A Birthday, A Road Trip, A Swim and Poison Ivy???

How in the world can you get poison ivy in DECEMBER, even in the South?
Or if it's not poison IVY then somehow my sweet birthday girl managed to get some type of contact dermatitis causing her to wake up on her birthday itchy!

Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, we are happy to report it's better already and hopefully on the way to being gone in a few days.

Otherwise, C had a great bday and the road trip to the ocean was remarkably uneventful. considering that Z looked a bit puny this am, and I had visions of vomiting in the car...we are happy to report, NOTHING like that occurred.

Here's a photo of the gang in the pool for a night swim and of the birthday girl having one big ole bad piece of chocolate cake. After all, not being allergic to chocolate is a good thing!

Z was very cute. He remembered the bridge to the beach and when I pointed it out, got VERY excited about it...."mom! Tomorrow! Tomorrow!" pointing to the water and smiling. I keep trying to prepare him that it's not going to be HOT like it was when we went last summer but all he keeps saying is "Da, Good!".
I think the weather in our part of the country was a bit hot for his taste back in JULY!!

LOL.

Also we are happy to report that his English is coming along a lot faster on this trip than previously.
Now don't get me wrong, but he now knows more English than I know Russian, and it's so totally fun to tell him words and he enthusiastically tries them out. Today it was "palm tree" for instance that got his attention. What is this weird tree? he communicated to me.....and I replied "PALM TREE" which he then repeats to himself a few times.

There is some ground we aren't going to have to break again. That feels good. Cause we know there's plenty ahead but to see him opening up to learning English is really tremendous. I admire that so much about his spunky personality.

One more tiny thing. Speaking of spunky!!

Forgot to mention, for those of you who might not know, one of the things which really knocked our socks off about Z this summer was how well he took to swimming. Literally the second day here,  he jumped in,  and I think at that point if we hadn't already all fallen in love with him on day one, day two would have sealed it.

So it was fun tonight to see that all the work he put in over the summer becoming "part fish" was still there. He jumped right in tonight and was in among the crew underwater with the rest of them. Pretty cool.