Freedom! Getting out of lockdown!

It has been many months since I last posted and almost a year since these pictures have been taken. A lot has changed in that year including our location (we are no longer in Kazakhstan), and I think I was avoiding to write about it because that would mean that one of the biggest chapters in our life came to an end. But it did come to an end (though we started another exciting chapter), and so I need to write about our last couple of months in Kazakhstan, a country that we called home for six years.

Twins on a walk with Yuki. During the lock down we took every opportunity to walk our dog because that is the only time we were allowed to be outside besides grocery shopping. Later our campus allowed families to be outside for 30 minutes at a time.

On May 11th Kazakhstan ended its first lockdown due to the pandemic. The lockdown had lasted for nearly 2 months. Now people were allowed to be outside and restaurants, stores, malls were opened though at 50% capacity. People took it to heart and it felt like the entire city was out that day. It was also a very warm and beautiful day outside, so we decided to visit the Botanical Gardens that were walking distance from our campus. We'd been inside for too long! This was the first day our kids got to leave campus in two months! 

Walking to the Botanical Gardens through Expo Plaza.

At the Botanical Gardens we rented bikes and spent an hour riding around. It was a beautiful day and it felt nice to be outside all together doing something that we loved!

 

Afterwards we went back to the Expo Plaza, to the Mall that just reopened and had a lunch at one of the cafes there. All the things we took for granted before!

The following pictures show some other things we did in May and June of 2020.

Over the course of 6 years I have taken a lot of pictures of Astana night skies, mostly sunsets (they are just gorgeous!). And here is another one: night sky after a storm. Love the light reflections off the wet roads and the separation of the sky! There is light after each storm, and that doesn't change!

In June we started playing basketball outside as a family and were grateful that our campus had some outdoor basketball courts! The kids got to be pretty good shots and even took their Papa out a couple of times!

On June 28th we had our last branch party because all three expat families (us, the Thomas family, and the Calder family) were leaving Kazakhstan in July. We gathered at the Thomas's home and had a little picnic as well as a Court of Honor for Ben Calder who was receiving his Eagle Scout Award. It was nice to see everyone one last time (we were leaving for Texas,  the Thomas family was moving to Washington D.C. area for their next assignment, and the Calder family was going back to Utah though Steve Calder was staying in Astana for another year).

Eagle Scout Award Ceremony for Ben Calder.

Our little branch: the three expat families plus our two of the local members, Kamshat and Zhana.

We decided to eat at our favorite Georgian Restaurant one last time. The food was delicious as always but now I have to learn to cook it myself to get my Georgian "fix"!

 

Steppe grasses on our way to the SMART Supermarket. I admired them every time we went grocery shopping to that store and wanted to take a picture before city mowed them down. Kazakhstan is a beautiful country!

Second Month of Quarantine (COVID-19)

On April 10th we participated in the world-wide prayer and fasting to overcome the effects of coronavirus and return to normal life faster. This was an amazing experience because so many people around the world with different religious backgrounds put aside their differences and united in one goal. If we could only do that all the time, put aside our differences and unite, our lives would be so much better. Two days later we celebrated Easter, a time to remember our Savior, Jesus Christ,  and a time for hope and new beginnings. I have a lot of hope.

Our usual Easter breakfast.

The kids asked to do an egg hunt (I thought they were getting to big for this but I guess I was wrong). Since we have a small enough apartment and not very many places to hide eggs, they thought they could be done in 5 minutes. Well, well, well ... not if your Easter Bunny is your mother on a mission  to make life (or egg hunt in this case) difficult for everybody involved. I made a rule that each girl could only pick eggs of different colors (there were 8 different colors). If they found an egg of a color they already have, they had to put it back. The first one to find all 8 different colors got a prize. And then I hid the eggs in "plain sight". It took the kids over an hour to find them. Here is why...

A seemingly ordinary plant. 

But if you look closer, it's a plant bearing an egg. I did a similar thing with other colors like putting an orange egg in a bowl with mandarins or putting a pink egg to stick out of a pocket of a pink shirt. This mama rocks! 

Our twins turned 12 in April. I wanted to have a birthday party for them with their friends but the world decided to collapse, and so we ended up celebrating their birthday the usual way - with just our family. They asked for Angel Food Cake for breakfast which I totally made from scratch and Chicken Tenders and Biscuits for dinner made by Spencer and coleslaw made by me. We thought that they wouldn't get any presents but money because all non-food stores were closed but Nika and Lina found some cute umbrellas in Ramstore (Turkish chain of grocery stores), and the twins were very happy with them! 

During quarantine, nobody could go outside except for grocery shopping, going to a pharmacy, or walking a dog. Since we have a dog we took that opportunity to take kids outside to get some sunshine. For the first few weeks we could only take one kid at a time, so our dog got 4 walks a day! She was happy. We also had to alternate parents, so both of us would get some sunshine. Spring came really early this year, and the weather turned to warm and even hot very quickly.

Lexa walking Yuki with me.

Towards the end of April we took kids out two at a time. Here are Sophie and Lexa walking Yuki with me (or Yuki walking Sophie and Lexa with me, depending on who is telling the story).

We have a very nice pond on campus. Unfortunately the management company wasn't taking care of it and by the end of May it completely dried up.

Here is a couple of random pictures from our quarantine time doing ordinary things.

Lexa practicing her guitar and ... I guess freezing?

Reading books. Here is Lexa reading a book by Dan Haring, Spencer's friend from school. 

Girls made me an Angel Food Cake for breakfast for Mother's Day

For my Mother's Day present I wanted to get some family pictures done and I wanted my people to not look like they don't love taking pictures! And they delivered!

It was too windy to take family pictures outside on Mother's Day but the next day the weather was beautiful! We went around our campus to a couple of our favorite spots and had fun. And nobody objected as promised! Here are some shots from the day!

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...