Mr. Igor

On Sunday we entertained a special visitor from Russia, Igor. That's Mr. Igor to the children.

I spent the whole day Saturday in my PJs preparing for his visit. The house really needed a good cleaning. (Of the wiping-down-all-the-baseboards variety.) And I really needed such a visit to prompt me to get into gear.

He read to the children our Russian-language Lion King book (see photo and video clip). Anna sometimes nodded her head as if she understood her native language, but I don't think she really did. I cooked up some good old Southern-style sweet iced tea and served warm peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream. For lunch we grilled German-style brats and ate potato chips and watermelon. After lunch we went downstairs and watched our adoption video.



Igor works at the National Park Services's Cold War-era Minuteman Missile site in the Badlands, about 45 minutes from where we live. Apparently he was here last summer, too. He's a journalism student in Russia.

Igor speaks English beautifully, hardly any broken English. He stayed for a couple hours and offered to cook us some Russian food at his place in the Badlands before he returns to Russia in late August. As he was leaving, he brought back from his car a small hand-held Russian flag and gave it to us. We put it in our book/china cabinet where we have displayed some memorabilia from our Russian trips.

We took the missile-site tour last November when my Dad came up for Thanksgiving holiday. Here are photos of inside the park office before the tour started and at the silo's off location. Of all the photos I posted of my dad's visit, I never got around to posting any of these. So here you go.