Get on the road.

So we rode our bikes.

We made around 90 kilometres last weekend, over the course of two days, with breaks in between, but still by far the biggest trip we´ve ever done. I wanted to cancel last minute, because it was cold and wet and I really wasn´t in the mood, but my men - especially the younger ones - were really excited, and everytime I tried to reason with them, Miro told me "We´ll pull this through!" - and so we did. 

Part of the trip we took a train, but we did cross the Dutch/German border by bike, and though my sons started to be tired at that point, they really liked hopping on the line of the former border, back and forth, shouting "Now I´m in Germany - now I´m in the Netherlands - now I´m in Germany again - and back to the Netherlands!" because they were really fascinated by this crossing-frontiers thing. 

See the clothes we are wearing? Yeah. This is late in May. And still feels like early March. But whatever. 

As soon as we crossed the border, it got better. We did not have a real map, or plan, but Dutch people are the most helpful folks, so it wasn´t hard to find our way. One time, a friendly elderly couple even rode with us for about an hour or so, just to show us the quickest and easiest path to our campsite.

So we did camp. 

I had found a beautiful campsite - according to the owner it´s built on the grounds of an old monastry, and therefore the oldest recreational park of the Netherlands, and actually there were some ruins amongst the tents. Other than that, they just had an amazing amount of kids-amusements, playgrounds, bike-trails (yes!),  and a swimming pool, and my kids would have loved to stay there for eternity.

And cuddling up, feeling the warmth of five people in cozy sleeping bags, that´s nice for sure. There are so many, many birds you can hear. And I like to wake up with a cold nose and the smell of green all around me. 

And as soon as the sun came out for, like, five seconds...

...we ditched our clothes and jumped into the pond. 

We saw a horse tournament, and we ate cheap, greasy indonesian food, and we met many rabbits, sqirrels, cows, but Miro did not manage to catch a rabbit to take it home. Now, what a pity. And of course, we read: 

And now we´re back home, and know that we can do it: Make 50 kilometres a day, carry all the luggage, and cross borders with our bikes. So, in case the summer ever comes, we can keep this in mind - there´s an option of spending our entire summer vacation on bikes. Right now, looking out of the window into the pouring rain, I wouldn´t mind riding somewhere warmer than Holland, though. It´s been a while since we´ve last been in Turkey :)

Music: 

Bastille is an awesome band I just discovered, and they seem worth a closer examination!

Cardgames, bruises, friends, make art

So, just before we´re leaving for that crazy weekend trip (riding our bikes 50 kilometres through the rain, to then freeze our asses off in a tent in Holland), I´ll give you a quick update:

We´ve been handdrawing a Harry Potter Card game:

My sons have recently been enthusiastic about those trump-card games. They have a Star Wars one, and a dinosaur one, and one with poisonous animals (a huge favorite).
I love them, because they teach them to compare numbers,  and to read, and to memorize...so, they are super educative. 1000 mommie points to Gryffindor, plus, they keep them educated.
However, it´s been cold and rainy over here, and as you know, Harry Potter is like a religion in this family. We pretend to be atheists, but in fact, all our kids get the Harry Potter books read to them starting at the age of five, and by seven, they need to have them memorized and be ready to quote them at any given time.
They are.
And we do have the large Hogwarts banner in our kitchen. 
So... I could have bought a Harry Potter trumps game - they are probably around 5 Euro on amazon.
But isn´t it so much nicer to hand-illustrate them, and think about the different ratings, and debate which characters we still need?
Some of my favourites are

...Professor Bims, drawn by Mehmet (the ghost who teaches history, for the few poor of you who´ve just seen the movies), or

Sybil Trewlawney, drawn by Ronja, or

Draco and Voldemort - my team evil. The ratings were decided by Mehmet and Miro - I´m really not sure if it´s adequate that Voldemort has 4 of 5 points for Quidditch, but what the heck.
Alltogether, we made a total of 36 cards so far, but I don´t think we´ll stop there.

Wanna see Harry, Ron and Hermione?

