How are you going to maintain her Russian heritage?

Moscow

This was the hardest question for me to try and answer before my second trip to Russia. Am I an expert of the Russian culture? No! So how on earth am I going to be able to teach her about her Russian heritage and the culture of her birth country?

I happened to be an observant type. I'm not sure which came first being a nurse or being a professional observer. As a nurse the skill of quiet observation is extremely valuable. The one good thing about traveling alone is that you can not help but to observe people.

There are a couple of things about the Russian culture that I do not want to forget. First of all flowers. Sounds silly but flowers are a big part of the Russian culture in my opinion. In Moscow on every street corner there is a flower shop. You can buy big or small bunches of roses and other very beautiful flowers everyday. I was lucky to be in Moscow on the weekend and I was amazed by the number of women who were walking around with bunches of cut flowers. Odd numbers of blooms are what is most acceptable so a dozen roses are not nearly as nice as 11 or 13.

I was lucky to be able to travel to Anna's baby home 2 times during this last visit. The area is very rural. Much of the housing in this area consists of small cottages with very intricate wood work around the windows and doors. Most of them are not painted but instead are a dark brown. The wood work is usually painted a bright color of turquoise blue or white. Many have 3 windows in the front. I so wish I had been able to enter one of these cottages just to see what they looked like in side.

In the winter time the area looked void of anything green or beautiful but the summer time was different, again with the flowers. Most of these cottages had large flower and vegetable gardens in the front yards. To my surprise many of the flowers were ones that I have had in my own yard at one time or another. There were cosmos, zinnias, purple cone flowers, phlox in purple and white. Black eye susans were in many of the gardens. So next year it is my plan to plant a garden very much like these gardens.

The other thing that I noticed and this may sound silly is daughters held their Mother's hands. Not because they had too but because they wanted to too. The parks were full of families in the evening who just wanted to spend time together. Walks were not the usually American power walk to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. The walks were much slower, so that you could walk and talk at the same time. Hey I could get used to that kind of walk.

Evenings were spent with the children playing at the park or pushing them in baby carriages. To me it seemed that the off time of many Russian families was spent enjoying each other's company. I am being honest when I say I think this is one thing that I hope to incorporate into my life with her. I actually told the judge that and he looked at me and said "She does not come from that kind of family." I told him if she became my daughter she would be from that kind of family. I think this made him stop and think. Quite honestly I think he was a bit surprised by my observation of the Russian people and the things that I was going to tell Anna about when she was older.




Winter time



Summer time