First Month of Quarantine (COVID-19)

One of the last normal things that we did before the world exploded with coronavirus was Nika's birthday. She turned 15 this February and as usually we celebrated in our little family circle. She wanted to have tacos for dinner and tacos she got!

Tacos with homemade flour tortillas! Yum!

Her sisters got her this shirt for her birthday and we got her a FitBit. She also got some money from us and from her Babushka. All of the gifts made her happy. She's been talking about FitBit for a couple of years now and was trying to convince us that she absolutely needed it to motivate her to exercise more and to show us that she walks a lot more steps a day than either Spencer or I. Well, three months later she is consistently in 3rd place (I guess FitBit is not a good motivation after all). 

Nika picked pumpkin pie to have for breakfast (yes, we are that crazy family that eats pies and cakes for breakfast!) and brownies for her birthday cake (pictured here). Yep, she's got a sweet tooth. No, actually she has something like 28 sweet teeth!

And the very last normal thing that we did was celebrating 8th of March (Women's Day here in this part of the world). It was also the last day we gathered together as a branch of our church. Just four days later Kazakhstan had its first official case of COVID-19, and two days later they shut down all of the schools in the country as well as all of the extracurricular activities for the kids (a sad day for our kids as they loved doing their sports and music). A few days later the government put the two major cities, Nur-Sultan (where we live) and Almaty on a complete lock-down with other cities to follow. The students at the universities had to leave campus and move to online learning. Our campus became like a ghost town in a matter of a few days. Spencer joined the rest of us at home and finished teaching the rest of his school year from our bedroom. For many weeks we were not allowed to leave home except for grocery shopping or pharmacy or to take our dog on a short walk. We took our dog on many short walks throughout the day so we could also take one of the kids out along with the dog (kids under 18 could not be out without parents). 

Celebrating 8th of March and not knowing what chaos that week is going to bring.

When they first announced that our city will be on lock-down, the very next day grocery stores saw crowds like never before. People were stocking up on grains, flower, shelf-stable milk, toilet paper and other necessities. The craziness lasted only for a couple of days. Amazingly, the stores stayed well-stocked during the entire quarantine unlike the stores in America.

On Sundays we held (and are still doing it) our home church meetings with just our family since we couldn't gather together with other church members. We improvised  by using medicine measuring cups (I am not sure why I was saving those over the years but they came in handy at the time of crisis) for our sacrament.

Ready for home church.

Nika and Lina both finished their Personal Progress Program in Young Women (usually girls would finish this program in their junior or senior year of high school but when Nika and Lina learned that the program will be discontinued, they worked especially hard to finish it much earlier)  and received their Woman in Excellence Awards. Lina got hers back in January but Nika received hers on March 8th (the last day of our official church meetings).  Here they are both sporting their medallions.

We've played a lot of these and other games together in quarantine.

The very first week they still allowed kids to be on campus without parents supervision, and since the girls could not do their track and figure skating any longer, they exercised outside. 

That first week we also took walks together with the girls once a day. The spring came to Kazakhstan very early this year (usually we still have freezing day temperatures at the beginning of April) but this year snow started to melt by the middle of March. This is what was left of NU Winter Park that they built this year for the first time.

Outdoor skating rink. You can't see it in the picture, but there is a big puddle in the middle of it.

Yuki likes this kind of weather!

She could totally be NU mascot!

Our crew.

We had to adjust our lives while in quarantine and one of those things is that we had to do a lot more cooking. But everyone pitched in and we learned to cook a lot of new dishes. The kids are turning into amazing little chefs, and Spencer and I ... well, we are turning into very creative big chefs! :) 

Here is Sophie and Lexa working on their dessert which is in the picture bellow...

Baklava!

Nika continues to perfect her baking skills and now she is a pro at making the best cookies ever that just melt in your mouth...

... Brownie Cookies

Lina continues to specialize in Asian cooking and during quarantine she tried and successfully created a few Asian dishes. Our absolute favorite are these ...

