Routine

We’ve been in Greece for just over 6 months now, and we’ve developed a routine. Unfortunately, as I realized yesterday, our current routine does not include time for me to write and post on this blog—which would be why I haven’t blogged for half the time we’ve been here! It’s time for a change in that part of the routine, at least.

Here is how our days typically go: Jeff gets up and starts getting ready. Once he’s at a certain point in his routine, he wakes me up and I start getting ready too. Then Alexa wakes up. Jeff and Alexa share a little time most mornings, getting Alexa started on her morning chores. By the time I’m out of the bathroom and headed downstairs, Jeff has left for work and Alexa is playing. She continues to play while I empty the dishwasher, start the laundry, and get breakfast for both of us.

After breakfast, it’s time for school. We do 2 pages of math, then a lesson from Logic of English. I read aloud a Bible story, a page or two from a poetry book, our history reading, and a literature selection. Sometimes I also read a math story, a science book, or a health book. Sometimes Alexa reads to me from her reader. Sometimes school is done at that point. Sometimes we do another lesson in one or more of our weekly (or less-than-weekly, as the case may be) subjects: art, music, science, geography, and health. We try to go for a walk after school most days, though we’ll frequently do it in between subjects instead of after.

After school—or sometimes, after I read but before our less-than-daily lesson—it’s lunchtime. After lunch, Alexa goes to her room to “rest” (in reality, play) for two hours. I can’t compromise on that time; I need it too much for my own sanity. We call it Alexa’s rest time, but it’s really Mama’s quiet time. I use that time to read my Bible, do housework, get dinner started … whatever I need to get done that I have not yet gotten done that day. I’m hoping to start using some of that time to blog again. When Lexa comes back out of her room, usually between 3 and 4pm, we finish any remaining school subjects—today she’s been begging for an art lesson, so we’ll do that—and then she plays, on her own if I still have my own work to do, or with me if I don’t have something else I need to do.

This play time continues until Jeff gets home from work. Dinner usually is ready when he gets home, so we eat, then he gets Lexa ready for bed while I clean up the kitchen. Usually she’s in bed sometime between 8 and 9pm. Depending on what time it is, Jeff and I may have an hour or so together before I need to start getting ready for bed myself.

There are some variations to the routine. Sometimes Alexa plays with one of the neighbor kids instead of me in the evening, or we walk to a neighborhood park where she can play with other kids. Every two weeks, Alexa and I meet up with some other ladies and their kids for a field trip to a museum or archaeological site. Once a week, we leave home right after we finish English so we can walk to our local laiki (farmers market) to buy fresh vegetables and fruit. We often walk down to the kiosk near our house to buy milk and yogurt. We occasionally walk all the way to the supermarket for more substantial groceries, but more often either Jeff or I will go on the weekends, because it’s an uphill walk home from the supermarket and there’s no parking to speak of there. If there’s not much to buy, Jeff often volunteers to walk there; if there’s a bit more, he’ll drive me there and then drive around the block while I shop. Every month or so, we drive to the butcher and stock our freezer full of meat so we don’t have to go every week.

Our lives have settled into a predictable routine. We live in Greece, but our lives aren’t so very different from what they would be in the United States. There are more places for good field trips here, but there’s no homeschool co-op. We most likely wouldn’t have a farmers market within walking distance in the U.S., but we could drive to one, or buy produce in the supermarket that would be comparable to what we can get at the laiki here. The supermarket where we’d buy our groceries in America would have a parking lot, so I’d drive there during the week rather than having Jeff drive me or go without me. But for the most part, our lives here are very similar to what our lives would be in America.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t felt as inspired to blog lately—usually I blog about the things that are different, the things I need to process or figure out, the things I think people in the United States would find interesting. I’m not quite sure how to blog about regular life, when that regular life doesn’t feel as exotic to me as it did back when we lived in Egypt or Cambodia. But I do need to write, for my own sanity, for my own memory, for my own outlet.

So that’s my goal now—to write more often. How often will that be? I’m not sure. Once a week? Once every two weeks? Once a month? Whatever it is, I’m going to try at a bare minimum to make it more often than I’ve been doing … so maybe I’ll see you in two and a half months!

The Magic of Christmas

It’s our first Christmas in a new home.

