Ex Patria

Our summer bucket list

Our summers tend to slink past.  Not that I don't love lazy summer days but in our house, it's good to have a few goals in mind.  You know, for those "I'm bored" and endless-rainy days.  Because those happen a lot in German summers. 
So I signed us up for the Summer Bucket List Challenge.  It's nothing fancy - it just encourages you to write up a list of things to do.  There are lots of good ideas to draw from, so we sat down and here's what we got so far.

Our bucket list is heavily skewed because the kids and I are going to accompany Doug who is working on a five-week project in Ramallah.  So, in no particular order, our summer bucket list:

1. Visiting the Biblical Zoo
2. Sleeping over at Opa's cabin in the woods
3. Floating in the Dead Sea
4. Painting stones like bugs
5. Summer sledding on the Wasserkuppe
6. Climbing the Masada and watching the sunrise (no sunrise)
7. Making oobleck
8. Creating a map of Fladungen
9. Finishing the quilt I've been working on
10. Visiting the Youth Wing in the Israel Museum
11. Walking around the Old City in Jerusalem
12. Hiking along the Jordan River
13. Spending a day in Bethlehem
14. Watching the fish and coral in the Read Sea Underwater Observatory in Eilat {Cancelled}
15. Walking around Petra {Cancelled}
16. Goofing off on the beach in Tel Aviv {Cancelled}
17. Making a lemonade stand
18. Backyard campout
19. Making giant bubble wands for super-bubbles
20. Making popsicles, a lot
21. Making jam out of backyard berries
22. Going to the Children's museum in Fulda
23. Sidewalk chalk painting
24. Eating lots of Middle Eastern food
25. Bringing home good olive oil
26. Making a scrapbook about our Israel trip
27. Spending entire days at the local pool
28. Teaching Jacob and Leah how to swim
29. Taking long walks after dinner
30. Doing lots of crafts
31. Helping Oma host a family reunion
32. Tickling my nephews until they scream, "Stop!"
33. Photographing my new niece
34. Painting the walls in the boys' room
35. Reading
36. Playing tetherball
37. Building a seating area in the backyard
38. Making a plan for the rest of the year
39. Learning to skip stones
40. Making a giant puzzle that takes weeks to complete (b/c now we have a space where we can leave it)

(Anything that is completely is striked through.)

So, that's how much we've got so far.  We're very excited about our upcoming trip - we're leaving in less than a week!  When we come back, we will have to face some tough decisions about the future, so we decided to have lots of fun and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy this trip. 

Which, incidentally, should make this blog more interesting, as well.

Random thoughts

We're in the US, did you know that?  Oh?  I didn't blog in a while?  Oops.

Anyway, we're here in Bethesda, MD, where Doug works at his company's home office for the entire month of February.  We are staying at a corporate stay close by, right in downtown Bethesda, only steps from the Metro.

Some random thoughts.

Love the apartment. It has two bedrooms and although that's one bedroom too few, it's a great apartment.  It's airy and has a great living/dining room/kitchen.  Hardwood floors, nice modern furniture, all kitchen appliances you need, everything clean and neat.  We have a washer/dryer in the unit which is awesome, as well as free wireless.  With the few items we brought, it's almost always tidy.  It's a vacation for my spirit, really.  I can straighten and clean the apartment in ten minutes, and laundry takes only minimal time, too.  The fridge is gigantic and has a big freezer compartment, complete with ice maker which the kids love, love, love.  So, that's all good.  (And it's paid for by Doug's per diem, how awesome is that.)

It's strange to be without a cell phone.  It's not only strange but people seem to think you almost impolite for not having a cell phone, as you are making their lives more difficult.  It's also striking to see just how many people are constantly using their iPhones while on the bus, the Metro, standing at the street lights.  

Which leads me to the incredible, very obvious affluence.  I admit that's partly because we are in Bethesda but it feels almost overwhelming to see all those pricey shops, the gleaming cars, the dazzling lights, the luxury everywhere.  Coming from Moldova to Fladungen wasn't such a disconnect as life there is quite humble.  Comfortable but not glitzy.  Here, it's like another world - well, it IS another world.  It jarrs me a bit right now.  I can't stop but thinking of those people I know who live a month on what these young professionals spend on sushi in one evening.

Just some thoughts.  Now we're off to the Smithsonian.

You are the smelly sock!

It's raining.  The temperatures have dropped from 36C to 12C in two days  (that's from 97F to 54F for you imperial types).  It's so blustery that it downed one of the birches in our backyard.  We didn't notice until this afternoon when the kids took advantage of a break in the rain to drag all their duvets out into the BBQ pit to play... something.  They didn't want to tell me what they played and didn't protest when I demanded the blankets back inside - best proof of a guilty conscience.

What to do with kids who are cooped up inside all day?  There is not much to do on a rainy day here in Chișinău and if you now think "puddle jumping!",  I hear ya.  Only that David has grown out of his rain boots, and so has Jacob (who has not grown into David's discarded boots, though), and we didn't bring rain jackets, either, nor do we have hats.  This happens when you move with 14 small boxes.  So, inside time.

