ran to the church to be washed and clothed and fed, spiritually and physically, before going to make his peace with Caesar. He accepted punishment in this world with a peaceful heart, knowing that he was already freed of punishment in the world to come. In the same way, every man wounded by sin in a fallen world, who runs for salvation to the Church, finds the arms of Christ open to him.

You have seen for yourself that the sort of thinking you mention in your letter is crazy and self-defeating. God does not sit up in the sky, setting us impossible tasks we must perform at any cost, no matter how unsuited they may be to our nature and abilities. He doesn’t begrudge our innocent pleasures, or enjoy our failures or mistakes. Humility is not self-hatred, and self-reproach is not neurotic self-obsession. “If I do something I enjoy doing, then it is definitely not God’s will... If I am asked to do something I have no talent or desire to do, this is God’s will... I must always be suffering.” A classic exposition of the Jansenist manifesto! Fortunately, it has nothing to do with Christ, or with life in Christ. You are on the right track when you suppose the answer lies in looking at Christ, and following His commandments. And those commandments are compassed like this: “To love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself. In this is all the law, and the prophets.”

Trials and sufferings will come upon us, if we are looking to keep this Great Commandment, but they will come unsought. We needn’t invent them for ourselves, by putting gravel in our shoes and ashes on our food, or forcing ourselves to be a bad radio announcer when we could be a good landscape gardener because we think God will finally like us (or at least let us slip past His eye) if we do as many of the things we hate as possible.

Self-accusation is also a big bear-trap for self-hating Puritans like you. I was reading an article by Elder Sophrony of Essex [2] last week. Someone was asking him about the psychological and emotional problems so prevalent in western life, and whether he felt that secular psychiatry offered any help. He said that, with the exception of syndromes directly attributable to malfunctioning brain chemistry, he felt that psychiatrists often do more harm than good by making people focus too much on themselves and too little on God and their neighbor. He said they begin to concentrate too much on the “designated problem,” often not the real problem anyway, and then try to change it by yet more self-analysis and introspection, which only makes us prey to many kinds of illusion. In this interview, done a couple of years before his repose, Fr. Sophrony said he doesn’t advocate too much introspection even for monastics or his other spiritual children. “You know, we pick and poke away, hunting for every little mistake or thought, and we make ourselves crazy, all for nothing. It becomes an obsession, and really makes a wall between us and God, leaving no room for grace to act. Yes, we must know in general our sins, and that we are sinful and deluded beings, but we must never lose sight of the fact that we come to God in prayer, not to be obsessed with our sins, but to find His mercy. Otherwise the devil takes everything away from us... joy, hope, peace, love... and leaves us nothing but this obsession with our mistakes. That is not repentance. That is neurosis.”

The remedy? I knew a woman once, a spiritual child of Elder Sophrony’s, a middle-aged married woman with several children, who was overtaken suddenly by a painful psycho-spiritual illness: severe depression with suicidal thoughts, which took the form of religious mania. She was obsessed with forebodings of damnation and despair of forgiveness; made long catalogues of her minutest daily thoughts, no matter how fleeting, etc. In desperation, with her marriage almost over, she went to Essex and begged Fr. Sophrony for help. He told her to throw out all of her notebooks of sins, to read the Gospel of St. John every day for a year, to say the Jesus Prayer as much as she could [3], to receive Holy Communion as often as possible, and to come back to Essex for some time every year, to rest and pray there. She did as he said, and made slow progress at first; but after a few years she became free and whole again. She told me at first that she had to say the Prayer out loud as much as she could, because the minute she stopped, she began falling back into her “old crazy mind” as she called it; but little by little, she began having more time free of her fears. The Gospel of St. John, after many repetitions, forced her to see that God is really a God of love, who cares for her in a personal sense. This was reinforced by her practice of the Prayer and her visits with Fr. Sophrony. Over the course of time, she proved to have quite a gift of intercessory prayer for others and spent the remainder of her life, as her children were grown, living a quiet life, “only a housewife” to all appearances, but spending much time each day in prayer for others, a form of charity in which she was much aided in the great compassion for the sufferings of others that her own torment had given her.