Unlike the last two years, we decided not to buy a real tree. I just wasn’t up for cleaning the fallen pine needles this year. So we bought a big, full, beautiful fake tree—and despite feeling like I ought to like real ones more, I just can’t help it … I love my big, full, beautiful, fake tree so much more than I did the small, sometimes sparse, pretty, real ones that we’ve had the last two years. It’s big enough to hold all our ornaments AND have room for more! It makes me very happy, especially knowing that we don’t have to hope for an equally good one next year; it’s already ours.

This is the first time in our married lives—my first time since I lived with my parents—that we’ve had an actual fireplace and a real mantel. For the last two years, we hung our stockings from shelves we’d put up in our dining room. Before that, they were draped from the top of the china cabinet. I like the fireplace much more.

My husband even found a use for the random strand of multicolored garland that I’m not sure we’ve ever used for anything …

And he found a similar use for a strand of green garland.

Our Nativity set from Cambodia first was guarded by Leonidas …

then witnessed by various incarnations of Dr. Who and his enemies, as well as a little plastic sheep masquerading as part of the original set.

We spent a couple of hours one afternoon making paper snowflakes, which we hung on twine in our windows and across the pass through between the kitchen and dining room.

Jeff made a special one in honor of his abiding love for Star Wars.

We spent more than a couple of hours one afternoon making our first ever gingerbread house. We bought a kit for the gingerbread pieces, but I made the royal icing myself, and Jeff bought Twizzlers, M&Ms, and gummies for decoration.

We’ve watched Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, The Grinch That Stole Christmas, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. We were reminded of the real meaning of Christmas in the Veggie Tales show The Toy That Saved Christmas.

We’ve read a book about the real Saint Nicholas, and another about Christmas traditions around the world. We read The Polar Express, Lucy’s Christmas, and a customized version of The Night Before Christmas.

We’ve added magnetic pieces to our Nativity-themed Advent calendar and discussed the birth of Jesus.

Lexa made Christmas cards for our neighbors, which will be delivered today with the cookies we made and the traditional good luck charms Jeff bought.

Our plans for tomorrow include gifts in the morning and a potluck Christmas dinner with my husband’s coworkers in the afternoon and evening. I’m prepared with ham, crescent rolls (God bless the Naval Exchange!), baked macaroni and cheese, and a couple of different pies—all ready to just go in the oven tomorrow, no further work required. And of course, we can’t forget the gluhwein, which just needs to be heated in the slow cooker.

On the one hand, I have felt so busy, and so tired, and so stressed, that it doesn’t much feel like Christmas.

On the other hand, this feels more like Christmas than any of the last few years.

The rooms in which I spend most of my time look like Christmas, full of simple, beautiful decorations.

Rather than deciding that Christmas activities are too much effort this year, or deciding to do them but not committing enough to tell anyone, I took the simple step of planning Christmas activities for each day (sometimes as simple as a book to read or movie to watch) and putting a slip of paper in the Advent calendar for Alexa to find. No matter how tired or unmotivated I am, I know I can’t back out of the activity when she expects one each day. You better believe I’ll be prepared for it rather than face her disappointment—no “I’m sorry, sweetie, but we don’t have the materials to do that today” this year.

Christmas didn’t sneak up on me this year, as it usually does.

I think this is what Christmas feels like as a grown-up. There is no more just having the magic happen—that’s what Christmas feels like for kids. The adults are the ones who make the magic happen. It’s still magical, but it’s magic with an effort. That may be the real reason it hasn’t felt like Christmas so much the last few years … I kept expecting it to just happen, without the work, the way it did when I was a child. That isn’t the way it is anymore. It’s my turn to make the magic happen for my daughter.

In the process, I made the magic happen for myself.

May you and yours have a wonderful, magical, Merry Christmas.

Settling In

We’ve been in Greece now for around 3 weeks, and I think we’re settling in nicely. Jeff has been busy at work. He’s grateful that he has some overlap with the person he's replacing so that he can get up to speed without quite so much pressure.

