Back from our family adventure...

We made it back safely from our stay with the family in the mountains.  Lots of pics and stories coming sometime soon :)

Pretty eh...  David just got back from a week of shepherding and helping out around the yurt with a family that lives out west.  We are all going to head out there next week!  I'll put more pics on soon.

Our home for the next couple of weeks...

Once again we are going to spend a bit of time in a yurt working along side a tuvan family.  Now that we've had almost another whole year of language study it should technically be very profitable for both our language and culture study.  last time we couldn't really talk at all.  now we can make small talk, ask about processes and hopefully follow simple instructions.  We will be helping with the goats and sheep (milking, shepherding, scooping up things) and making all sorts of milk products :)  David was out there for a little over a week by himself to check it out while Emma was finishing up her dance camp, now we are all heading out there.  A nice little break from computers, wii, movies, electricity and showers.  hmmm.  Please be thinking of us that we would have good health and build good relationships with this family.

See you at the end of the month!

Emma practicing for her last dance class (for the summer anyway)

Our First Tuvan Wedding

 David and I were invited to a wedding on Saturday.  It is the first tuvan wedding we've been to.  I still don't know the names of the bride and groom...oops.  We were just going to help our friend Slava (pictured with David) set the place up but then of course they insisted that we stay for the wedding.  We were the only non tuvans at the whole wedding so we kinda stuck out :)
Grateful that we got to experience a Tuvan Wedding. 

Emma and her ballet friends...

 I just took the picture above of Emma and her friends.  They spend everyday together (mon-fri 8am-4pm) and they even had camp today too (sat.) but still she called when she was done and asked if they could come over.  They get along great :)   It's fun listening to her jabber away in Russian. 

The other pictures are ones that Emma (or her friends) took when she brought our little camera to school one day.  there are some excellent videos of them practicing their dances but my connection isn't up to the task of posting them :(   Emma has a big concert next week after her dance camp is finished. 

We are so thankful she could be apart of this...it's been so good for her in many many ways.   And she found some great friends for keepers.

I forgot to write about the event...ooops :)   We were invited to go to a baby shower out at the ranch/farm/yurts where we lived for a month last year.  It was so great to be out there with the same people (plus a whole lot more) and to be back "home" again.  We really enjoyed our time out there... and David is out shepherding right now for a couple of weeks. (just at a different ranch)  The rest of us will join him when Emma is done her dance camp next week. 
Anyway, baby showers are quite different here as you can tell from the pictures.  we don't normally have vodka and cognac at baby showers back home.  strange.  Nevertheless, we enjoyed our time with Kongar-ool (above) and his relatives. 
Another interesting part of the day was these two guys from Turkey who were making a documentary about Kongar-ool/Tuva or something like that.  David was interviewed so we are hoping we can some how get to watch it online...I think he'll sound great in Turkish :)