Luba's week with us

( This picture is out of order) Here is Luba with her "birthday" presents at our annual cousin's camp. Because my brother lives so far away (and because it's hard to remember everyone's birthdays) we do all our gift exchanging at cousin's camp. Luba was thrilled with her watercolor tubes and other art supplies. Doesn't she have a beautiful smile?

Meeting Luba at the airport. Their plane was scheduled to arrive at 10:50 pm but actually arrived 30 mins. EARLY! (who ever heard of an early plane???)

Because of the late hour of arrival, only Clarissa traveled to St. Louis with us to pick her up.

Meredith and Luba at Maramec Springs, our Sunday afternoon activity with the other children from Russia.

Luba is visiting.

Last night we drove to the St. Louis airport to pick up Luba. She is from Russia and will be staying with us until July 13. She is with a program called the Lighthouse Project. They bring older orphans to the USA in hopes that they will find a family to adopt them. She will be going to a VBS done in Russian for 3 days this week, so she can learn about Jesus.

Luba is 13 and is oh so sweet! Although she speaks no English and we don't speak Russian, we've had fun communicating! She's already picking up some English words and we're finding out that despite what Russian words look like, many of them sound the same as in English.

One of the funny things that happened--Rebecca was showing her pictures in her science book, saying the names of the animals in English, then Luba would say it's name in Russian. (this is when we figured out how similar the languages sound). When Rebecca pointed to a mouse, Luba said what sounded like "clarissa!" So we typed it into imtranslator.com (a great tool!) and found out that it is actually the word for "rat" that sounds like Clarissa! We've had fun giving Clarissa a hard time about it! And, thankfully, Clarissa is a good sport about it!