Speaking of the Chicken Dance… …following a recent Newsboys concert, the first song played as exit music was, in fact, the Chicken Dance. As the crowd herded out of the arena, I very subtly flapped my wings and twisted my shoulders along with the music. The girls watched in horror. I wondered if they were even familiar with the Chicken Dance; Americans seem genetically predisposed to perform the Chicken Dance whenever the music hits their eardrums.  Like the YMCA…you just gotta do it. Is this one of the things that we take for granted until the terrible day we learn that […]

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As anyone mesmerized by The Evolution of Dance knows, dance has changed over the years. Different moods characterize different eras such as social change in the sixties, technology revolution in the eighties; the dance of the time clearly reflects those moods. (Wow, can you tell i’ve been helping with way too many high school English papers??) So now there’s this thing called Dougie. Apparently, it’s so popular and engrained in teen culture that it morphed from nothing to a verb practically overnight. I asked my daughter recently what characterized Dougie. Was it a specific move, like the Moonwalk? or a […]

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I have heard it said that time moves faster with each year… Age 4: Crammed in the backseat of a light blue Volkswagon Beetle with my three closest carpool-mates, looking at my friend’s 7-year-old sister with awe, I think “I will never be that old.” Age 14: Three years still seems a long way off, but now my thoughts are filled with “I can’t wait for graduation!” Age 24: The years begin to flow together, but I still think I have a whole life ahead of me. “Maybe in three years I’ll think about settling down and building a family…” […]

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I have heard a rule of thumb that you should expect about a month per year of age for a young person to adjust to a new adoptive family/country. Four years old = four months of adjustment. Fourteen years old = a year and a little more. We are almost to the 14-month mark, and I’d say our experience is pretty close to the average. So much has happened, and we have all changed in the past year…it’s hard to even know where to start. Since Lena and I returned in the middle of January, we only took about a […]

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Day “I don’t know” through Day “I’ve lost count” – Sunday, 10 January, 2010 through Saturday 16 January, 2010 If I’m being honest, I have to say that the second trip was rough. Seriously hard. After a week of “regular life” which included blowing nearly half of my working hours fighting with payroll over the paycheck they failed to issue while I was on leave, I boarded a 7:30 AM flight to JFK, with a 10-hour layover and then a 10-hour direct flight to Kyiv on Aerosvit Ukrainian Airlines. I truly believe I was the only person on that airplane […]

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