 

This is my Ronnie, with her two best friends. They´ve been playing Harry, Ron and Hermione (amongst other things - I think they´ve also been Sam, Frodo and Pippin), and it really fits the beautiful relationship they´ve devoloped, now that their time in primary school is coming to a close. Ah, I love my two sons in law ;)

We had Couchsurfers over again: 

 

An Italian mom with her son, who was a perfect match for my twins.Oh, it was so bright and shiny having them here - it´s a good thing they´ll come back next week, on their way back home. Mehmet, Miro and her Nico communicated so well, and while the kids played, we cooked like an italian family - I made pasta and she made Polenta and I made cupcakes and she made almond cookies and I made salad and she made cheese with mustardo, the most delicious thing I´ve ever eaten, and it was loud and crowded around our table and she told stories about the community-living experiences she has and her night in a russian prison. 

That´s why I love Couchsurfing.

I got a job today!
Like, I mean, a paid job. Like, a four-digits Euro paid job, even if it´s in the smaller four digits region. After the summer holidays, when my sons start school, I´m a working mom.
I didn´t apply for anything, but I hang around in the smokers corner behind school for long enough, so they finally decided to take me in ;)
And I´m really, really excited, because I know I´ll be doing what I´m really good at, well, in fact, what I have been doing for 3 years now, only I´ll finally get a proper payment. My payment. Feels damn good!
The only thing I´m scared of is that I might not find the time to continue writing my books, and I do not want to give that up.

Shortly after I received those news - I sat in class, teaching calculating with Euros - Hermione Ronnie came in, because she´d had an accident in sports:

A rope fell on her head. A rope! Must have been freakishly high, that rope. So, since she felt pretty wobbly after that, we cancelled the scouts camp she´d planned for this weekend, to keep her here for another night. I´ve read her all the child-proof chapters of my books, and she gave me some helpful hints for my fuure plot.
Now she allready seems quite fine, so I think she can just come and camp with us tomorrow.

And you know what Neil Gaiman says:
Make Art.

So she did:

It came with a written interpretation:
The red symbolizes an open wound, coming from the stone she´s adjusting with her hand on the small dowel. The yeollow thingies are a sun going down, and a falling, yellow cloud, symbolizing downfall in general. And there´s an owl. Because she likes owls. And I´m not making this stuff up. She´s just exactly like that. Very... um... poetic.

While we´re talking about poetic and creative conversion from pain into art - let me just show you my video of the day:

Biffy Clyro -- Opposite - MyVideo
Ahhhhhh!
I love love love their videos, always. Even when Simon Neil doesn´t go shirtless. I love how they are totally over-the-top dramatic. How they show this literal walking-away-from-a-carcrash-relationship. And how they include the warped tree from the album cover. And all the glittering shards. I loved this song even before the album release, when I could only find bad quality acoustic versions on youtube, but now, with this video, I love it even more.

Eva´s on her scouts camp, and right when she returns, she can pack her bags again, because she´s leaving for France, where she´ll be staying for two weeks. Tim got his vaccs, because he´s going to Asia next month, for four long weeks. And Ronnie will go on a class trip, too, so it´ll be just me and the boys. Which is lovely, too. And I´m missing my best friend. That, as well. I wish she was here so I could just debate the latest Game of Thrones episode with her. Sir Jaime´s a hero, see?

And now... well, it´s late, and i have to cycle to Holland tomorrow. I´ll smoke one last cigarette, and I might check into this book of mine, and then it´s... Good Night :)

We are the Partyshakers!

Okay, first off - I´m really sorry for referring to that super silly song and putting it into your head. If you´re singing it now for the rest of the day, despite yourselves, that was completely unintended :)

However, I found it quite fitting to go along with this post, which is a) about shaking and b) about the party we had last Saturday.

The shaking part:

We finally made slushies!

That´s one of those pinterest projects I guess most of you have allready seen, and I´ve always wanted to try it. Yesterday, we did.

Basically, you make little cool packs, by putting salt water (quite a saturaded solution) into tiny freezer bags. Leave them in the freezer overnight, so they become nicely hard.

Then, put your tiny cool pack in another plastic bag - be careful the bag with the salt-water solution doesn´t open - add the juice/water/sirup whatever liquid you desire, and SHAKE!