Leah spent a good hour this afternoon running around in the house, asking everybody many multiple times, "Which color you take?"  Fortune tellers are great time-wasters.  I printed out these cheeky fortune tellers and the potty humor appeals very much to my kids.  Leah has her own interpretation on the various yucky scenarios - so you are the smelly sock, you are the toilet monster, you get stuck in the poop machine and you are the basement.  Which are all very dire fortunes, indeed.  Incidentally, if you are craftily inclined, What I Made is a great site and I only wished Scott would be more productive and also that he'd finally finish his Dangerous Alphabet for Boys because that's just awesome. C'mon, Scott, hurry up!  I have boys who want to spell out their names with this alphabet!

So, rainy Sunday.  We read, write, delete emails, play Wii, listen to Doug's old college radio station and npr from the nation's capital, play games (why again did I think it was a good idea to download "Angry Birds"??) and make lists for our trip to Germany next week.  A trip that may or may not happen as have the little problem of having overstayed our welcome in Moldova.  Months ago we applied for legitimațies, which are exactly what you think they are, little laminated cards with bad photos that ensure sundry officials that we have no sinister intentions for their country.  Or in any case, that those intentions are state-sanctioned and US-funded.  However, we had badly underestimated quite how much red tape this country has retained from Soviet days, and so we find ourselves past the tourist visa expiration and before the issue of the official welcome document.  Which makes us, um, illegal aliens?  Nosy tourists who break a law? Do we get slapped on the wrist or do we get a non-reentry stamp into our passports?

We pushed.  We called.  We begged.  What we did not do was pay a bribe because as the head of a USAID-funded project, Doug is under orders not to do that.  This may turn out to be a problem because here in Moldova, the non-bribe official route is always the long, torturous, complicated and time-consuming one.  Maybe we have not allowed enough time to pass, maybe the single person who stamps those documents is just righteously pissed at all those USAID people who never pay a bribe and therefore delays indefinitely?  I have no way of knowing.

The big boys and I will drive to the border on Wednesday, the car full of outgrown clothes, shoes, read books, filled journals, and we will take our chances.  An additional wrinkle is the problem with the car that has also been in the country for too long.  For six months, we reckoned, we can get buy without registering the car.  When someone pointed out that the Moldovan customs is particularly pedantic with cars, we inquired about registration.  It turned out that we cannot register the car even if we wanted to:  the poor thing is too old.  In Moldova, and we found to our great dismay, in many countries around the world, you cannot import a car that is older than six years.  Incidentally, we got our car into Germany some few days before the car turned six, so we never encountered this particular piece of customs law before even if such a law exists in Germany (which I don't know).  Our car, which is driving just fine, is precisely as old as Alan: it came out of the factory on the day he was born.  We bought it second-hand a few years later but it's a nice coincedence that makes it easy to remember how old the car really is.  It's a bit rusty around the edges, and has an enigmatic electrical problem which is both elusive and very in your face, but it's served us well and we had planned to drive it until it falls apart.  The fact that we maybe can't do that makes me want to say to someone, "You are the smelly sock!"

 

Rainy days.  We better read some more "Johnny Tremain" to the kids now.

 

 

 

Traveling with kids - some things we have learned

For the first time, we are going to travel with four kids in August.  I mean, really travel.  We've been lugging them around on day trips and such, and the boys are pretty experienced travelers in their own right.  But it's the first time that we haul all four kids on a plane and then spend three weeks away from home.  And already we've discovered that with four, everything has an added layer of "difficult" on top and mostly this layer results in additional cost as well.

Renting a car?  A normal car doesn't do any longer, now it HAS to be a minivan.  Those are two classes more expensive than a midsize car.  Ka-chink!  Hotel rooms? Nobody wants to rent you a double room even though it would be plenty big enough.  Online reservations are quick and dirty but also rather inflexible;  I made the experience that booking two kids will result in decent sized rooms for all of us.  Really, those little ones?  After-thoughts, that's what they are.  We didn't plan to bring them along, honest!  Inside-USA flights are extremely expensive if you have to pay for six people, or for five, depending on the airline.  Even AmTrak doesn't give family discounts (something I'm very used to in Europe!).  Grrr.

Anyway, we'll start off with three days in New York City.  That's a must for us - we love the city, and it's Doug's hometown if he has any at all.  We got a great deal on a double room right around from Times Square which is something we also love - it's the part of the city that is plenty interesting at 3 am when you have to shelp around tired but wide-awake, wiggely, excited and cranky kids.  24-hour-diners are a god-send for jetlagged families.

The plan is to rent a car (ka-chink!) and drive up to Danbury to visit relatives, then swing by our friends' in rural New Jersey on our way down to Florida to visit the in-laws.  Or maybe on our way to Washington, DC;  that's not decided yet.

Doug and the kids also want a stop at Wolf Trap Great Wolf Lodge (ka-chink! ka-chink! ka-chink!) in Williamsburg, VA, costs be dammned, and we are hoping to convince certain friends to team up with us.  (Damn, that place is expensive! Just checked the website again.  I'm not sure we can do this.)

Traveling with kids is always stressful and throughout the years, and with lots of trial and error, we've come up with some strategies to avoid some pitfalls:

Contrasts

This is what it looks like here:

And this is what it looks like where Doug is at the moment: