The language

 
The summer after I finished kindergarten, I read Little House in the Big Woods. That's my go-to reading anecdote, and it has been relevant in a surprising number of conversations in my life.

*Oliver and I discuss our childhood educations* - "You started school when you were 7? You didn't read until you were 8? I read Little House in the Big Woods the summer after kindergarten!"

*Discussing lifelong love of reading with friends* - "I can remember the first "real" book I read; Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods."

It's a tiny detail I look back on fairly often. Sitting in the family van on a long vacation road trip, nothing to do for hours and hours... I can picture the seat reclined back, and remember my mounting excitement as I realized "Yes! I am doing this!" A switch was flipping and a whole new world was opening up for me.

It's such a good feeling, that switch flipping.

I've got a bit of that going on right now, actually. I'm 150 pages into Eat, Pray, Love. It's an honest-to-goodness grownup book, and it's in German. I am reading a real book in German. I don't understand every word, but I am in it 100% and giddy at how much I can do. Yes! I am doing this! Is this what it was like back on that road trip? Did I miss words in every paragraph, but piece it all together and teach myself new things out of nothing but my own excitement?

I had this glorious moment somewhere around page 100. Liz and her boyfriend had been having problems, and the third paragraph on the page opened with her boyfriend proposing a "crazy idea." What? What was this crazy idea? I wanted to know, but only got half of it on the first pass. Okay, so read it again. And again. And again. What's this word, "miteinander?" Hm... Liz and her partner weren't sleeping "miteinander" anymore...

Wait.

mit = with
ein = one
ander = other / (another?)

With one another! With one another! They weren't sleeping with each other anymore! High five.

Wait. There are so many other words...

Ineinander (Intertwining one another)
Hintereinander (behind one another)
Voneinander (from one another)

I am a long way from fluent, but where I am right now is fun. I know enough to start making all sorts of connections, and that excitement can only inspire me to do more, right? Maybe soon a whole new world will open up? Feels like it's close.

And just like that, it was easier

      
We didn't do a lot of traveling last year. On the one hand: duh, of course. We had a three year old and a one year old, we had just moved overseas and had to assemble a household, we were brand new to Frankfurt and had to orient ourselves in many ways...

But on the other hand, what a shame. As I've said before, we're not here forever. (Another shame, but that's a whole other post) We'll probably never live here again (at least, not until the kids go to college?), and thus it will never again be this easy to travel around Europe. To "waste" a whole year of that time not traveling, then... shame.

A totally understandable, one might even say necessary, shame.

Still a shame.

Okay, we didn't do nothing. There was a long weekend in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Nuremberg:







There were a couple day trips to towns on the Rhine river:



We took visiting family down to Bavaria:



And we spent a week and a half in Italy at Lake Como.







That's pretty ambitious on its own, isn't it. Okay, when I look at all these photos it seems like a lot. Still, it was much less than we had imagined. Germany has so many long weekends! In addition, Oliver gets SIX WEEKS of vacation a year! We're not here forever...

When it came down to it though, I didn't want to travel last year. It had become too overwhelming. There were two kids, and two young kids required a lot of work. Bedtime was painful, our sightseeing options were limited, and the need to constantly keep an eye on the baby and comfort her when she inevitably started crying about something trivial... it wasn't fun.

Whatever. So we don't travel much while we're here. You can't have every experience, so let's just focus on what works for us (staying in Frankfurt) and make it fun. There's no shortage of German culture here, so no loss.

Then, in February, we went to Cologne for Karneval. It's Germany's Mardi Gras, and Oliver booked us a trip as my Christmas gift. Mardi Gras? With kids? I was skeptical and hopeful at the same time. Maybe it would be a craptastic weekend, and maybe it would be fun. I was fully prepared for either option.

Turns out it was the latter! Nils and Liv caught parade candy by the sackful, and Oliver and I put on "costumes" (we don't reeeally do costumes) and had a bona fide cultural experience. We kept it simple, and were grateful for whatever we got out of the weekend. Everyone was happy.







The memory of Cologne was still with me then, when in April Oliver had to go to Munich for work. Hey, do you guys want to come down a day later? We can spend the weekend there together. I thought about it, about rustling the kids onto a train and riding alone with them for 3 and a half hours, about navigating a city for a couple days... it sounded like something I could do. It appealed to me, even.

On the ride down, we shared the "family compartment" with another woman and her two sons. She was also traveling alone, and her boys were three and one. I watched her with them, watched her constantly holding / attending to her one year old. She pulled things out of his mouth, held his hands while he walked unsteadily on a moving train, rocked him back and forth when he got tired and fussy. I then looked at my own kids, coloring, playing with trains, and rolling around on the floor while howling like wolves (God bless the sliding, soundproof door on that family compartment!)

Thunderbolt from the sky: things are so much easier than they were last year, because we don't have a baby anymore! Liv doesn't eat dust off the floor anymore. Both kids go to bed like, well, kids now. Our options in any given place are still limited, but Liv's ever-increasing autonomy gives us so much extra space, it feels like someone has come into a room full of windows and flung each one open.

We had a great time in Munich. Like Cologne, we kept things simple. Just like in Cologne though, everyone got something out of the trip.

I think we might start doing a little more of this stuff. We're not here forever, you know.