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Week 1 & 2 of 2024 (In Review)
I’m trying something new this year. Every week (or two) I’m writing in just to document the usual daily life stuff that went on this year, my last year on maternity leave. This might just be mostly text, not a lot of photos, but the point is just to document the little things in an effort to blog more. Let’s see how it goes. It was another quiet New Year’s Eve night for us new parents, eating nachos and watching The Big Fat Quiz of the Year while baby slumbered, and I’d been anxious (for months!) about him waking thanks to the war-zone-like New Years’ fireworks around the city center.…
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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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Life, Lately: Autumn With a One-Year-Old
Happy autumn! I thought a catch-up was overdue, so here’s what’s been going on with us lately here in South Bohemia – life on maternity leave with a seventeen-month old toddler. THINKING… When I get free time, my mind is just a jumble of the hundred things I have been wanting to do. Writing it down in my planner, a series of random papers or a Google Doc has been saving me. Right now, Mouse is have an unusually long midday nap and I’ve been frenetically choosing activities: have lunch, pay bills/life admin, weekend plans… but then “which learning tower should I buy?”, I need to plan Christmas things already!,…
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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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Summer, Lately: Celebrations & Life With a 12 Month Old
We had a beautiful month of June here in South Bohemia. I have to say that I feel like I was so tired for at least half the month and had no idea why… until I realized that the allergy meds I am taking every other day for hay fever make me terribly drowsy. I am quite ready for allergy season to be over (still sneezing) but at least June was spent in a dreamy sort of daze. It started with a beautiful choir concert performed at a little festival in an apple orchard near Lišov. What an amazing setting and reminder (just when I really needed it) of how…
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I Want You To Know.
Dear Our One-Year-Old Growing Little Mouse, This week you turned one! Your first year has both flown by and yet also I can recall every little step of the way, every week with every little new change that happened between last summer and now. It has been one of the greatest years of our lives, being together with you and seeing you grow. Your parents traveled to the Czech Republic over ten years ago – we decided to embark on a big adventure, partially because of the yet unsatisfied curiosity of wanting to experience living in another country and have some international adventures. I felt that there was always some…
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To Pass or Not to Pass: An Evergreen Language-Learning Struggle
It is getting more and more embarrassing to tell people that we have been living in the Czech Republic for a whole decade… generally, because of the state of our Czech language ability. That is not to say that it is absolutely poor exactly… it’s just not… “living there ten years” quality. The other week our baby’s cardiologist said, when I reminded him that we usually speak English together, replied with a benign but just as soul-piercing, “oh sorry, I forgot that you don’t speak any Czech”. Ouch! I got through sixteen days in Czech hospital and can’t bother to try during one doctor appointment? Now, I am a language…
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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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Having a Baby in the Czech Republic? (non-EU national) Legal Steps You Need to Take
First off, this is an informational post particularly written for all of us confused non-EU foreigners living in the Czech Republic that are not able to get the straight answers that you need about what exactly to do and in what order after having a child here. I am writing this just for you, to save you the hassle that we ourselves had to go through. Please take heed of the steps because there is a very specific order they need to be accomplished in, even though this order cannot be found anywhere online that I’ve seen. In short, there are 5 things you need to obtain on behalf of…
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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…