If you run around shaking for a while, your juice will freeze to the consitency of slush ice, which is, literally, pretty cool.

Ronja took far too much juice for her little cool pack, so it didn´t work out for her, but Miro achieved quite a nice result, which he photograped himself:

 

And it is definetely fascinating to witness liquid transform into solid within minutes. 

I wish I had seen this project before last Saturday, I so would have included it into our kid´s party! But I have two more parties to go this summer, so I´m sure I´ll find a possibility to try this in a group. 

So  - officially my sons have been six years old since January. Only, we were hoping to have a nice summer party, since it´s a lot easier to occupy 12 wild 5-6 yearolds out in the sun than it is in January, inside. 

So we planned their birthday party for May... not expecting May to be almost as cold and dark as January. 

However, we had the party. And I wasn´t really in the mood. I did prepare a nice buffet, 

and I did prepare some games - I had a little pool, and waterguns for everyone - but when it started pouring Saturday afternoon, I felt cheated. 

Luckily... 

...there is Tim, who came up with the cutest adventure path, leading over terrible bridges...

...and into the forest, where dangerous snakes live (there are no snakes in our forests, but we had antidote - lemon juice - and the kids got really excited!), and I have my Eva, who pretended to be the monster in the forest who needs some leaves for her tea, and my Ronja, who pretended to be the little monster who needed the kids to buid her a new home.

And eventually, even the sun came up, and the party ended exactly as I had planned - with all the kids soggy wet jumping around in our garden, getting buckets and ewers out, and I gave out tons of old shirts and skirts and shorts from my girls, and later, all the moms sat in our garden, chatting away in italian and arabic and greek, and it was, actually, just pretty. 

So that was that. 

And here´s some music:

Just add sugar.

Sometimes, I dream of this self-sufficient life, close to nature, where you produce all the food you need yourself.
I´m not exactly sure why, because when I think about it closer, I realize that this kind of life would cut off huge chunk of time from my crafting/writing/reading/piano routine, which I surely do not want.
But we can play-pretend, right? Like little children, playing mommie and daddy, my husband and I can play-pretend to be farmers.
So, within the last weeks, we planted potatoes, zuchini, lettuce, physalis, sweet pea, and several herbs. We allready do have some raspberries, cherries, apple, plums and blackberries in our garden, but since this spring was pretty cold, I´ll guess we still have to wait a while to harvest them. It is, by no means, enough to live on it, even if we added the bees and sheep we´re sometimes, when we´re giddy, like to ponder about.
What you can, however, harvest, is woodruff.
And I happen to have a friend who is a) a cook, and b) has a garden with woodruff in it and c) shared with me! :)
So...

...I made woodruff-syrup!

And let me tell you, this stuff is super-delicious - not to mention it makes your kitchen smell heavenly.
You take a huge amount of sugar (1 kilo), mix it with 2 litres of water, and bring it to boil, until the sugar dissolves. Now you have gluey, runny syrup.
Now, and only now, you throw in the woodruff. If you add it while it´s still boiling, it could give you headaches. My friend found a website that suggested to smoke it, I do not recommend this either (though, we might, one day, secretly try it, when the kids are sleeping...psst!)
Ahem.
However, we only want the delicious, sweet, woody aroma, which we get, by leaving the woodruff in the syrup for about a night. We also added the juice of 3 lemons.
The beautiful green color doesn´t come from the woodruff itsself - I added foodcoloring, to make my syrup resemble the store-bought one. My friend went all natural and didn´t add any color, your syrup would then look slightly yellowish - but taste, of course, the same.
I made four bottles, but could only take a picture of one, since we gave all the others away or drank them within two days:

Now, ain´t this pretty?
Just in case you have now idea what to do with it - you drink it mixed with water :) If you take water with gas, it trumps every sodapop-stuff you can buy in the stores :)

This success motivated me to keep canning. Remember, the dream about self-sufficiency. Back to the roots and all that stuff. Well, the strawberries and rhubard were store-bought, but at least i did the canning myself:

Nah, dontcha wanna lick that spoon?

I canned 12 glasses of jam today, so we have gifts to give away for christmas... except I know allready plenty of friends who always share their homemade food with us, or are just nice, and my sons go through two pots of jam a week, if I let them, so... christmas? Who am I kidding?