Alexa and I are doing well. I like our housing, though it has its challenges as always. We estimate that it’s about the same size as our house in Kosovo, but it has a larger number of smaller rooms, and some of the design features make it not quite ideal. For example, there’s no good place in the living room for the TV because of the placement of doors, windows, and a fireplace, so we think we’re going to need to angle it into a corner that will still be a little tight. We’re also lacking wall space that would be suitable for hanging our art pieces, due to windows, doors, tall furniture, and a “special finish” that we aren’t allowed to disturb on the wall above the fireplace. It’s an interesting challenge to say the least, but we’ll figure it out. I’m planning to do a blog post about the house hopefully before too long, but unlike at previous posts, I want to wait until our things are here and set up so that the pictures will show the house as we’ll be living in it rather than as it is before we make it ours.

Our two furry family members have rejoined us. One week ago, Jeff flew back up to Prishtina, where Cleo and Isis had spent the summer with friends and our car had spent the summer in a friend’s driveway. Jeff left Athens on Friday night, overnighted in Istanbul, arrived in Prishtina Saturday morning, and was on the road with the car, the cats, and their stuff by noon. He arrived here around 9 o’clock that night. The cats seem to have adjusted pretty well to being back with us, and we’re happy to have our little family all together again.

Alexa and I each have found a friend. Our next door neighbor grew up in the same state as me, and she has a 4-year-old daughter. The mom has been an invaluable resource for me, taking me to a huge laikey (farmer’s market) and to the supermarket, in addition just to being a fun person to be around. Alexa bonded with the daughter the first time they met—even though Alexa called her simply “the little girl” for the first couple of days until her name stuck—and they enjoy playing together as often as they get the chance. Best of all: they’ve only been here for a couple of months longer than us, so unless something unexpected happens, they’ll be here until just a couple of months before we leave.

I’m slowly figuring out how to cook in Greece. The laikeys are wonderful, with fresh fruits and vegetables. It looks like I’ll finally learn what’s in season when, as options appear and disappear over the year. My neighbor took me to an awesome butcher shop where I was able to stock up on all the beef, chicken, and pork we’ll need for perhaps the next month (we have a good freezer). I still need to explore the supermarkets a bit more—I’ve only been to two, and in neither case did I really have time to go slowly and look at exactly what’s available; I was on a mission each time to get what I needed and get back by a certain time. It does seem, however, that there should be plenty of options here. Once all my kitchen stuff arrives, I should be able to put together good, healthy, familiar meals. Until then, I’m able to feed the family basic meals involving meat, vegetables, and minimal seasonings … and there is a wonderful Android app called “ClickDelivery” that enables us to see English menus and order a huge variety of delicious food to be delivered to our door. Our wallet and waistlines will appreciate the arrival of my slow cooker, though.

Speaking of, we’re hopeful that our stuff will arrive within the next couple of weeks. There were some snafus on the part of the shipping company in Kosovo that delayed our shipment, but those seem to have been worked out now. It has been reaffirmed that they cannot simply put the uncrated boxes in the truck, drive it down, and contract on their own with a company here to deliver those boxes—the boxes accordingly have been placed in lift vans, which will be put on the truck, driven down, and then delivered by a company that’s actually been approved by our security people. Yeah, we're silly like that ... we like to vet the people who have access to our stuff ...

We were able to start school at approximately the same time the international schools here started, though we didn’t get to start all subjects the same week. We had to wait for most of our curriculum to arrive—we have the history curriculum in digital format on the laptop, and we’d ordered history, geography, and literature books to arrive around the same time we did, so we’re on week 3 of our 36-week planned year for History, Geography, Literature, and Bible. We’re on week 2 of Art and Music, and we’re just starting Health, Science, Math, and Language Arts this week. The art and music curricula arrived at the same time as the other books we’d ordered, but I needed to review them a little, and I also didn’t want to add too much at once. Our remaining materials just arrived a few days ago, as we’d purchased them in the States but left them with friends to mail to us here—they wouldn’t fit in our suitcases.

School is going fairly well so far. Alexa is enjoying my literature selections—instead of following any particular curriculum for that, I’m pulling books from multiple reading lists. So far, she has not wanted to read any history books until we got started, and then she was interested. The science books, on the other hand, are a source of great fascination for her, especially the ones about animals. We haven’t officially started our curriculum yet, but that hasn’t stopped us from reading about 10 of our science books already. In addition to science, Alexa has been excited about music and art. She seems to like the math and language arts curricula we’re using, too, although that may be because they’re beginning at a level that’s very basic review for her. I’m hopeful that she’ll keep enjoying them once we hit the new material. I’ll try, in a few more weeks, to do a more comprehensive post about our curriculum choices for this year and how they’re going. I realize that I never did get around to finishing my series about kindergarten curriculum last year.

