The trip itself was very pleasant. We sang Old Macdonald until I lost my voice. The kids know enough animal names and noises now to make the song fun for everyone. We also listened to a tape of Ukrainian vocabulary I'd purchased last year. The tape itself was worthless as a study guide for me, because it's just a long list of verbs and phrases in no particular order. A year ago, when I didn't know any Russian or Ukrainian, it wasn't much help to know the infinitive form of verbs or phrases like, "What color is your car?" I'm not sure what target audience the creators had in mind -- certainly not people who wanted to learn to speak Ukrainian -- but we found an audience in Nicky. He absolutely loved hearing Ukrainian spoken, and listened raptly. On side one, the tape gave Ukrainian infinitives followed by the English equivalents, and on side two, the tape gave English phrases followed by the Ukrainian equivalents.

 

Every time I plugged in the tape, Zack immediately complained loudly that he wanted music instead, but within seconds was repeating everything he heard and demanding that I turn up the volume. I don't think he absorbed any new vocabulary, but he listened and repeated for up to ten minutes at a time. Nicky, however, positively glowed and soaked up language the way a child's t-shirt soaks up grape juice. Side two was especially fun, because after we heard an English phrase, I'd call out the Russian translation, and Nicky would call out the Ukrainian translation. We then listened to the tape's answer, and Nicky and I compared the Russian and Ukrainian words.

 

For all that Zack's English language acquisition is lagging behind Nicky's, he understands an awful lot of spoken English. When we got to the "What color is your car?" question, I shouted out the Russian translation, Nicky called out the Ukrainian translation, and Zack shouted, "Red!"

 

By far the biggest benefit of playing the tape was discovering the Ukrainian for "Christmas." I'd been searching for ways to explain about Christmas to the boys, but every term I found in dictionaries or on websites got me only blank stares from the boys until we heard "Happy Christmas" in Ukrainian on the tape. Nicky's eyes lit up and he crowed, "I know Christmas!"

 

Language continues to be a huge part of the boys' lives. Even when they're not learning new words, they're still focused on language much of the time. For a good ten minutes on the drive, they argued about where we were going. Nicky would say "hotel" and Zack would reply "gasteenyatsa" (the Russian word for "hotel"), over and over, back and forth, just those two words. When they got tired of that, we went back to Old Macdonald.

 

We rolled up to the hotel around 9:00 at night. Nicky had slept for a couple of hours in the car, so was wide awake and wanting to play. Zack hadn't slept, so was tired, cranky, and wanting to play. It took about two hours for them to settle down and go to sleep for the night.

 

Saturday morning, we ate breakfast and went swimming at the hotel, then headed to Sea World for the day. I'd done my best to explain about Sea World to the boys beforehand, so they were eager and excited, even though my limited Russian was woefully insufficient to prepare them for all the cool stuff. Nicky was especially excited about the "car-train-thing-that-goes-really-high-and-really-fast" (a roller coaster), and asked about it every five minutes from the moment we woke up. The looks on their faces when they caught their first glimpse of the roller coasters in the distance was worth every second of the trip. Their eyes shown, their jaws dropped, and they squeaked in excitement. Unfortunately, both boys were too short to ride on anything except the Texas Splashdown (a log ride), the kiddy coaster, and other little-kid rides.

 

Nicky got to touch a dolphin, and we saw all sorts of sea creatures, including sharks, jellyfish, whales, octopi, squid, thousands of colorful saltwater fish, and of course all of Nemo's cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. It's amazing how much vocabulary they'd learned from watching the Finding Nemo movie. They recognized and were able to name all the major categories of fish.

 

The biggest hit at Sea World was the Texas Splashdown ride. They had to wait in line for thirty minutes for a three-minute ride, and happily did it three times in a row. They would have kept going, but there were other things to see, and they were showing signs of being over-stimulated already. When we got to the point where every other word came out in a whine, I called it a day, and we headed back to the hotel. We'd spent about seven hours walking around Sea World, and the boys had no trouble at all getting to sleep.

 

Sunday morning we ate breakfast at the hotel again, and played on the elevators ("Up and down! Up and down!"), then left for home. On the way back, we stopped at Natural Bridge Caverns. The dark caves were a bit too scary for the boys, so we just looked at the entrance ("Big hole!") and played on the dinosaurs for a few minutes. The trip home seemed extraordinarily long to me. We had to stop a half dozen times to stretch legs, pee, eat, and get gas. The trip seemed long to the boys, too, because they knew we were going trick-or-treating Sunday evening.

 

Explaining Halloween was a lot easier than explaining Christmas, probably because it involved specific costumes, actions, and candy. The boys knew exactly what to expect, and were really looking forward to it. It also helped that Sea World was decorated for Halloween, with skeletons ("Scary, Papa! Look!"), witches ("Baba Yagska!"), and kids wearing costumes.

 

Zack (Little Bunny Foo Foo) hopped his way through trick-or-treating, and was only frightened a little bit by the displays we saw. One area about six blocks from our house has a Halloween tradition where each family on the block tries to outdo all the others with huge displays. It was all good fun, and we saw probably 150 kids in costume. Nicky (Peter Pan, complete with sword) wasn't scared at all because he understood it was all make-believe. The boys hauled in enough candy to last them for weeks, and were really good about waiting until we got home to eat any of it.

 

The boys were well-behaved all weekend. Although there was a bit of whining when they got overtired, we had no tantrums at all, and no fights. They took in all the new things without blinking, and threw themselves into the festivities with good humor. I'm so proud of them!

 

It was kind of hard for them to get back into the hum-drum routine of school after all that fun, but after the first day back, they'd readjusted fine. Nicky finally lost his loose tooth (while eating an apple at school), and proudly shows his new gap to everyone he sees. Zack is sleeping well. and doing much better at controlling his impulsive behavior. Both of them are affectionate and compliant most of the time, and their happiness shines through everything they do.

 

They are such a joy to me. I am the luckiest man in the world.