But canning is fun, and I´ll can a lot more in the near future!!!

And did I show you my sprouts? No?

Glasses with sprouts in them became a regular installement on my kitchen windowsill, since everyone in this family loves sprouts, and that way, we never run out of them. Not exactly farming, but hey, it´s the right direction, isn´t it? :)

Other than that, I spent the day cleaning the porch, errecting a party tent, decorating the garden and baking three cakes so far - we´re throwing a party for our twins tomorrow, with estimated 15 kids and about 10 grown-ups. So, technically, I´ve still got lots of work to do in my kitchen... but we´re having a friend over, who´s spending some nights in our house between his exams. Right now, he and my husband are drinking beer and laughing, and I think I´ll join them on a walk outside. I feel more like breathing some fresh air... and maybe, just maybe, collecting some elderflowers... to make some more syrup, preferably tonight :)

Music:

Lately, I´ve been drowning myself in that song. I find it astonishingly beautiful. I love the lyrics, and I love her pianoplaying - I try to immitate it, but fail miserably - and I love the enthusiastic drummer, and I love the drama, the built-up, and, oh, just look at the video - they even have a dark-haired cello player!

Indian bread and equality.

This is chapati, and I made this. And it´s really, really delicious. And simple.

I am very thankful we´re living in this diverse, plural, multicolored region - in each class we have kids from at least 5 different nations, and I think that in my son´s kindergarden, there are kids with parents from more than 10 different countries. For my kids, the concept of "foreigners" doesn´t exist, and I believe this should go for every kid. They only know friend, or not friend, but it doesn´t even occur to them to ponder about such things as nationalities. And I love to mingle, too.

So, I recently befriended a really sweet Indian mom. She´s slightly younger than I am, and one reason we bacame friends is that we both love to talk English, and hardly ever find an opportunity here. She wants to know all about our german educational system, which I can tell her, and about playing music, which I can tell her about, too, and all about how to find a job, which I certainly can´t tell her. I want to know all about her Indian culture - she only moved here a couple of years ago, and she fascinates me by telling me about the Indian cast system, about her parents having servants at home and huge snakes in the garden, and her marriage being arranged, but allright. But generally, we´re not that different. In fact, our conflicts and interests pretty much overlap. So we love to sit in the warm spring sun and talk, and talk for hours, while drinking spiced tea and chapati.
And then she tells me about her encounters with racism, which occur about weekly.
And it makes me deeply ashamed and extremely sad to learn that, unlike our children, there are still people - mainly old people, but some young, too - who feel the need to stop a young mom on the street and ask her when she´s "going back home" and "why she´s taking away jobs from the german people".
I bet the people who do this are the same a**holes who stop me on the street to ask me why I dare overpopulate the planet when they see me with my four kids, our who´ve never seen a mom babywear and immediatly need to tell me this is unhealthy and only done in Africa.
Doesn´t make it better. And since my kids are out of the babywearing-stage, and I´m mostly only around with my twins, since my girls do their own stuff, those incidents stopped for me. And they were never that regular to begin with.
I can´t even imagine how annoying it must be to live with this kind of everyday-racism, how hurtfull.We have a close friend who is equally qualified in his field as my husband is, who goes from one job interview to the next and doesn´t get the job, because he´s of turkish origin. He was born here, and I never even think of him as turkish, but apparently, other people decide to take this as a main criteria. And it makes me so angry.
I like my country.
Overall, I think we´re a pretty open society, and life is good. Sometimes, Couchsurfers ask me whether I think it´s "safe" over here in Germany, and I honestly tell them that it´s the safest place I could imagine, no matter what skin color you have, and that my people are tolerant and open minded.
And mostly, we are.
Whereever I went, whether it was Britain or Poland or France or Russia or Poland or the Netherlands or Tunesia or Egypt or Portugal, the people I met were... people. I met people in Poland who wouldn´t want to talk to me and I almost got raped, and I met people who let me sleep in their master bedroom and taught my kids how to sing in polish and treated me like family. Dutch people greeted me with "Heil Hitler", and other dutch people showed me their cool playgrounds and invited me into their homes. British hooligans once spoiled a night of midnight swimming in the sea by beating up my friends, but I can´t even begin to tell the many lovely, heartfelt encounters I´ve had with British people that made me fall for their country.
What I want to say is that... racism is, despite our history of extreme racism, not an exclusive german phenomenon.
But that doesn´t make it any more acceptable.
But I do believe - hope, and believe - that for the next generation, for our children, this kind of behaviour will slowly dissapear. We connect through the internet. We have globalization.
And I love to embrace this in my life, every. single. day.
I just wanted to tell you this.

