Holidays in Poland

Easter in Poland is a four day weekend full of lots of excitement, tons of food, religion, and fun for all ages. It would take me a full week just to shed the extra few pounds I gained, if I wasn't eating the leftovers. :) Magda is a crafty individual so every holiday she will spend some time with Lydia making new decorations for the house and Easter is no exception. Dying eggs for Easter is a universal hobby but I really enjoy the older traditions in Poland of dying eggs naturally using vegetables. This year we dyed eggs using onion skins, beets and red cabbage. Magda added a cool highlight this year by dipping a needle in wax and drawing on the egg before dying them. By doing this it would leave a pattern without color on the eggshell. I think red cabbage is my favorite source for natural dye, it gives the eggs a kind of blue color which I like.

Magda did another really cool art project this year for Easter but I don't think it has to just be limited to the holiday for a household decoration. The basic idea is to blowup a small balloon. Dip the balloon in glue, wrap the balloon in colored yarn and wait for it to dry. After the yarn and the glue dries, you pop the balloon and remove it leaving the shape of the colored yarn. It is also pretty cool when you pop the balloon because it slowly retreats from it's environment while fighting the glue and trying to stay in place.

In the United States my Easter revolved around searching the house or yard for a basket full of goodies left for the Easter Bunny. I know I am getting older these days and my hair is turning grey, but a part of me really does miss the excitement of searching for what might be found. In recent years I think my favorite Easter Basket treat has been Starburst Jelly Beans. :) The bottom line about Easter is that the holiday is about spending some time together as a family.  

We also just celebrated Labor Day and Constitution Day. Mila the Destroyer even created a Polish flag in her preschool. We went to a few BBQ's over the long weekend and had some guests over at our house as well. Overall it has been a busy few weeks on my social calendar. :) The girls are doing well, and one teacher apparently called Mila the Destroyer an Angel in Preschool?! Well Mila can be an Angel at times and Lydia too, but my girls are born to be wild and I try not to be surprised by their actions, good or bad. For the most part the weather has been good, but a recent cold snap killed some of the gourds we had just planted. We are starting some more plants from seeds inside the house and will put them in the yard soon. The flowers in the yard are coming along nicely and Magda and I planted some more in the yard which I will take some pictures of soon. Well bye for now.

Mila The Destroyer enters preschool!

Any new parent can read the title of my post and realize just how epic this moment is! :) Anyone who reads my blog can understand how important it is to have Mila away from our house where she can destroy and play with other kids her age. Mila is an amazing little girl and completely different from her older sister in many ways. If I had to explain the difference of how my daughters act at home in simple terms, I would say that Lydia is an introvert mostly wanting to be by herself and Mila is an Extrovert wanting to grab your hand and go do something together. The difference in my girls starting preschool is also quite different. When Lydia started preschool in the US she was shy and cried and didn't want us to leave at first. When we started Mila this week for preschool, we brought her inside, removed her hat, and changed her shoes and she bolted before we could even say goodbye. When Lydia was starting preschool we would have to wave to her from the window while one of the teachers held her so that she could say goodbye. Anyone who has had to wave and say goodbye when the child is crying and screaming for you knows just how hard this can be and fortunately we don't have to do that with Mila. Mila the Destroyer is however daddy's girl and will run to me whenever she hurts herself, or is sad, or hasn't seen me in a while and I come home. So I am spoiled with the reaction I get from Mila when I pick her up from preschool. :) Mila with yell Dada and run into my arms to be picked up and hugged. :) Mila was awesome this first week and did a very good job behaving herself. She played well with all the other kids and even behaved herself when eating at school in a group at the table. If she can continue to do well at this pace we might be able to leave her at the school to take naps in a month or so. Lydia is doing well at school and is pretty smart for her age but she has a tendency to want to do her own thing and ignore what the rest of the kids are doing. We will pick Lydia up from school and find out that she didn't do one of the exercises that the other kids were doing and we will have to complete it with her at home. The teachers will also tell us however that Lydia is a very smart kid and is good at math and spelling, so I guess I just have to chose my battles. Lydia loves to color and this week Magda got her this little note book that makes it fun to be a fashion designer, and Lydia has already created several cool outfits, like this one.

