Broken glass and the power struggle

Several times per day we go outside and walk around. Naomi and I are very inefficient walkers. She has made it clear that she wants to walk by herself. Her boots are too big, and although she’s quite agile inside, she falls all the time outside, especially if the ground is uneven. Her boots are size 5, for those of you with young children; it’s still fresh in your mind that that is really small. She’s take off her mittens and throw them down on the side of the road and keeps going, “who cares!” she seems to say. I’d like to hold her hand and guide her around the dangers and filth. She developed a technique where if I grab her arm, she’ll turn into a ragdoll and purposely collapse as a protest to my help. Yesterday morning we were walking, as she wished, without holding hands. I could see a dirty mound of ice ahead of us and just beyond that a broken beer bottle and a pile of dog poop. I quickly just picked her up, I was getting fed up and I told her I’d have to carry her a while. She arched her back and loudly voiced her complaints. I think we have another independent runner on our hand.
We were killing time, so we decided to go in a store. I don’t usually buy beer on Sunday mornings, but I had a few rubles in my pocket so I figured what the heck. Also we bought a coca-cola lite and what I thought was yogurt that later turned out to be sour cream. Naomi reorganized the merchandise at her level while I paid. The young woman working the cash register put my items in a small bag. I would describe this bag as being as strong as a bag made out of tissue paper. I grabbed Naomi under one arm and my purchases in the other and headed out of the store. As we went through the door I thought, gosh, that beer bottle might be too heavy for…….CRASH!, bang, bang, bang, the beer bottle went through the bottom of the bag hit the concrete stairs, bounced all the way down to its final resting place on the sidewalk. Well shoot, I thought, Naomi and I walked down to assess the damage. It’s didn’t even break, not even a crack.
Naomi refuses a bottle, her body language says” get that weird thing away from me,” she must of drank bottles before, she’s was not breast fed. Anyway, she semi-refuses a sippy cup. She really prefers a little tea cup with a handle. It’s very cute to watch her drink out of it, very Montessori-like. The only problems I have with this method of drinking for a 21 month old is she spills 100% of the time, unless I hold it for her. The other problem is what happens when the glass tea cup hits the tile kitchen floor. I’ve never seen anything like it. The cup exploded into 100’s of tiny pieces. Some even bounced so high they landed up on the table. Of course we were both bare foot. I put her shoes on her and laid a chair down to block her from coming into the kitchen, I could see this was going to take a while to clean up. When I told my mechanical engineer friend, Ken, about the exploding disappearing cup, he said it must have been tempered glass. We’ve only broken two glasses so far, pretty good I think.
I decided against showing broken glass for the photos. This is our new friend Hannah feeding the pigeons with Naomi. Here is a picture of Naomi attempting to make an international call to her Dad. The other one speaks for its self. Two more full days here in Khabarovsk, then on to Moscow