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Going to Rome With a Baby! Our Experience & Tips
Ciao, all! We had our first family vacation that was just the three of us last month. Sadly, Ferdie couldn’t come as we were headed to ROME, home to some of the best museums in the world and managing it with a dog plus a nine-month-old wasn’t the most relaxing-sounding thing. It was a wonderful trip! I’d been dreaming of returning to Italy for a long while now… and then the pandemic happened. As of last summer, things are running pretty normally in Italy and even though we couldn’t have our babymoon there as I wanted, it was so fun taking Baby M there and enjoying it as a family.…
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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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Life Lately: And That Was Autumn With a Baby
Now with a five-month-old, I can barely sit at a computer for more than ten minutes each day – I’m embarrassed that this post took me about two months to finally publish. I am really taking to heart “sleep when the baby sleeps” so my very few minutes of free time is going to rest and self-care. Sometimes I manage to write a whole e-mail. With an infant that is demanding more and more attention daily, that is definitely what’s working for me right now. With Alex back to work in mid-September after about two and a half months as a new little family, things have reached a new level…
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Year of Life & Travels: 2020
We made it! And yes, even 2020 is going to get a recap post! I love these sorts of posts and catching up with what people were up to this year, so here we are. They’re also really wonderful to look back on and see the year as a whole. I know a lot of people choose a word of the year before the year even gets going, but as I do my year-end reflections on the last few days remaining, the word to define the year that was always comes to me. This year would be adapt, of course. And now, a run-down of the year that was… Ah,…
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Upgrade Season
The end of summer is always upgrade season for us kids. It’s usually the time of the year that we come back from whatever summer adventures we’ve undertaken, walk in our house and say man, that table’s got to go or I can’t believe we still haven’t got that print framed. You see, we’ve lived in a furnished flat since the beginning of 2013. Most of our furniture is used and loved hand-me-downs (which I am so, so grateful to have been able to use!) or just whatever furniture that friends of ours don’t want anymore. Because we never knew how long we’d stay, I’ve always been reluctant to purchase…
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The Saturday of Summer
July, my favorite month of all – the Saturday of summer! It blew in with a flurry of gatherings, barbecues and a spot of camping at a lake (Lipno, naturally) at the beginning of the month. Camping in Europe has been… interesting. This was our third camping trip here in Central Europe and I have to say, I really prefer American camping a bit better! Usually for tent campers, you get literally just a patch of grass on which to pitch your tent and nothing else. No picnic table or fire pit unless you go to a campground with a bit more of a bougie situation. Also, we don’t have…
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This Fourth of July
As we moved from the United States to the Czech Repubilc, I assumed we’d be trading one country’s national day for another. Turns out, which is not altogether surprising if you are familiar with Czech/Czechoslovak history, the Czech Republic doesn’t exactly celebrate their national day – there is none of the fervor that is associated with American Independence Day. The history of the 20th century has made things a lot more complicated. There is Independent Czechoslovak State Day (October 28th) when Czechoslovakia declared their independence, maybe the closest thing to Independence Day there is here, but also Restoration of the Independent Czech State (January 1st), when the Czech Republic as…
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Keep Smiling
A conversation occurred this week (which I mentioned in this Instagram post) in which a certain secondary school-aged class of mine, when asked what they liked about České Budějovice could think of almost nothing, but then finally offered 1) The train station is near the bus station. (this is the case in almost every Czech city ever) 2) There are a lot of things and services here. (in comparison to a small village) And that was literally it. No single teenager in my class likes České Budějovice. This is something which I take with a couple grains of salt, of course because one, they’re teenagers and they don’t like anything,…
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Year of Life & Travels: 2019
Hello all! Hope you had beautiful holidays if you were celebrating! The Czech celebrating period seems to go for about two weeks so I am still enjoying the beautiful downtime, lit candles, all of our decorations and tree – this time is honestly one of my absolute favorites of the whole year, even though Christmas is over. We’ve just had a nice holidays in the Salzkammergut lake region of Austria, not very far at all from Salzburg (but in the smaller villages). I will post about it soon but I wanted to get to the annual and much anticipated (by me, if nobody else) ‘Year in Life and Travels’, 2019…
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Destinations
A directory of all places I have written about since this adventure (and blog) began in 2012, in order of their appearance. Please pardon the mess while all the new links are added! (Check the archives or search in the meantime) glasgow arisaig isle of eigg isle of skye oban farmlands isle of iona & mull isle of islay edinburgh best memories of scotland hello, londonthe bb bakery bus tourbrixtonlondon during the holidaysthe cotswoldshow to get your dog to the UK from the EU two weeks in paris one & two 9 day itinerary what to do in autumn in paris a montmartre story when travel is scary: return from…