The most confusing individual aspect of my Lydia is the fact that she does not like to dress herself. Lydia loves to be a princess, and color pretty things, and create outfits, but asking the girl to get dressed is like pulling teeth. Well I will leave you for now with this picture of Mila sleeping after her first day of Preschool.

LPG tank and snow tires poor Californian Chevy is adjusting :)

After driving around Poland for six months with only a gasoline burning American truck, we made the decision to convert our Chevy to a hybrid. For my American friends who complain about high gas prices, we pay around $6.78 per gallon of gasoline in Poland. I made my truck a hybrid,and it now has a 100 liter LPG tank. The cost of LPG comes to around $3.32 per gallon which would put it more in line with that we were paying for gasoline in California. It cost us about $1,600 to do, which I think is good deal and will definitely save us more in the long term. I don't drive as much as what I did in the US, but the $150 fill-up was pretty painful and has been financially draining. Our Chevy is doing great with the new tank and doesn't have any loss of power while burning LPG.

I have also purchased my first set of snow tires. The new tires cost about $1,200 and was by the way a family and friends price! For my San Francisco Bay Area friends snow tires are only necessary if you have a jacked up pickup truck and you want it to look even bigger and more cool, but for my Polish friends snow tires are necessary if you want to drive anywhere in the winter. On the first real snow-day I picked up Lydia driving in what I would consider near white-out conditions without snow tires. It was a very slow, slippery and tense drive for only being about a mile, or two. Large parts of California would have been shut down in that mess and many places closed, but in Poland it's just another school day so it's better to be prepared. The snow season appears to be over for the year but I will probably wait a few more weeks before I swap out my snow tires for regular ones. Last year we had a heavy snow that came just before Easter and I really don't want to be stuck spinning around because I was impatient. I gave Chevy a bath the other day by taking her to one of those self-service car washes where you get to play with the pressurized sprayers and choose water and soap and wax to wash away the filth and give a shine. Beastie came out looking good and I was told that I really need to do it more often or face the consequences. Beastie by the way is what we call our Chevy because she is much bigger than most of the cars in this country and we have a hard time parking her :) Most of the trucks in this country which are made by American companies or are brought from the US have camper shells on them, I would like to take mine off to give Beastie a more original look but I have to figure out where I can put a big ass camper shell without trashing the yard. The other option would be to rent space somewhere to put the camper shell, but of course I don't want to spend a whole lot of money doing that. Well things are going well and we are all keeping busy, I promise more pictures will be coming to keep you feeling like you are here with us :)

Spring is back and so is my blog!

The snow and ice have been gone for a few weeks now and new plants and flowers are popping up all over the place. For someone who enjoys gardening and watching things grow I really enjoy living in a place that has four seasons. To translate for my friends living in the San Francisco Bay Area this means that white fluffy stuff falls from the sky and doesn't disappear until it is warm enough outside to melt. The snow creates a kind of reset button for the yard. There is a period of time when rather than watering or planting things, you get to take out the shovel and clear a path in the snow from the house to the car and around any doors. I am also amazed to find out that this climate has a lot of very hardy plants that actually survive this extended freeze quite well. For example we have a ton of strawberry plants coming back to life that were completely buried under snow for a long time. I know my California strawberries would have all been completely dead.

The raspberry and quince bushes that I planted in the fall are starting to show buds and leaves. There are also daffodils and crocuses in bloom around the yard. We also bought plenty of new bulbs and irises that we planted in the fall, so it is kind of like Christmas when we watch them pop out of the ground and bloom.