You asked for suggestions. Naturally, anything I offer is subject to your own confessor’s direction, but the following suggestions come to mind: Your case may not be so extreme... but it can become so. I would suggest you begin making an effort to cut off these darkly accusing thoughts by saying the Prayer when they arise, and also reading the Gospel as much as you can. You might find it helpful to simply prepare your confession from a prayer book for now—using the list of sins in the Erie prayer book* or another, but using this to prepare only on the day you go to confession. Don’t allow yourself to brood over them outside that allotted time of preparation for the Sacrament. For this period, you shouldn’t need more than an hour, at the most, to prepare for confession. Once you’re done, you’re done. No cheating. After you go to confession, drive away by the Jesus Prayer all thoughts which try to remind you of the sins confessed, or make you think you’re still not “really forgiven”. Don’t be discouraged if they return, and don’t make yourself more upset by castigating yourself over it. Just try, as peacefully as you can, to keep saying the Prayer. You may also find help by saying several knots, or a rope, to the Mother of God. She’s very good at helping us up when we feel lost in the uttermost depths. So, pray simply, and simply pray. Don’t brood over the unchangeable past. Self-accusation time should be limited to once a week, or whenever you prepare for confession, for now.

Don’t worry if you don’t feel joyful on feastdays or other times when you “ought” to feel joyful. Joy is a gift, like life and sunlight and air and flowers and food. It comes and goes, according to its own rhythms and seasons, and its presence doesn’t mean someone’s holy, any more than its absence means someone’s doomed. For beginners in spiritual life, feelings are not as important as acts and habits. We must build the habits of prayer and life in Christ, and let the feelings follow when (or if) they may. When you pray, don’t get all worked up into a fret by monitoring yourself constantly, trying to measure how many seconds of compunction you achieved or whether you felt 1.5 degrees more repentant than yesterday. Just say the Prayer, and keep your mind on the words of the Prayer. The more we scrutinize ourselves, the less we’re paying attention to God. Might as well chuck the prayer rope and spend an hour looking in the mirror instead. If your mind wanders, don’t make a mental note to accuse yourself of being distracted from 1:06 to 1:09 on Tuesday. Just gently put your thought back on the words of the Prayer, and use the words as an anchor to tug you back to the here-and-now if you drift away. That’s enough.

It may be, as you suspect, that you’ve collected a few mistaken ideas about how to live an Orthodox spiritual life, and that these mistaken ideas have colored some of your experiences and influenced some of your decisions, especially those having to do with monastic life. Well, mistakes are just mistakes: chances to learn better and different ways of being and doing, not indictments of our right to exist or our hope for salvation. Give thanks to the Lord that in His mercy He is opening your eyes to see these things now, and to think and act upon them with His help. It’s spring now in the natural world, and springtime for the soul too. You have a chance to do a little spring cleaning in your natural house, and start off a summer of new growth with cleaner windows on the world and fresher, brighter rooms inside your heart. Do not be tricked into believing the demons who tell you that you are “committing a blasphemy even at Liturgy, because you do not ever seem to get better.” It is they who are locked in their hatred of God and man, and who blaspheme, full of rage because they know they will never change, and hatred for us because we can. First of all, it is not our task to judge whether we are ever “getting any better.” That is the Lord’s business, not ours, nor yet the devil’s. Secondly, you are a beloved child of the living God, Who died and rose that you might also die and rise, and live forever in joy with Him. The Lord Who broke the bars of death and harrowed the pit of hell is quite capable of bringing you safe home to Heaven, if you will get out of the way and let Him in. “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Be of good cheer. I wish you well, and hope to hear from you again.

In Christ,
M.

Endnotes

1. Ed. note:Calvinism (also called the Reformed tradition): A Protestant Reformation theological system that emphasizes the rule of God over all things, but alters the traditional Christian understanding of free will and man’s relationship to his Creator to emphasize doctrines of the total depravity of man and predestination. Protestant theologians following this trend were John Calvin, Bullinger, Zwingli, and many others including the English Thomas Cranmer.

Jansenism: A 16th-18th century Counter-Reformation Catholic movement in northern Europe that echoed Calvin’s teachings in emphasizing original sin, human depravity, and predestination. Originating in the writings of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen, it especially found a stronghold amongst French Catholics. Several of the movement’s propositions on the relationship between free will and “efficacious grace” were condemned as heresies by Pope Innocent X in 1653, and the ban on this teaching was reaffirmed by subsequent popes.

2. (Ed. note) Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov) (1896-1993): Spiritual son of St. Silouan the Athonite, and compiler of his works, Fr. Sophrony founded the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Tollshunt Knights, Essex, England in 1959. The community is now under the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

3. (Ed. note) The Jesus Prayer: A traditional prayer often used by Orthodox Christians: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

* (OCIC Ed. note) She is referring to the Old Orthodox (Old Rite) Prayer Book published by the Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity of Christ in Erie, PA.

From Road to Emmaus, Vol X. No. 1 (Winter 2009 #36), pp. 27-34. Posted with permission from the RtE office in Portland, OR. Posted March 24, 2009.

Introducing....

I took the plunge, and bought my business license today! I am now the (very proud) owner of The Apple Branch Pantry. I will be making jam, and anything else I feel like throwing in a canning jar. I am spending this week getting set up, and then the first batches of jam are due to be canned on Saturday. :)

I am very excited.

