Adam loves smiles.  He has his game down pat.  He stares at the back of someone’s head until they turn around and give them a smile.  Then he smiles back quickly before turning his head away and hiding in shyness.  Then he will glance back out of the corner of his eye to see if they are still smiling and smile again.  This game goes on until either the willing participant tires or we have to move along.  Usually option two.

We went out to dinner on Saturday night and Adam was looking around all night for smiles.  I tried to explain that the prune bib and potatoes on the face might be holding him back.

But he was sure he could get some smiles so he bore down and stared even harder.

A quick potato break.

This morning after Adam’s morning nap we headed out to see Lenin.

We had to wait on line. Can you spot Adam?

We weren’t allowed to bring our cameras past this point so we’ll have to be creative in our desciptions to keep our readers attention 🙂

We had to walk into his tomb which looks like this from the outside. 

 You’re not allowed to talk and you’re supposed to look serious like this.

I like to tell Fo and Adam, it’s the journey, not the destination, that makes it all worth it.  That’s a tough sell at 7PM when a cranky, hungry, certain someone (hint: not naming names but its someone who is not on an all-liquid diet) has been lugging the stroller through the underground labyrinth of Moscow.  So I tend to use other tactics. 

“Where are we going?”  “A park.” 

That usually does the trick, especially if it’s a nice night.  So we set out on our walk.  A long walk, admittedly, but the views (aka “the journey”, keep up with me folks) made it all worth it.  And they were awesome:

What we have here are two frozen pizzas, catfish, chilli, chorizo, all the fixings for peanut butter and jelly and three types of ice cream.  Oh and milk.

Pajama days in our house are reserved for special occasions, when we’re not feeling well, when we need a little extra TLC, when we want to stay home and cuddle.

Today Adam got to enjoy a pajama day for the first time for no reason at all, simply because he took a long nap and we had to run out to meet Randy for a business lunch.  Those are the best pajama days of all.

Our apartment is right across the street from the embassy where Randy is working and it’s been great having lunch with him every day.  Sometimes he comes home and we cook but today since it was Friday (and we had no food in the house) we went out.  We headed to Coffee Mania to meet Randy on his lunch break.

To the regular tourist, Coffee Mania from the outside may look like a not that special chain…but to knowledgable Russky experts like the Alis, we know that this is actually a pretty upscale establishment with rather tasty food.  But we Alis like to keep it real and attended lunch in our pjs.

I ordered a delicious Tom Yam and Randy ordered delicious dumplings. Since this place is around the corner from us, has amazing food and a safe high chair, something quite elusive in Russia, I think we’ll be coming back here often.

After lunch, Adam and I decided to stroll over to the Revolution Museum.  We saw lots of fun things on our way over.

On our way home, we stopped in a delicious bakery to get a snack and some bread.  While we were there it started POURING, there was hail, thunder so loud it caused car alarms to go off and buckets of rain. But we were nice and cozy in a bakery. Not a bad spot to get stuck in for half hour.

The storm cleared up and we headed home.

Yay! Is it breakfast time? 

You’ve all heard me talk about the many, many, many stairs in Russia. Here is a little peek at how the Russians do wheelchair accessible.

I tried this ramp with Adam and it is STEEP.   Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen any people in wheelcahirs….

More to come on our day today later, but now we’re off to meet dad for drinks at the Embassy 🙂

After our failed market trip on Sunday, I decided to have another go at it.  I was told by a vendor that Wednesday is a good day to go. It’s a whole sale market day and open from 8-12.  By the time I got Adam up (his jet lag has him sleeping in until 10), dressed and out the door it was close to 11.

With all the metro transfers and stairs that I decided to ergo Adam. I don’t resort to the Ergo often and once I had us all ready to go and loaded up the baby, diaper bag and camera bag I remembered why.

I opted to just go with the stroller. My logic was that carrying the stroller up and down stairs was easier than carrying everything the entire time.  I figured this would also limit my purchase since there is only so much weight I can carry and I already had this 18 pounds loaded up.

We walked to the Metro. A couple of staircases, transfers and stops we had arrived.

On Tuesday, Adam and I decided to go to the Moscow Zoo.  It’s really close to our house and amazingly only involved going up and down one flight of stairs. We encountered this little guy on our way over. I’ve never seen anything like it and we weren’t even at the zoo yet.

Let me preface the remainder of this post by stating that I LOVE zoos. I’ve been going to zoos for many years before having Adam. Now that I have a baby its just even more justification for going to zooz.

The Moscow Zoo was interesting. They had some amazing animals, a huge sea walrus, a spotted leapard, cheetahs, elephants and dolphins. But…there were huge crowds around the the few interesting animals which made it hard to see any animals. There were no crowds around the 45 bird exhibits they had.  The zoo was also HUGE.  But it was mostly fluff (animals I have no interest in seeing because I can see them in my regular life…birds, turtles, more birds, raccoons).

But we did still have a good time.