My girls are growing up quickly too. Little Mila the Destroyer turned two earlier this month and she is speaking more words in both Polish and English. Mila the Destroyer has a firm understanding of the words 'No' and 'Nie' and likes to upset mommy and daddy with her eating habits. I call Mila a forager because she has a tendency to wander around the kitchen and dig in the cupboards to create a meal that is balanced to her liking. She will ask for a particular food because she likes the packaging or just likes to see the container open and then she is immediately uninterested in the contents. She will also make you peel bananas thinking that she will eat them and then will proceed to have a floor protest when you try to actually give it to her. When you give Mila the Destroyer a bowl of Cheerios in milk she will go and get a straw to suck the milk out and then eat the Cheerios over the next two hours. The good news for little Mila is that being that she is two years old we can now enroll her in a local preschool and will be doing so, soon. Mila the Destroyer will have the pleasure of trashing her sisters old stomping grounds here in Poland :) I think she will be starting out with partial days at the school for a while before she is adjusted to being away from us but she should do well there. This will be a great opportunity for her to have other people explain to her not to break, climb or throw things and learn how to interact with other young kids without beating them up :)

Rain brought in some mushrooms :)

There are two important factors to having good mushrooms growing in the forests. One factor is having it rain, and the other is for the weather to be warm enough with some sun. Now we had it rain for a few days and a little bit of warmth, but now it is pretty cold outside all day and night. So for the one day that it was good enough conditions, we went out into the forest and found some mushrooms. It was really quite odd though, and only by accident that we even went looking. you see it has been very cold here and we haven't been seeing even many of the bad mushrooms outside, let alone the good edible ones. I was out in the forest the other day and while throwing some old bread under one of the pine trees for the birds, I noticed a large Birch Bolete, so we went hunting :) As we wandered through the woods we found some more Birch Boletes and some Orange Birch Boletes and one or two Chanterelles. Here is a picture of an Orange Birch Bolete that we found.

As you can see from the picture above, the Orange Birch Bolete has an orangeish-redish kind of cap as opposed to the tan or brown cap for the regular Birch Bolete. Magda made an awesome mushroom soup out of what we found as usual :) *Correction Magda sauteed mushrooms, it wasn't a soup because she didn't add any water. I have different tastes than her in mushrooms, and when it comes to mushroom soup I just tend to like the mushrooms that make the soup more crunchy, and the Birch Boletes do that. When we are out mushroom hunting we will often find many inedible mushrooms, and some that are edible that we will have to identify, so we walk past them. We might pick one on occasion to bring home and identify, and we might just take a picture because a mushroom looks cool. The following little mushroom we find sometimes when we are out hunting. It is small, and white, and translucent, and pretty cool. I doubt it is edible but we always like seeing them in the woods. 

This was probably the last time we will go out mushroom hunting this year. The rain has moved in, and the ground is wet, but it is just too cold outside to allow for any good mushroom growth. Magda went out looking today and did not find anything to be proud of. I will definitely be missing the edible bounty when I am out on my walks, but the change in scenery always allows for some good photography. I am looking forward to taking some pictures of birch trees without their leaves and the snow when it starts to fall. Lydia loves the snow and is always asking "When will the snow come, and my birthday?!" Her birthday is December 23rd. Lydia's school is not very far from our house, maybe a mile or a mile and a half. We have promised her that when the snow starts to fall and the ground gets covered a little bit I will take her to school on her sled. This will be a lot of fun for her, and a little bit of a 'Rocky 4' kind of workout for me :) Well off to bed now so good night :) or of course good morning :).

IKEA is the Arch Nemesis for Mila The Destroyer

I explained in a past blog that we are always searching for that perfect piece of furniture, but that sometimes we just have to settle for what will help us out at the moment, and this is it. Mila The Destroyer is full of mischief and just cannot be watched and yelled at 24/7, so you just have to pick your battles. We settled for this piece from IKEA because it allows for her to get to some of the stuff on the bottom levels and still allows for us to keep some things out of her reach and path of destruction. If you look closely at the the small stack ontop of the structure in the upper left hand corner you can see a stack of wood block puzzles. Now the puzzles are/will be fun to play with her as she develops a little bit more, but for now they are fun for her to dump on the ground and run away. In about the middle of the picture you can also see a pink basket full of foam puzzle pieces which she would also normally dump and run, or break apart if together and run away, but she has not been messing with this basket at all :) We also picked up a few other items for her to play with/on. 