We're enjoying life in Greece so far. If I can find a way to take language classes (childcare is an issue), I'll enjoy it even more. We're looking forward to connecting with another homeschooling family once they return from vacation later this month. We also have plans to start visiting churches soon. We're settling in, figuring things out, and making connections. We're going to have a good three years here.

A Simple Christmas

Am I the only one who often finds Christmas Day to be vastly different from the peaceful, joyful celebration of Christ and family promulgated by heartwarming family movies and rosy Facebook posts? As a child, my family’s annual celebration felt like what I saw on those movies. It had the feel of a Norman Rockwell painting—lots of gifts, a huge meal with the family gathered around the table, smiling faces. Maybe there was stress for my parents, but I never saw it. Christmas was perfect and full of magic.

As an adult, my experience with Christmas Day has been different. The first year that I did not go home to my parents’ (and later, after the divorce, my mother’s) house was the year that we moved to Egypt. It was just Jeff and me. It was a good Christmas, with lots of church activities, time with friends, and relaxation, but it was different from what I grew up experiencing. Jeff and I had bought gifts for each other, and we had gifts that we received by mail from family, but the morning gift tradition felt sparse after a history of bounty—my parents went a bit (a lot) overboard in gifts for us kids, and it was the first year in my memory that the tree had gifts for fewer than five people under it; in later years, it had been gifts for eight or nine people. The tree just didn’t look right to me with so few gifts under it, and the feel of a sparse Christmas was even greater since we’d only put decorations on the top half of the tree due to our two new kittens having entirely too much fun with the lower branches and any ornaments within their reach.

Our first Christmas tree in Egypt

 The meal that first Christmas on our own also was very different from what I’d experienced in the past. For the first time, I was responsible for preparing Christmas dinner. I had started learning to cook only after our move, so I had a scant six months’ experience, and the thought of preparing a full, traditional Christmas dinner was overwhelming. Jeff and I had talked about it and agreed that our Christmas dinner would be his favorite meal, one that was at about the limits of my cooking abilities at that time: meatloaf (using his mother’s recipe), baked macaroni and cheese (again using his mother’s recipe), green beans, carrots, and mashed potatoes. Even that meal was a stretch for me, though it turned out that we didn't eat it on Christmas day at all; we'd eaten a big breakfast and weren't that hungry, so we just ate pizza for Christmas dinner! It was a good Christmas, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't as perfect as it should have been ... even though I had no idea what a perfect Christmas would look like without a big family, a huge pile of presents, and enough food to feed an army.

The years went by. My cooking skills improved. Our family grew to include Alexa. Our cats became slightly less interested in the ornaments on the tree. By the time we had our first Christmas in Cambodia, I was ready to recreate my childhood Christmases for Alexa.

Or so I thought.

I carefully combed through Amazon’s website, looking for perfect gifts for my one-year-old. We put up and decorated the tree—again, only the top half of it, though, after the first lower-placed ornament was batted around the tile floor by one of the cats. I planned a full Christmas dinner, consisting of those traditional staples that graced the tables in all the movies and television shows, none of which I'd ever cooked before. I carefully planned out my cooking schedule, based on what time we wanted to eat dinner so that we could make it to a dessert party later that day. I was confident in my cooking skills and my planning ability. I hadn’t counted on the stress of cooking several new dishes in one day with the goal of having them all done, hot, perfect, and ready to eat at a specific time.

That day ended up being incredibly stressful, as I tried to enjoy watching Alexa open and play with her gifts (which still felt like not enough to me) while keeping one eye on the clock so I could start cooking on time. Then I spent the rest of the day in the kitchen, hurrying because I’d underestimated how long it would take to do certain tasks or stressing because the brand new recipe wasn’t turning out quite like I thought it should. By the time we sat down to eat, I was exhausted, grumpy, and all around not in a pleasant mood. And dinner didn’t even look or taste as impressive as I’d hoped. (Note, though, that my blog post from that year put a positive spin on everything! Christmas must be perfect, after all.)

