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Week 36 & 37 of 2024 (Year in Review) — Summer’s Over!
I knew that the first weekend of September, according to the weather forecast would be that sparkling, shiny last true summer weekend here in South Bohemia and boy, did I plan accordingly. We spent the week preceding it doing all the last fun warm weather things you do before you know you won’t have that kind of summer freedom anymore: taking our little one to the zoo (it was too hot to see many animals but we had fun anyway) and to Dívčí kámen for a picnic and to splash about in the creek near Hamr. The last summer Saturday we spent “camped out” at a nearby riverside park, enjoying…
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Week 13, 14 & 15 of 2024 (In Review) – Easter & April Heatwave
The weeks have flown by and I dropped the ball a little bit, so reviewing the past three weeks: Easter week and the first gorgeous weeks of our current month, April. Truly hope to be on time in about a week from now bringing us current. Man, besides this cold snap Central Europe is undergoing at the moment, haven’t we been so spoiled this year? Easter week was generally uneventful and wholly relaxing – even more so than spring break. I was so pleased that it was our little one’s first time participating in Easter traditions like an Easter egg hunt around the living room on Easter Sunday and his…
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A Year of Life & Travels: 2023
Here we are at the beginning of another bright new year! These yearly recap posts are my absolute favorites to read (on other blogs) so I hope you will enjoy catching up with my year and seeing little Mouse grow before your eyes! It was a big year for our little family and we are so lucky to have had the travel opportunities we did! If you’re on the fence, I cannot recommend traveling with a baby this age enough, truly. New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2023 was unbelievably warm – we’re talking 18°C (64°F)! We took a long walk with friends & no coats with our six month old…
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Postcards from Summer
Well folks, it’s already the middle of October and the mornings have officially veered into “crispy” territory. The longer between posts, the harder it is to write because I feel like I have to catch the reader up on everything, but I also know that just writing is better than nothing at all, so here I am, talking about the summer our baby was one year old and what a special summer it was. July started off beautifully with our first visit to KVIFF (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival) as a family, complete with dog and baby. It was also our first festival after the pandemic, mostly because Alex wisely…
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The Books of 2022
I really thought I wouldn’t read that much this year. Fed up with reading a bunch of titles last year for book club that I wasn’t that interested in last year, I jumped in and did a bunch of baby/pregnancy-related reading in the first half of the year, figuring that was all I’d get around to once I had the baby. Boy was I wrong. Enter: breastfeeding sessions. I was not privy to all that breastfeeding a baby entails (in many ways, honestly). But basically, it means that every 3-4 hours, you are hanging out feeding your baby, something which takes little active effort from you, for at least thirty…
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Year of Life & Travels: 2022
2022 was such a big beautiful year, especially compared with the two that came before it. This was the year I finished out my first full school year (not online at all!) at my new place of work. I worked my little booty off, knowing it would be the end of my free time, earning both an Intermediate Certificate in Herbalism (two years of work!) in late April and a B2 Certificate (Upper-Intermediate) in German language achievement from the Goethe-Zentrum in early June. But obviously, the biggest thing – I spent the first half of the year growing a baby! In the middle of the year, giving birth, and the…
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The Books of 2021
I made some major mistakes in my reading life last year. It pretty much all came down to being far too ambitious and picking up way too many reading projects! You might remember last year when I announced my participation in #OurYearInTranslation, in addition to trying to keep up with my book club. What a colossal mistake. I think OYIT is a great prompt if you’re stuck, in a rut and want to try something new, but that’s the thing – I was really happy with my big stack of books as it was and I didn’t really need a challenge. Honestly, I just needed everyone to leave me alone…
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Looking Back On Last Year, 2021
Alright, look, I’m embarrassed how late this post is coming out, but when you’ve just come home from a fifteen day trip abroad, dropped your bag and started a full work week (ew), there are a lot of other things to manage. So already, we’re not doing it the traditional way as the typical happy “Year of Life and Travels” year-end re-caps. 2021 was one of the hardest years I’ve experienced, but I can’t tell if it’s only the beginning of more to come or just a fluke of a year. I admit, I can only think of a couple years or times of my life that reached the same…
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At Summer’s End
Ahoj, friends – what a break it’s been since my last post in July. As you know, I’ve been in the USA for most of that time, only just returning back to the Czech Republic at the beginning of this month. I unexpectedly decided, especially with everything going on, that during that time producing anything was not it and that I really needed to just take it all in. Input instead of output. I do think that we all need time like this at certain parts of the year or even month to not put anything out there and to just listen. Normally around this time of year, I would…
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The Books of 2020
A big year for reading it was! I set my reading goal intentionally low at twenty books, but in the end I managed thirty-one! Perhaps this was because I still wasn’t sure if I would undertake any kind of formal studies and wanted to emphasize quality over quantity, and although I greatly surpassed it, I don’t really think the pandemic was the culprit. This was the first year that I really, actively considered reading books a hobby. Before it was just something I did, I guess, but now it’s gone full-out obsession, I’m either sorry or delighted to say. Ironically, I feel like I spend more time thinking about what…