The table which is next to Tickle Me Elmo has two chairs to go with it, but we decided to put them away for now because Mila was using them as her own personal house stools. Mila is of course an excellent climber, but she is also resourceful and will use other objects to boost her height and we just weren't thinking at the time we got the chairs. Now the storage box to the right is where we keep most of the plush toys and teddy bears out of sight. But The storage box rolls out and is definitely one of Mila's favorite things to empty and climb inside of. One thing that we have gained around the house by having more furniture, is a little more time delay before a mess happens, by forcing Mila to take the time and open a drawer or a cabinet before trashing the area. We are also pretty good at using our ears around the house listening to particular noises, the metal handles on some drawers and cabinets make heavy metal sounds and the scraping of a drawer opening are pretty pronounced. So when we hear something about to get trashed we can jump to action and tell Mila no, which sometimes works. :) Putting things out of reach and out of sight doesn't work as well as it used to, as Mila can climb well, and now she has a tendency to ask to be picked up so she can see what is not in view. Mila The Destroyer is pretty good at telling you she is upset or tired, as I mentioned her attacks before, but she is also pretty good at throwing tantrums. One of my favorite tantrums is what I have labeled 'The floor protest' in which she will drop to the floor screaming and pounding and thrashing for about a minute. Magda and I just laugh because we will take something away from her, and she will drop to the ground and we say "oh a floor protest" :). Well the little destroyer is taking a well deserved nap right now and I have to get back to some things, so good morning :)

Poland's interest in Halloween is growing

10 years ago any mention of Halloween in Poland would have been strongly condemned as Paganism, and would not go very far in conversation other than scoffing at the children having fun. I am very glad to see that today we are met with the same outrage but we also have a lot more people celebrating Halloween :) Religious extremism pops up at times here in Poland, this time it is for Halloween, which is largely just a day for kids to have fun. The reality is that this world has many different people from many different religious and geographical backgrounds, and by condemning holidays and beliefs we are not bringing this world any closer to peace. Now I am not saying that you should like Halloween or even participate in it if you are living in Poland but for us parents and grandparents we should not teach our children to hate it. You see, this world could actually be a Utopian society, if as parents and leaders, and respected members of society we did not teach hatred. Children will absorb everything that you do and say in life, and if you preach about hatred of certain individuals, or groups, or ideals then those children will do the same when they are older. If you go into a diverse kindergarten or preschool environment, with kids from different backgrounds and countries the kids will not care about the color of other kids' skin. All kids know is how to have fun and that maybe some of their friends look a little bit different than they do. Take a high school sports team, for example, the players don't care about where people come from, they just want to get out there and win as a team. So as more people in Poland learn how to check their passions at the gate and welcome a little fun for the kids, this country can open up a little bit and be a little more peaceful. My family still plans on celebrating All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day this year, as well. I do enjoy the positive side of religion, which in my mind is about bringing people together to live life in an honest and peaceful way. So when we talk about holidays, why should we have the right to tell people which ones they can celebrate and which ones they cannot while still believing this is right? Who are we to say that because you are not a part of our religion that you cannot celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa? I chose to promote peace, prosperity, and respect among people I meet, and I hope that their beliefs do the same without looking down upon other groups of people, or individuals, who were not born into a good life. I often ponder what was my past life, was it in poverty or abundance, and how did I chose to live? And if you ask my wife what do I ask for as gift for my birthday, or Christmas, she would roll her eyes and repeat for you "peace on Earth, and goodwill towards man." So lighten up a little bit, laugh at the kids costumes or pretend to have as much enthusiasm and imagination as they did putting them together, and throw some candy at them if they come :) And most of all just choose to be happy and don't just promote more hatred through Facebook posts.

This is by the way my pumpkin, which is supposed to by inside of an American football helmet :). Well goodnight everyone or to some good morning :)