Log Day

Grandma bought literally tons of Romanian firewood.  It is a wonderful variety of very dense wood - it must have been a beautiful forest.  Here we are hacking and stacking.  Everyone worked very hard!

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I'm With Cuz

The kids always have a good time visiting with their cousins.

Game Time

Our favorite new game is Parcheesi - Grandma likes to play too.

Update - they won!!

The boy's first grade class won the distinction of best production in the primary school carnivale!  :D

Farsang

The boy's school put on a Farsang (FAR-shong, if you've been following along) today.  His 1st-grade class put on their rendition of this popular one to the same tune - a song about going out to collect mushrooms. Cute!

The start

Spinning around a flower

The boy is on the far right

The cheery end

The girl meanwhile watched from a bench with a bunch of other small kids.  Here she's with her 2nd cousin.

The girl update

Our girl trying out sports photography

...learning how to make donuts

...and finding time for a hug.

Future Hacker

My boy sporting my hat which to me makes him look like an Alaskan fisherman.  However the next moment he was engrossed in his mother's laptop, and I could only think 'basement hacker'.

Farsang at PreSchool

Farsang (FAR-shong) is basically carnival - something to do in February if you're not a heavy drinker.

  

This is Anna in her ovoda (O-vodah) with her (sometimes) best friend.  Although she likes to wear her vampire teeth with her bunny mask, she had the good sense to leave those at home.

The Scientist Hunter

Here she is playing zebra - "scientist hunters are chasing me to kill me so they can take notes and learn".

As a defense she spread around a large basket of other "dead animals" so the scientists would take notes about them instead.

Later she defends herself from a tiger attack with a frilly baton -  "now the hitting begins!"  Bam! Bam!

School work

Our boy is learning cursive handwriting this year and is doing marvelously.  This is an early on example

Day trip to Pest

Wife and I drove out to Budapest to meet with some friends. We met with one couple who is moving to Norway this week in a fabulous multi-level bookstore that used to be a market.

This room was restored and made into a cafe where we had coffee.

It snowed the entire day and the city was really beautiful.

Later we had dinner with some of her work colleagues.  As it turns out the apartment building where we met was entirely populated by one of her colleagues' family.  They actually hand-built the entire 3-story apartment building themselves, back in the socialist heyday.  (It is NOT seen in the picture above).  The lady's husband is an EE and is into RC airplanes - he let us fly his computer simulator, and demonstrated his helicopters in the nappali.

Snow Season

Even though it's been too warm to keep the snow around long, it's been falling almost every night and day.

 


The orchard next door.