“Mom, there are a lot of things I miss about Baku,” Eli says this morning as we are waking up.  Every once in a while, we hear new details about Eli’s and Jake’s memories of their life in Azerbaijan.  I like hearing what they remember.

“Our apartment complex, with the four buildings and the store down below where we went to buy bread.  They were nice.”

“The people we knew, our friends that we used to play with at the soccer park and the courtyard to ride bikes.”

“The car wash next door,” “the elevators were nice inside,” “the train park.”

Here was the view from our windows:

“Loaves of bread, the bread was so good!”

“Fountain Square,”

“Ice cream!  We could get ice cream everywhere and it was so good!

Peaches

“Eating doner kebabs out on our balcony,”

“Gulya!  She made us so many great treats, baklava and soup, and we loved her kitabs!  We would come home from school and ask for a kitab and she would give us one.  They were so good!

We remember our teachers too.  Miss Mila and Miss Farida, and the way they ate a lot of chocolate together in the kitchen.  The cooks at the school made potato piroshkis for the kids’ snack every day, and the boys remember the teachers holding sugar cubes between their teeth and drinking tea through the sugar.

Jake remembers this as his “favorite salad.”  Beets, mayonnaise, potatoes, pickles… Can a salad get more Russian than this?

They also remember drinking tea in preschool, every day…

And playing with snow on the balcony.

Mommy misses Baku too, but her memories are overwhelmed with memories like this:

Thank goodness for pictures.  This life really did exist.