And give you the recipe for the Indian bread, right?

When I called my friend to ask her for the recipe, she laughed at me, since there is none.
You simply take whole wheat flour, any amount, and some spoons of oil, just any oil, and enough water to give the dough the consistency of solid clay. Keep mixing and kneading until it feels about right, as soon as you gather some experience, it shouldn´t take long.
Then form little balls with your hands, and flatten them - my friend has this super cool, thin wooden dowel she uses - I took an empty soda-bottle.
Heat the pan pretty hot, without taking any oil, put your bread in there for 2 minutes, flip it (we use only our hands - if you´re quick, you don´t burn yourself!), and you´re good to go :)

Have some german Kräuterbutter with it :)


Music:

The very dangerous project nobody wanted us to do...

...but we did it anyway :)

If you´re from the States, and a little bit into craft blogs, then this is probably nothing new to you - I guess you´ve heard about etching cream a dozen times.

If you´re from Europe (I don´t know about the other parts of the world), then this might strike you as super weird - taking dangerous chemicals to etch glass.

The thing is, my friend and I, we like craft blogs, and we like experimenting, plus, she has a sillhoutte-cutter she wants to put to use.
I hve allready tried to engrave glass, which is incredibly hard, at least when you want to achieve results other than childrens drawings. When we read about etching cream, we knew we wanted to work with it.

All our other friends, however, are chemists. Okay, not all, but since we live in the town where aspirin comes from, I could name at least 10 people without blinking who work somewhere in the chemistry field. And when they heard of our plans, we got some severe reactions.
Apparently, etching cream contains hydroflourid acid, and as soon as we announced our plans, we began to get phonecalls about all the very serious consequences this could have, from etching down to our bones without even feeling it, to, yes, even death. If you put your hand into the container of cream and leave it there for 20 minutes, it could mean your end!

Which only tickled our rebellious side. No risk, no fun, one could say. FInally a craft project that involves a little adventure!
Send the kids out into the garden, roughly push dinner aside and get started. I´m not sure we even wore gloves - at least I didn´t.
And, please note, I did not tag this as an official tutorial :) If you were ever to repeat this, I´m sure you´d take all the reasonable precautions.

However,here are our results:

...a Taylor Swift drinking glass for Eva, one with an owl for Ronnie...

...Yoda and Darth-I-am-your-father-Vader for Miro and Mehmet...

...and the angelic power rune and a bike for me and Tim. I like the Swiftie-glass best, I must admit.

All done in an afternoon.

The really hard thing (despite calming our friends) about this project was to get the stencils - it took me and my friend around three hours of relativly concentrated work in front of the computer (hardly any chatting!), during which I searched images we could use, while she prepared them for her silhoutte.
Typing "silhoutte" into google is a good start, but you´ll also have to take care that your lines don´t get too thin or intricate, and that the design still works on a small surface like the one on a drinking glass. 
Next time we´ll do this, we´d apply the etching cream a little thicker - as you can see, there are parts where the glass isn´t thoroughly etched, but for a first go, we were fully satisfied, and I´m really thankfull my friend let me play along on this project, especially since time was precious.
Even more than the finished result, I loved the process of working together. And the fries.

Music for the day:

I listened to a lot of songs this week, and I had an especially depressing one on repeat all the time. However, I then found this gem of accapella art, including Tyler Ward (whose groupie I am, anyway), and it completely lifted my mood. I didn´t even like the original, but this cover makes me smile from ear to ear - and my counter says this is now the 37th time I´m listening to it - today.
So I´m now dancing away to bake some blueberry cake :)

Hello.

Nice to see you around here.