Chicken (and later she did spinach and mushroom) filled Chinese dumplings. 

I do not have a picture of Spencer and I in the kitchen but here is Spencer's new dish that we often have on Sundays - Moroccan Stew!!!

And as for me, in the last few weeks I learned to make a lot of new salads and breads, one of our favorite being these pretzel rolls.

Our life in quarantine was different, but good.  We were healthy and happy and still had a job and access to food, clean water, and communication.  We were not planning on spending the spring this way, but we were making the best of it.

To be continued...

Catching up with our lives - summer 2019

We got back to Kazakhstan from our trip to Utah at the end of June which meant that we had most of the summer here. It was the first time that we spent most of the summer in Astana. We usually would have a trip to Utah and a trip to somewhere else like Russia, but this time we just stayed in Astana. This meant we had to occupy our time with something fun and productive. So, here are some pictures showing what we did this summer after we got back from America.

We celebrated 4th of July by going to McDonalds at the Mall across the street. 

Our twins put on a fashion show which all of a sudden gave me a scary thought: they are growing up way too fast!

Our summer in Astana was really hot this year but most people were gone on vacations, so it felt like our kids were the only kids on campus. To get them to go outside every day we decided to get them skateboards (they actually paid for half with their own money). It was a great thing but we ran into unexpected problem: when they would skateboard on campus, the guards would often run after them telling them that it is not safe! Really?!

Yuki has been true to herself and enjoyed all of the attention she could get from her fan-club which became even bigger with the new group of students that arrived in August. 

We made an outing one Friday night out to the Expo site to see the Musical Fountains. 

The fountains were neat but we have seen bigger ones in our life (we did live in Las Vegas after all!)

The neat thing about having the biggest mall in Central Asia just across the street from us is that quite often they do different exhibitions there on weekends. This one was a quilting exhibition (I noticed that most of the quilts were done by Russian artists, it must be not a Kazakh thing)

This one was one of my favorite quilts - an entrance hall in the Opera and Ballet Theater here in Astana.

This summer I decided that I needed a new hobby for myself and decided to try cross-stitching. This was my very first project. I think they turned out cute!

This summer I had a brilliant idea to challenge all of our kids to really learn cooking, so for a couple of months in the summer each girl took a day of a week (every week for almost two months) when she would be cooking a family dinner. They were to come up with their own menu and do all of the cooking only asking me for an advice when needed. This challenge turned out AWESOME! Each one of our girls took this challenge to heart and cooked extraordinary dinners. Sometimes they even came up with new recipes that were exceptionally tasty! They are much better cooks right now than I was going into college! After this experience we decided to work on a family cookbook which will have all of our favorite recipes and which we are planning to publish before our first daughter goes to college.

Sophie is cooking

Lexa is making biscuits 

Lina is making garlic toasts for her chicken-n-dumpling soup.

I do not have a good picture of Nika cooking this summer but here is one of her specialties - beignets. It is definitely going into our family cookbook!

Once other American families from our church came back from their vacations, we had a fun family Taco Night together with some games that quickly became a hit! Here is Spencer going against Nika trying to shake out the most beans from his cup with a little hole.

This summer we had to say good-bye to some of our dear friends. Here we are with the young volunteers from our branch, sisters Beagly and Sever who both left to serve in other cities in Russia and Kazakhstan.

And here we are saying good-bye to one of our favorite couples, the Adairs who moved to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to open a humanitarian services office. 

At the beginning of September we had a nice development on campus - they brought a mini bazaar to us with all of the fresh fruits and vegetables! I was in heaven! These melons are my favorite!  

School started in the middle of August and with that began a new basketball season for Spencer. As our tradition, we had our basketball team over for brunch one Saturday in September. Some of the basketball girls were in America this summer on their work-n-travel visa, and were very excited to see some of the foods they came to love while in America.

And now it is fall!