A Circus, literally!

The four of us at my favorite restaurant, the Goose-Swan. The name comes from a fairy tale. The Verineke is awesome. Lena had the rabbit today, Brianne went back to eating omelets!

The hat trick, lucky Trent!

Brianne and her clown nose. It made Lena's day!

You go girl! Do the hula in front of over a thousand people.

Today was a different day. We got to take Lena to the circus. It was just the 4 of us. They had some great acrobats and gymnasts and some very interesting animals. They started with dogs that jumped through hoops and danced and then added in monkys that swung on the trapeze and an ape that rode a motorcycle, pretended to play many instruments (including a guitar while "smoke on the water" played over the speakers) and danced. Then they released a porcupine that walked along and into a cage and released pelicans from above our heads that did NOT want to follow the script and provided even more entertainment while they tried to catch them. They had a pony and my favorite, a brown bear! The bear walked on his back legs arm and arm w/a trainer, then rode on a cart, walked on a barrel, rode a scooter and danced. He was awesome.

Then, there were the clowns which about halfway through the program decided to grab an audience member, who just happened to be Brianne. See we bought our tickets 3 days ago while driving by there and so we ended up on the front row! There were probably 1,200 people there in this Ukrainian circus and they drag out 1 of probably the only 3 Americans there. It was hilarious and happened so fast I don't think Brianne realized what was happening. She still had on her coat and they asked her to hula. She did it very well and then they put a clown nose on her and had her do it again. It was so funny. Lena got a big laugh out of it. The funniest part is that when they took Brianne to the center of the ring, they told her what to do in Russian! Thankfully, we have become fairly good at charades and they gave her enough motions as to what they wanted her to do. Otherwise, they might have thought she was el stupido.

Then later in the program, the clowns came back over w/a hat trick. They would pour water in a top hat and when 1 clown put the hat on, no water came out , but when the other clown put it on, she got soaking wet so she brought it over to Trent and turned it upside down over his head and to his gratitude, no water came out.

After the circus, we got to take Lena to a restaurant. I thought she would be so delighted b/c it was her culture and food, but she could not make a decision. She has lived for 4 years being given every meal without any choices and a large menu seemed overwhelming I'm sure. However, she did get delight in seeing us handed menus written in Russian b/c the shoe was on the other foot.....until they brought menus in English.

Tomorrow is Sunday and we will take bracelets w/colored beads for the kids to make and talk about God and the meaning attributed to the different colors. I am looking forward to that. The kids are comfortable enough w/us now that they will gladly take what we bring.

We talked to Lena about the possibility of all of us leaving and just me coming back after I saw my family for a few days. She was ok with that and so was our facilitator. We will do the rest of the paperwork on Monday that we need Trent's signature on. I'm just waiting now on the travel agent to see the possibilities. It was a good day. Thanks for your prayers.