Pierce kid pictures: Anya and Natasha

I talk about my kids a lot but I'm not much for photographs. A few days ago, though, Dessie got a hankerin' for a new round of family photos. So here are pictures of each of my kids (spread across several posts -- each of which has this exact same opening paragaph -- due to Blogger's five-photos-per-post limit).

Anya (diminutive of "Anna," a name reflecting her maternal Russian heritage)

Unfortunately Anya's face is in shadow in this one, in which she's hamming it up a bit in front of the water fountain at the little park where we went to take the pictures.



This is a considerably less formal shot of Anya, with Natasha on our couch (you may remember this one from an earlier post). Anya is the one with the big grin.



Natasha (as every reader of War and Peace knows, you just don't get much more Russian than that)

Almost four years ago, now, Dessie and I made our first trip out to the Litvínskoye children's home way out on the Kazakh steppe miles from anywhere, or so it seemed (though it turned out to be very close to the tiny village of Osakárovka, which is where the happy part of Anya's and Kinya's childhood was spent). And there our friend Marina introduced us to the shy little cutie in the next picture (Marina is the one on the left).



So that was Natasha Iónina (now Natasha Brown) when we met her for the very first time -- that picture was pretty much taken as Marina introduced her to us. Here she is now, gettin' close to all grown up:



Unfortunately you don't get her smile in that photograph; this next is the best I can do as far as Natasha's smile, though it's still clearly not her Grade A effort.



Next: Kasia and Kinya.