Monday morning

It is another Monday morning at the Rogers household...nothing super exciting to report. I attempted to get up with Dn. John again this morning, but Marina decided to wake up at 6:15, and Megan at 6:30, so I laid down with them to try and get them to go back to sleep. I was all too successful...in that we all passed out, and didn't wake back up until 7:45. But, we're up now, and buzzing around getting all kinds of stuff accomplished.

Megan turned on her favorite ABCs CD, and I sat and listened to Marina singing along with it. I am daily amazed at her language skills. She can sing (for the most part) the alphabet, she prays, yesterday in church she was saying the Trisagion prayers. It sounded like this: "Hoooooooweee GOD, Hoooooooweee Mi'ee, Hoooooooweee 'Mortal, Mercy on Us." She was very emphatic about saying "God." Just over the weekend, I noticed her starting to string words together. What can I say? She's brilliant. :) Her allergy reactions continue to fluctuate and be all over the map, so I can't say what's going on there. I don't think that her soy allergy is much to worry about; I've been incorporating soy back into her diet and have seen no changes. In any case, she's got a follow up in a couple weeks so she can be retested, and we'll see what the doctor says.

I do have a prayer request--my Grandma Barbara (Megan's namesake) is very ill and in the hospital. We're not sure if she is going to recover...and if she does, there are a lot of problems in her home that are causing some pretty severe stress in my family right now. So please pray that she gets better, and then that we are able to convince her to move to Alaska.

I did it! But....

That's right! I actually got up this morning. Dn. John came and woke me up at 6:15, and I kissed him good-bye downstairs at 6:20.

By 6:25, both girls were awake. What the heck?!?!

Our usual early morning ritual is to snuggle in bed for awhile, so Megan asked me to come lay down with her. So there I was...up for fifteen minutes, and then back in bed squished between my sleepy kids. Marina and I must have dozed back off, because the next thing I knew, Megan was shaking me awake and telling me this little gem: "Mom, I spilled yogurt in the fridge, and there is pineapple on the stairs."

Apparently this new routine is going to take some getting used to.

Early morning, Take 2

The best laid plans of mice and men often get derailed and die horrible, tragic deaths. That's the quote, right?

My kids were up half the night crying, so I elected to postpone my early morning "Christine time" for another day. As a result, we all slept until 8:45. It was pretty delightful, actually, but I am disappointed that I had such an epic fail on my first attempt. However, there is always tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. With any luck, Marina and Adelaina will nap at the same time today, and I can still get some writing time in.

Wish me luck

I was thinking today about my goals. I have a couple. They're not huge, but they are important to me. In any case, I was trying to figure out how to squirrel away some time to work on them in a way that wouldn't take away from my kids or my husband. I only came up with one solution, and it pains me in a way that I can't even describe.

I have to start getting up earlier. Ugh.

So, tomorrow's plan is to get up with the birds. And if not with the birds, at least with Dn. John. That means come 6 a.m., I will be voluntarily climbing out of my nice cozy bed. I know, it's crazy. But, I figure something's gotta give, and my sleep schedule is apparently volunteering.

My plans for the butt-crack of dawn? (Matthew, that was your shout out). I'm going to throw on some sweats and walk 1/2 mile before Dn. John leaves for work. After that, I'm going to get all my "social networking" (read: time wasted on Facebook) out of the way. Once that vastly important task is conquered, I am going to write.

I wrote a story about Pascha from the perspective of Hades a few years ago. Somewhere in the bowels of my computer is a prequel of sorts...the Crucifixion from the perspective of the Wise Thief. The original plan was to complete an entire Holy Week set of short stories, from the Last Supper up until the Resurrection. I have 2 1/2 done (the 1/2 being the Garden of Gethsemene where the servant gets his ear cut off). This week's project? Finish the last half. I'd like to have a set of 7-10 when I am done. Who knows, maybe some crazy company will even want to publish it. (That would be SWEET).

In any case, send happy "early morning" thoughts my way. I get to spend time with my youngest God-daughter tomorrow also. We've never really had a chance to bond, and she is coming over for most of the day. I'm pretty excited, and the girls are pumped.

As for right now? I'm off to watch a movie. I've had some crazy desire lately to watch stuff that was popular when I was in junior high. We've got Jurassic Park and The Mighty Ducks downstairs. I'm not sure what we'll choose, but I do guarantee that it will be accompanied by a root beer float. Yum.

Ah Megan...

I was sitting here at the computer, and Megan climbed up into the chair and perched behind me. She was singing and humming and doing her regular little Megan things, until all of a sudden, I hear oh-so-quietly whispered in my ear:

"Give me your money, so I can spend it at Target."