Christmas dinner in Cambodia

 

Jeff told me later that he’d prefer we eat sandwiches and have me be relaxed and happy rather than attempt to have the Norman Rockwell Christmas dinner with me stressed out and grumpy. I had to agree.

The next year, we went to the States for Christmas. It was less stressful in some ways and more stressful in others—I didn’t have to cook, and I had my big family Christmas with the fully-trimmed tree and lots of presents under it, but we also had to juggle “doing Christmas” with several branches of the family, none of whom wanted to celebrate together. Our typical R&R stress of trying to coordinate with all the people we want to see, all the things we want to do, all the shopping we need to do, all the logistics of returning to post with everything we brought with us plus all the things we bought or were given—all of that stress was magnified because it was Christmas. Plus a reckless driver caused a car accident and broke my mother’s arm, resulting in a great deal of pain and an unexpected surgery for her. So it was good to be home for Christmas, but it was stressful, even aside from my mom’s accident and surgery. Not the joyful and relaxed holiday for which I longed.

This year, we decided to go simple. We bought a real tree—my first one ever. Alexa excitedly helped decorate it, which meant that it had ornaments all the way down to the bottom, and somehow the cats didn’t bother it this year … maybe because of the motion-detector-activated cans of compressed air Jeff set up around its base J . Most of the other Christmas decorations stayed in their storage bins. We bought Alexa one big gift—a dollhouse—and one small gift—a family to live in the dollhouse. (It came mostly furnished, and Alexa’s grandmothers finished filling it as part of their Christmas gifts to her.) We bought small gifts for each other. I planned a traditional, but simplified, Christmas dinner, which consisted only of dishes that I’ve cooked before: pre-cooked honey baked ham, candied carrots, green beans, Irish soda bread (as the commissary was out of crescent rolls, which Jeff prefers over any other bread in the world), pumpkin pie, and birthday cake for Jesus. We agreed that the whole day would be played by ear.

This year's tree and Alexa's dollhouse

We woke up when Alexa woke us. We had her wait for just a minute while Daddy got the camera ready, then went downstairs with her and allowed her to open her gifts. We had a surprise video call from Jeff’s mom at what turned out to be the perfect time, so she was able to see her granddaughter open the gifts she had sent … as well as the gift she’d sent for Jeff, since I wasn’t paying close enough attention and Lexa opened it before I noticed. We made sure to take pictures of Alexa opening her gifts so we could put them on Facebook for the givers to see. Other than one gift—a Play Doh set that would have been messy—we allowed her to open her toys completely (box and all) and play with them before moving on to the next. We made sure she knew who had given her each gift, as an exercise in gratitude.

After all the gifts had been opened, I made breakfast while Jeff and Alexa played with her new toys. We ate a leisurely meal, and then I started preparations for Christmas dinner. We had no set time when we wanted to eat, no place to go, no one coming over. I’d planned out in what order I’d cook everything so that things would be ready and at the right temperature at the same time, but it didn’t matter what time that turned out to be. There were no surprises and very little stress. When dinner was ready, we ate it, all of us content and relaxed and happy to be together. It was by far the most joyful, relaxed Christmas I’ve experienced as an adult.

Are there things that we “should” have done differently for Christmas Day this year? Yep, no doubt. Are there things that I’d like to do differently next year? Absolutely. For one, I want to incorporate the real meaning of Christmas into our family traditions in more ways than just having a birthday cake for Jesus. And I’d love to follow the more traditional church calendar with a season dedicated to Advent (which I did to some degree this year, but not as deeply as I’d like) and a 12-day season dedicated to Christmas, rather than just one day. These are things I’ll think about and discuss with Jeff and plan for next year. But overall, I’m very happy with the way things went this year.

We found the Christmas playbook that works for our family: Keep it simple and relaxed. Don’t try to make it television- or Pinterest- or even Facebook-worthy. Recognize that my family now is different from my family of origin, and it is not necessary or even desirable to recreate my childhood Christmases. Allow for flexibility throughout the day, and remember the most important thing—Christmas is about love, not perfection.