Snow globes are often very pretty to look at and can be highly entertaining to children but they are not the best items to be handed over to little toddlers who just like to shake and throw things and get excited when something breaks. This is a common sense kind of message and if I had to guess my older daughter Lydia was involved in the accident and surrounding conspiracy to cover it up. Yes I do say conspiracy because she was not the only person to avoid telling me about the broken snow globe. You see on Tuesday night I went to football practice and left the girls with their grandma to watch them and when I got home there was no mention of it. Yesterday while I was playing with the girls in the afternoon laying on Lydia's purple IKEA carpet Mila comes over to me and hands me a large piece of ragged glass while trying to place another small piece into her mouth! The next thing I did was of course throw the house into lock down and perform a hazmat type of sweep shaking, picking and vacuuming up any remaining small pieces of glass. So other than the broken glass it was a pretty snow globe, I think it was from Disneyland or the Disney Store. The snow globe had Minnie Mouse inside and was also one of those rotating music boxes so it's too bad it had to meet its demise. I managed to get some cleaning done around the house while the Destroyer was asleep and also had a nice walk with her in the stroller in the afternoon. When you are pushing a stroller this time of year you should always glance into the woods and look for edible mushrooms. It is almost like a national duty or right here in Poland to pickup mushrooms from the woods. When there has been rain and it's not too cold mushrooms are going to start growing in the woods and fields and everyone here knows that. In fact when you are traveling around the roads and you notice there are a bunch of cars parked on the side of the road there are definitely people out with wooden baskets or plastic bags for gathering mushrooms. Mushroom hunting is also a sport for people of any age and I have seen people as little as three and very old Grandmas and Grandpas walking the forests finding the edible bounty :) Here are a few pictures of the mushrooms I found yesterday while taking Mila for a walk. If you look very closely at the first picture you can see that I intentionally left part of the stroller and Mila's foot in the background :)
The first two mushrooms are Birch Boletes and very easy to identify by the thick blackish-white scraped away stalk, light to dark brown rounded cap and sponge texture underneath the cap.
The third mushroom is a King Bolete or Boletus Edulis and it is also easy to identify by the thick stalk very light to dark brown rounded cap and sponge underneath the cap. The King Bolete can very a great deal in color and shape depending on where it is found but the cap and sponge are key to easily identify a Bolete. Well it is raining today so I probably won't be taking Mila The Destroyer for a walk but it does mean that if it doesn't get too cold I will be out looking for mushrooms tomorrow or the next day. Well while Mila is still asleep I am going to make some coffee and get some other things done, bye for now.
*update! My Polish wife is on a business trip to USA right now and because of her jet-lag she is up reading an corrected me that the Bolete at the bottom is a Queen Bolete and not a King Bolete because it has a yellowish-Brownish stalk and it is yellow underneath the cap. Yes Polish people can instantly identify and make subtle distinctions, too bad she can't help with the girls from a distance :)
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