A favorite pastime ...

... on a hot day. Sitting on a large storage crate on the balcony and making a clothespin open and close.



With his teeth.

Well, buy them some peanuts and Cracker Jack

We love baseball. Oh my it's a wonderful game. We're midway through the Ken Burns documentary about our national pastime, and we're enjoying it. The documentary gives the impression that baseball was an even greater source of national unity in the past than it it now, though I'm sure there were people in the early part of last century who also claimed it was a boring game.

Soccer's the big game here in Ukraine, so Dietrich's not likely to learn baseball through cultural osmosis. We'll have to teach him, and mlb.com will help.

But I see signs that baseball might someday be not so foreign here. Around Christmas, we made a special outing to what we'd heard was the best toy store in Kyiv. We weren't impressed by the store (it's long and skinny, hard to navigate and too easy for little hands to grab all that interests them). But we did get one special gift for Dietrich. "Oh, a baseball," we exclaimed when we spotted the white ball with red stiching. "Dietrich must have it, no matter the cost!" (Thankfully, it was cheap.)

But last week we got Dietrich another soft baseball, and this one we found in a very ordinary toy kiosk above the supermarket a five-minute walk from our house.

Plus, on our way to the market one evening, we saw two kids playing some odd game in the courtyard of our building. Never expecting that they could be playing the game we love, we asked ourselves, "What is that? Cricket?" Nope, it was baseball. The rudimentary, pitch-at-your-buddy, no-one-to-field-a-hit version of baseball. Keep it up, kids, and in a few years, Dietrich can play outfield.

Taking a dip

Our washing machine is a front-loader that fits neatly under our kitchen counter. In our old apartment, we had a tall, skinny top-loader, but it wouldn't fit here, so we swapped with our landlord.

Dietrich has long known how to open the washer, and he loves to fill it up with stuff. Most of the time I notice this before I start a load of wash, but the other day we looked over to see this panda magnet going for a swim.



When it was just the panda, it was funny. But upon unloading the clothes, I found the pig, the cat, the dog and several other creatures also had taken a dip and, like the panda, were no longer recognizable.

You'd think I'd have learned after I washed the remote control ...