Chapman

Well, Jace ripped the screen off my laptop, so I have been computerless for almost two weeks!  It is amazing how far behind you get in two weeks.  So, I will just give a brief synopsis.  Acctually, I don’t even remember what has happened these past two weeks except that my whole family was together for the first time in a year!  Lia and Justin’s family flew in from New Haven last week and my dad flew in from Ohio and the rest of the family drove up from St. George and we had a great time just being together!

Other than that, I started school this past Monday– I just have my thesis class Monday and Wednesday for one hour and that’s IT.  It was going to be a piece of cake, but Trevor just found out he has to move back to Ukraine until I graduate.  Super sad.  We don’t like how much he is away from Jace during these extremely influential years so we decided the best thing to do was for Jace to move with him and then Cali and I would join them in Ukraine once I graduate December 16th.  That is sooooooooo long away and I am going to miss them both like crazy– especially Jace.  Trevor is always away on business, but I have NEVER been away from Jace except when Trevor and I are on vacations.  So this is going to be a very long three months.

Trevor has to go to New York this month for work, and we were just going to stay here since I have school, but since he is going to be in Ukraine for so long, we all decided to go with him to New York so we can spend as much time together as a family before we’re split up again.  My professor is SUPER awesome and is totally working with me so that I can leave for this next month.  HOORAY!!!  So we will be in New York until October 1st, then Trevor and Jace fly to Ukraine and Cali and I drive back to Utah and I start back in school.  PHEW!

In Cali news, she will be 8 weeks tomorrow!!!!!  Where has the time gone!??!!?  It seems like yesterday I was bringing her home from the hospital!!!!  She is such a precious little girl and is SO good.  She continues to sleep ALL the time, and pretty much only wakes up to eat.  She sleeps all through the night and for that I will love her forever.

To celebrate her seven week birthday, we went camping up Spanish Fork Canyon.  She was SO GOOD!  She slept in the tent all night and we had a blast!  Jace loved it to death.  It was SO awful because I forgot I had a doctor’s appointment the next morning until the reminder went off on my phone while we were still sleeping, so we had to pack it all up and rush to my doctor and I was so filthy and smelled like smoke and I looked like a hobo.  It was SO embarrassing.  I am sure they thought that we were living in a tent in the middle of nowhere, renouncing civilization.  I hope they don’t call social services or anything.  We all looked horrid.

She is starting to grow out of her newborn clothes!  She is getting so big!  She has already almost DOUBLED her birth weight!  She was 6.9 lbs at birth and at her 6 week checkup she was 10 lbs!!!!  She was in the 5th percentile for weight when she was born but now she is in the 50th percentile!!  What an overacheiver!!!!!!

She can lift her head and doesn’t need it to be supported anymore, when laying on her belly she can move her head from side to side, she has started giving actual smiles, and she even laughs in her sleep sometimes.  That little girl is so advanced!

All right!  That is as caught up as I am going to get– once you hit day three of not posting, it’s all a blur.  So I will just put up pics.  Happy 8 week B-day, Cali Girl!

Last, but not least, here is my current favorite song.  Holy cow, I LOVE it.  Phenomenal.

	The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build A Home .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. LOW WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG HOURS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS. SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN EVENT OF SUCCESS.
Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer (1874-1922)

The advertisement above, placed in a London newspaper in 1912, inspired nearly 5,000 replies.

Trevor

We have been in Ukraine for a week so far and it is not as foreign from America as I thought it would be, but it still has alot of things that are totally different.  Here is a quick list of a few things:

• Very few people have cars– everyone uses public transportation.  You get on a bus or “gazelle” which takes you either to your destination or to the metro.
• The toilet is in its own “toilet room”.  The room is just like a tiny little room that is big enough to house the toilet.
• The toilet paper is like newspaper– grey and very stiff.  Kind of like the brown paper towels you get out of the dispenser in public bathrooms.
• The bathroom (the room with the tub– not with the toilet) faucet does double duty with the sink.  The sink is right next to the tub, and you move the faucet over to whichever one you want to use– the tub or the sink.  If you want to take a shower, there is a handheld sprayer over the faucet and you flip a lever and the water stops going through the faucet and into the shower head.
• There are no dishwashers.  Instead, there is a tiny little clothes washing machine where we would normally have a dish washer.  The clothes washer is TINY.  It can only fit two pairs of pants and 4 shirts at MOST.  Tiny.  And there is no dryer– you use a clothes drying rack that is located next to the furnace to let it all air dry.
• No one lives in houses.  Everyone lives in HUGE skyscraper apartment buildings.
• The men are all pretty nondescript– either short and stout or tall and thin.  The girls, however, are all beautiful.  Very tall and thin and they all dress AMAZING!  I LOVE it!  They all have their hair and makeup perfect and they generally wear black leggings, knee or thigh high leather stilletto boots, and knee length gorgeous coats.  They all look like they stepped off a runway.
• It is freezing outside (always in the negatives) but life just goes on– people don’t even seem to notice.  The streets are bustling and people are going about as it if were summer!
• The elevators are TINY.  Only about 8 square feet– 1/5 the size of the typical American elevator.