Second Birthday Party

Keeping with the tradition of holding major holidays twice, we did celebrate our birthday again. This time with a little home gathering including my brother, his fiance and a Russian mom-friend with her 5-year-old. We drank champagne, ate food and a bunny-shaped ice-cream cake. The kids ran around screaming and slid down the stairs on their butts (you would not believe how fast they can go). Overall it felt like most birthday celebrations I had before leaving Russia - a little gathering around the table. It was also Easter and we were all in a good mood (even though it certainly felt like Christmas outside with chilling winds and snow). My brother figured out how to work our dollar-store baloon-animals kit and made some bunnies and doggies for us (alas they did pop pretty quickly).

I am posting this 2 weeks later, because I am so overwhelmed by my schoolwork that I have no time to gather my thoughts and my pictures for a coherent update, so you will have to excuse me writing a list of things worth mentioning

Eva can count - she tries to move her fingers and says her numbers from 3 to 10 (generally skipping 4)
Eva loves her little baby-croc shoes, which she can put on herself and calls "eve-shoes" for a friend of hers who wears them all the time
We have been watching "Little Murmaid" and I have to say that the whole idea of Ariel running away from home at 16 and getting married to a prince is starting to really annoy me
Eva draws endlessly with markers, crayons and anything else and erases it if she can, she loves chalk too, especially outside and she drew a fairly credible sheep today
We are all enjoying a 50 cent easter toy that has a magnetic bunny spinning between two metal rods - it is hypnotizing and well worth the money, especially because it did drive Eva to say her numbers, as in "thwee, feiv, six, seben, ait, nine, ten, gooooooooooo" and she would push the bunny to roll, plus she now asks "where bunny?", which is something I have not heard her say before
She has taken to running up behind me, hugging me and sayin " I got you"
She tells people to move or come or stay right here, which is especially funny if she doesn't know your name because she would call this poor boy at a playground "boy" as in "booooy, oh boooooy, come here boy!" much like an old lady calling a bellhop (I am not really liking how bossy she is, and we try to at least get her to say please, but if you tell her "say please" she will reply "say please" and consider herself off the hook)
she can climb into her crib and we are thinking that maybe she would be motivated to sleep by herself if we got her a bunk bed (we climbed into some of those in Ikea and BJs)
When she says excuse me it sounds like "scootie me", with Scooty being a dog of our friends'
She likes wearing her little dresses - who would have known it! but she wears them with pants underneath
she needs a haircut
I need to go to bed now so I will stop writing