WHAT THE--??

Marina Prays

Translation: In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you Jesus for my waffle. Amen.

In the mind of Megan

Megan is RELENTLESS. She really really really wants a new baby (she waffles as to whether or not she wants a brother or a sister). At least once a day, the subject comes up, and Meg has kicked it up a notch lately especially since her Godmother is now expecting a new little one.

We've told her in the past the "time-line" of babies....ie, you meet, fall in love, get married, and THEN have a baby. So here's the conversation we had today in the car.

Megan: I told Nick (her cousin) today that I'm going to have a new baby. He told me I was wrong.
Me: Well, he's right. You aren't having a new baby.
Megan: Well, you are!
Me: Honey, you know that there is no baby in Mom's tummy, right?
Megan: (super depressed voice) I know.
Me: God will decide when to send a new baby to our family. It's just not time yet. We have to wait for God.
Megan: Maybe you should just get married again. Then you could have a baby.

At this point in time, Dn. John and I about choked, we were laughing so hard. Like I said: relentless!

Chaos Theory

I have no idea what the true chaos theory is, but it seems to be centered on my house. It is madness here today! I'm not sure what has gotten into my kids, but they've completely lost it. For the first time, I experienced them both throwing gigantic screaming fits simultaneously. I think they were feeding off each other. Although, I will admit that going 19 months without concurrent screaming fits is something of a feat. Now to break that record....

I have turned a movie on, which seems to have calmed them down, and I came upstairs to hide and take a breather. Whew!

Also adding to the chaos theory is that fact that I haven't REALLY cleaned since Holy Saturday. I've done little bits here and there, but my house hasn't been truly clean in almost a week and a half. It's starting to make me twitch. I'm hoping to plow through and get lots done this afternoon (since the morning is a lost cause, apparently), but we'll see. I also have to figure out something for dinner....hm, what is in my freezer? Ah, meatloaf and mashed potatoes it is! Sweet.

I'm really starting to think that having a housekeeper would just be fantastic, if not for the fact that I would be embarrassed nigh unto death to have somebody else witness the filth here. Plus, I suppose they would put stuff away in all the wrong places. (Hmm, much like my children....).

On a happier note: HOLY CRAP MATTHEW AND ANASTASIA!!!!!!! I am still in shock. Super excited that we will soon have a new little Howell to love and adore. All FIVE of you are in our prayers daily. I have a message for the baby: Be nice to your Mom! Stop making her sick. Love, Aunt Christine.

I wish I had been keeping track of the number of people who have encouraged (read: TOLD) me that it's time for us to add a new baby to our family; apparently, whatever the Howell's do is perfect, and we need to jump on the bandwagon. :) I'm pretty sure the number has passed a dozen. Thanks for the encouragement, all you people who wouldn't actually have to be pregnant. Glad to know you love my kids, even the ones who aren't even a twinkle in anyone's eye yet.

Five minutes later

I would just like to add that five minutes after I published that post, Megan came upstairs, informed me that she was done helping, and proceeded to throw a giant fit when I wouldn't let her sit in the chair with me.

*Sigh*

One step at a time....

Megan's awesomeness

I am in love with this phase in Megan's life. She is easing--slowly some days, rapidly others--out of the terrible twos, and into this fantastic era of helpfulness and cheerfulness.

For example, I am watching my friend's one year old all day. She is being uncharacteristically (man that was a hard word to spell) fussy, and has been following me around the house crying/screaming for the last three hours. Megan took matters into her own hands a little while ago.

"Mom, I think Samantha is hungry. I'm going to give her some yogurt."

Go for it, I thought. So Megan straps a bib on her, and proceeds to feed her yogurt for a good fifteen minutes. Of course she was right; Samantha was starving and wolfed it down. After a while, I hear, "Mom, Samantha is done eating. I'm going to wash her face, and then we're going to play." So, Megan washes her face, and then shows Samantha the toys in the living room. They've been playing quietly and happily for almost twenty minutes.

MY DAUGHTER IS AWESOME. That's all there is to it. I've been able to get a bunch of stuff done, and have snuck upstairs to be on the computer. I'm starting to think that she will be a major help whenever we lose our minds completely and decide to have another kid.

Pascha

Folk dancing! So much fun.
Megan was pretty hopped up on sugar yesterday. She danced almost nonstop.

Daddy and Marina, chilaxing at the feast.
Marina and our God-daughter Adelaina at the feast
Megan discovers the Easter Eggs hidden in the living room.
Marina had fun with them, too.
Marina, all bundled up and snuggled with Mom on the Pascha procession.
Megan dyes eggs for the first time.