Let's Go To Russia!

Ricky colored the states he's been to the other day: a total of sixteen. Not bad for a five-year-old. He's very coastal, as you can see. He loves maps, and has a large poster of the world on the wall behind his bed. He locates the following countries on the map: the United States, Spain, Argentina, China and Russia. The UK too, but he sometimes can't find it.

His fantasy is to travel to Russia. Neither Bryan nor I have been there, and we don't tend to talk about Russia. During the winter of 2009, my sister visited Russia and sent us many great pictures from over there. In one, she's all bundled up in front of the Kremlin. In another picture, there's a bridge with a frozen river beneath it. In a third, which was taken after dark, she looks frozen and is standing next to an old van and a mountain of snow and ice (this one is Ricky's favorite photo and he had it as his wallpaper on this computer for a while. He managed by himself to change the wallpaper to this, by opening Picassa and trying different things). These photos really captured Ricky's imagination and he's been talking about going to Russia with tia (aunt in Spanish) ever since.

Then, when we got him a map and he saw that Russia is so big, he loved that. It made him giggle. He also likes China because of its size.