Cold, colder, hopefully today was the coldest!

It’s another chilly day here in the Donetsk region. Today was the coldest day so far with temps of -1C and -12C with light sleet. We’re expecting a heat wave of sorts on Monday. The high will actually be 2C! ;-) Tuesday the forecast cools back down but changes from snow/freezing rain to clear skies. We’ll hope that is accurate. Our days are looking very, very similar… we did have a bit of excitement at breakfast today. We got ham instead of salami. Please don’t tell the Food Pyramid police about our diet here. The closest we’ve gotten to a fruit or vegetable in two days was a glass of grape juice with breakfast. 

 We left earlier for the orphanage today so that we wouldn’t have to be concerned about coming home after dark. When we arrived, the children were all enjoying their vast collection of candies, cookies and roll-on deodorant that St. Nicholas brought them last night. The caretaker told the girls to take us out of the playroom where everyone was gathered to play in their room today. (They’re still in the new, warmer room. It looked like its windows had been replaced with new weather-resistant windows.) V, of course, wanted to play Uno. We did that for a while, but just before lunch she told Nastiya that she wanted to learn the English alphabet. (I think I held in my excitement, but you know the teacher in me was squealing!) When they came back from lunch Dan played Uno with Nastiya and V’s roommates while she and I looked at the alphabet and an “Easy English” book we picked up here. It’s actually pretty well designed with not only the Russian and English words but the phonetic spellings (in Cyrillic) as well. We left around 3 and faithful Sasha was waiting for us in the car… holding his windshield wipers. I wouldn’t have thought of it, but they do work better when not frozen.

We expect we’re in for the night… yup, it’s only 4:00. No real need to explore town with the current weather…