Before we knew it summer ended and the school year began. We prepped by buying a whole lot of masks and hand sanitizer. But school was in person!! Every day for Malcolm and Miral and half of the week for Adam.  I was worried about the boys wearing masks all days, being at school, and everything. But everyone came back happy and ready for the new school year. After 4 months of home school we appreciated school so much more. 

Then we headed out to wait for the bus. 

This one had her first day of school next. She was so excited to be back at school and with her friends Laura and Naim!

She was also excited and insistent on picking out all her clothes for school every day!

Miral also had her new bike from Laurel and Beckham to ride to school!

Smiles all around this school year! 

 For Miral’s birthday we had a special day at home and then a BBQ at the Embassy with our friends. It was great to be able to celebrate with friends. We kept it small and invited our bubble and were outside and it was a great day. We are pretty lucky to have the Embassy to BBq and hang out in and a group of friends who we can spend time with during Covid. It was the smallest birthday any of the kids have ever had and was really nice and almost more special that we could have a small celebration in such a hard time. Miral wanted a Peppa pig party and since I love a theme we decided to serve a few different types of pork. We all joked about naming the pork tacos after Peppa’s family, but decided others might not get the Ali sense of humor….

But first we had a morning celebration on Miral’s real birthday. 

When we arrived in Athens we headed right out to explore a bit before meeting our friend Elianna for dinner, but it started raining, so we hopped on a sightseeing bus and it ended up being the best rainy activity out there! These three LOVED it!

Miral even squeezed in a little nap. 

The rain stopped but Miral’s nap didn’t, so we stopped to have an aperitif.

This might be my favorite picture ever. One of the seven wonders of the seven wonders of the world is right behind him and Malcolm instead was enthralled for a good 20 minutes by a pile of ants….this is Malcolm in a nutshell. 

After a lot of grumpiness and complaints this one was pretty excited to leave the Acropolis.

We all had some ice-cream to cool off!

Followed by one last delicious taverna meal in Plaka where the boys got their second coke of the trip to celebrate our last meal in Greece. 

I am going to miss the food the most….

And the naps on me!

One short masked trip and we were home, missing Greece but excited to see our friends again and celebrate Miral’s third birthday!

Somewhere along this last school year, when we moved two months into the school year, the boys started a new school in a new country, again, and we had 4 months of home schooling thrown in there during a pandemic quarantine, Adam finished second grade and Malcolm finished kindergarten. 

It wasn’t the school year any of us thought it would be but it ended up being special in its own way. It was the first school year for the boys in Ukraine, the first school year they had to bring snow pants in to be allowed outside, the first school year they were both together at the same elementary school. It was the school year we ALL learned how to use Zoom, how to work together in one dining room, and how to do arts and crafts project with limited supplies. It was the school year that Malcolm learned to read and how plants grow. His teacher Ms. Jackson is one of the kindest souls I have ever met. Poor Malcolm cried a bit when he realized he has to switch teachers next year and I might have teared up a bit myself. It was the year Adam learned how Google hangouts works, got a school email address and was able to stay in touch with his friends even though we weren’t allowed to leave the house. He learned how to make Google slide presentations that put mine to shame. He learned multiplication and how to write stories. He takes after his mother and loves a good run on, but who doesn’t. I am so proud of these two boys. They adapted like true foreign service kids and we decided we should celebrate their last day of school. While home schooling has its fair share of challenges and my patience was definitely not on the the level of Ms. Jackson, I loved seeing what the boys were learning and getting to be a part of it for this small moment in history and we all agreed a party was necessary. 

For the last day of school there was a big assembly. Balloons were hung, special breakfasts were made, we all dressed up and my technical skills were stretched for the millionth time in 2020 and I managed to connect my computer to the TV so we could have a big screen assembly. Malcolm was chosen by his sweet friend Gunes to say a few words of goodbye before she moved back to Turkey. Adam won an award in music, that he definitely gets from Randy and we said goodbye to Adam’s second grade teacher, Ms. Nikki. All in all a great graduation day and definitely a school year we will all remember!

While the Embassy BBQs were great, we still had a lot of Covid vacation hours to fill.  It was spring and starting to get warm so we started spending more and more time outside. First up, we needed some haircuts and with Covid numbers on the rise in Ukraine we decided to go to daddy barber shop. There were some tears and complaints, but the haircuts looked great and the boys were ready to go into spring with a new look!

Pre-haircut

Post

No haircuts but here for moral support!

We spent a lot of time scootering and roller skating outside after our zoom school calls. 

Dandelion picking is s a big part of spring in Kyiv. There are dandelions everywhere in spring. More dandelions than I have ever seen! There was even dandelion fuzz all over the streets at one point!

One of the best spring days we had was a day that we decided to play hooky from home school and work and headed to a park. Everyone needs a field trip every once in a while. We headed to a large park, took a long walk in the forest and then had a picnic. I remember this day so vividly even thought it was last year. It was when all of Ukraine was still locked down and it was one of the first times we ventured out to do something new. We were nervous but it was the safest activity we could do. We were outside and there was no one around. We walked for hours in the park and loved it!

For posterity sake, this is the day I finished my first EER as a Foreign Service Officer! An employee review that people in the State Department take very seriously. A year on the job….what a crazy year!

We kept making pizzas on Fridays, sometimes in costume!

And baking all the time of course!

But the weather started to get warmer and we were able to get outside to parks more and more.  

In case you can’t tell Randy’s face here is saying- yes Fo, I loooooove when you take photos of me sitting on a log 🙂

I was able to work outside in the sun. 

Miral started her accounting job 

And as the weather got warmer all the restaurants started opening up and even set up summer terraces, which meant we could go out to eat! 

And go to outdoor birthday parties (small Covid friendly ones).

Is there anything better than getting paid for work but only having to go to the office part time!? I switched roles from issuing visas (which was closed during Covid and meant no office time at all for months and months) to helping Americans which meant going into the office every other week.  It was nice to have more time to spend at home with the kids but also nice to go back to work semi regularly, see people and interact with friends. It was also awesome to be able to put on work clothes again 🙂

These two were pretty excited to start eating outside!

We decided to start this puzzle as a family (spoiler alert, I finally finished it 6 months later by myself…)

We got some new sneakers because the boys keep growing like crazy!

We celebrated Maria’s birthday with dinner outside at Chichikos, our favorite Georgian restaurant. 

Hair kept growing and soon it was that dreaded time again….(no child was injured during this haircut)

We discovered the best croissant place and became regulars! 

We got to walk around and see more of Kyiv. 

We got to go out by ourselves without kids! No negronies were harmed in the taking of this photo. 

And we had lots of lazy mornings with snuggles and coffees in bed- by far my favorite things during Covid, lazy mornings with extra time for coffee and snuggles. 

Before we knew it was Mothers Day! I woke up to loads of treats. First off a beautiful plant. Hydrangeas are by far my favorite flower. It was the flower I used on the tables at our wedding and I love them in every color! When I am old and retired and have my own house with a garden, I am going to learn how to grow hydrangeas!

I had beautiful handmade cards galore!

And then because it was Mother’s Day, the sun was out and no one can say no to me on Mother’s Day I asked everyone to dress up and take some pictures in a park. Which I have decided is what I want every Mother’s Day! The boys are in this great stage where they don’t mind dressing up and wearing nice shirts and they even like it and this one LOVES dressing up. She insists on picking her own clothes every day and always wants to wear a party dress.  

See-dandelions everywhere! 

We all headed home and Randy made us a yummy dinner that we ate in the fancy dining room, aka- the classrooom. A great day!

 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.