Rome. How I love the fact that we could accompany Jem on one of his work junkets, I mean, trips. After the three hour flight from Riga we arrived past midnight, and I found myself all sweaty in the heat of Rome, looking into the red eyes of my overtired (and still very excited) kids, thankful that we lived "nearby", and hadn't just made the 24-odd hour flight to Europe from Oz. While Jem sat in meetings for the most of four days, we tramped around the city, followed our noses,...
Finally. Mikus has started to write. It's been sorely testing my patience. You'd think I'd remember valuable lessons from Tiss' road to literacy, described in this post. And partly, I did - I remembered that new skills come as a sudden explosion, one minute they refuse to write, can't read anything, and the next day they write a whole sentence and you wonder how it happened. Well I've been waiting for the explosion. And waiting, and waiting. And this week...
I love this wonky, sunken house we stroll past every morning on the way to kindergarten. Its obviously on its way out. But lovable nevertheless. Even more so with a blooming cherry tree in the garden.
Speaking of blooming, we made an ultra-quick visit to the country this weekend. So much there is flowering, all perfumed and delicious. Golden fields of dandelions, cherries, apple trees, lilac. I can't wait to de-camp to the country in a couple of weeks...
... how did that song go again? This post has been building for a while. I'm just not sure where to start - so I've decided to break it up into manageable chunks. We start the story in an inner-city suburb of Riga, Latvia - a suburb which historically was a place of wooden manor houses. Later, in the late 19th century, the area was built up with two-storey wooden apartment houses for the workers. Today many of these houses remain - buildings right up along the side...
Eventhough we've lived near Scandinavia for ten years, in all this time I haven't visited much of it. Kinda like living in Queensland and never having snorkelled on the Barrier Reef. You know you'll do it someday, so you don't hurry to do it - and visitors from other parts of the world wonder if you have rocks in your head.
The last four days I was on a work trip in Norway - a country I visited for the first time. Although we didn't do too much sight seeing, we enjoyed views of...
Don't move! Or I'll blast 'ya!Today. Star Wars Party. For Mikus. Things were good. Some guests came in costume - even some adults. Some did not. We are tired. Off to bed. Some pics below. PS. For you curious cats, you may be able to see bits and pieces of our (UNPAINTED! UNFINISHED!) new house in the background
Mikus welcomes his guests
Light saber swingin' in a room full of balloons
Two party pinatas getting smashed....
