Day off. Slept well. In the morning Viktor Blagov came on and said the decision had been made for us to fly on, and passed along greetings from the station’s chief designer.

During the day we worked with the electronic photometer, assembled the Puma sight in its gimbal and linked it with Delta. We replaced the radio-telemetry receivers. In the evening the families came. Lyusya brought my friend from work, German, with his daughter. The girl has grown up nicely, she’s big already. It seemed to me that Lyusya had puffy eyes — upset, maybe — but she behaved well, joking around. We asked our kids: want us to show you a cartoon? The children shouted in chorus: show us! And for nearly the entire session we broadcast “Animal Football” from the station instead of ourselves. The kids were happy, but the wives were upset that they had too little time with us — they didn’t get to talk or look enough. Vitalik has grown tall, but he’s still like a little boy. He says to me: “Papa! That’s enough flying — get in the spacecraft and come home, we miss you so much, we’ll decorate the New Year’s tree together.” I answered: “Son, in that case I wouldn’t be decorating the tree — I’d be chopping it down, and a long way from home.”