Village Life

After scouring several vacation rental websites, we found ourselves booking a few rooms in a modern house on a little goat farm on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. It wasn't exactly what we were looking for, but would serve the purpose of getting us out of the roar of city traffic -- and goats! What's not to love?! We had access to a shared kitchen, but there were no restaurants or markets nearby, so we hauled all of the food we thought we might need for the two night stay. Public transportation would only get us to within a mile of the place, so we opted to make our lives both easier and more terrifying and hail some taxis to get out there. Car seats are a relatively new requirement here, and the taxi companies will only provide one child seat per car, so anytime our family wants to taxi somewhere we have to hail two cars. And the

car seats seem to be mostly just a formality anyway -- while both boys were still securely strapped into 5 point harnesses back home, here the car seats simply use the seat belt to restrain the child (like what you would use for a 5 year old, perhaps). Needless to say, we avoid taking taxis as much as possible. Side note: I have seen infant seats rear facing installed in the front passenger seat!

Lev was suffering from teething fevers, so wasn't happy to be strapped in the now unfamiliar device rather than on my lap, and proceeded to scream for the duration. Which in turn caused our driver to race all through town at 90 kph. But we made it, so that was nice.

Our time at the farm was relaxing and nice. The house was only 3 years old, but the floors looked like they had seen 15-20 years of wear and the doors were never fit up well, so even the bathroom door didn't close all the way.

Unfortunately, it was bitterly cold again, so we didn't spend much time outdoors. I really enjoyed just being away from the din of traffic noise though! We played lots of games, including teaching Finn Uno (he is actually really good at it, and gleefully plays his Draw Two cards with an evil laugh), and I tried to get extra rest as Lev was refusing to sleep at night unless I was holding him. The goats were cute and charming, and Matt even said the same! So I'm making a little progress on project own-goats-someday :-) It was alarming to notice the hired hand's break room in the goat barn -- initially I thought he lived in there, but upon further examination it didn't have a bed so I'm not sure where he slept.