Bubble Magic

As the weather started getting warmer we started spending more time at the Embassy. Parks were still closed and the Embassy had color teams that could never meet but on Blue days we could go play and ride bikes in the Embassy. We were always there with the same three families, so one chilly day in May the genius idea was born to have barbeques. We would be outside, we only hung out with each other, we all loved to cook and we all desperately needed to hang out. After three months of hardly any interaction our bubble was born and it was amazing. We all made one or two things and brought some meat to BBQ and it worked out perfectly. The 9 kids would play and roam the embassy grounds in packs and the adults would sit around and have wine and slowly cook and prepare dinner. When I think back to these weekend days, it was without a doubt the highlight of my Covid quarantine. In a normal world we would hardly have all been in the country most weekends with vacations and would have had other people to have dinner with, but at first we weren’t even allowed out of Kyiv, so it was just us, every week and it was lovely.

This little one LOVED it. Her best friend John Harris took her for flower walks every week and then she would come back and give them to me.

After a few weeks of Embassy barbeques, restrictions were lifted and we could finally spend time outside of Kyiv! We decided to take our barbeque bubble and go away for the weekend. We found a cute place a few hours away called Shishkin. We each rented our own little houses and barbequed outside all weekend. There was even a lake and pool, that were mostly empty, that we got to hung out at! It was the vacation we had all been craving for six months and even though it was just a few hours drive away, after months of limited interaction and no vacations it was like heaven! There were large enclosed grounds that the kids ran around and biked on all weekend, and the adults got to talk and hang out and feel like people again!