I posted a version of this over at And Sew We Craft (where I blog weekly), where I focus on crafting, but this version will explore all the aspects of our day, and go into depth about how they differ from day to day.
The day I’ve documented in Tuesday 14th May 2013.
All our days looks fairly similar except for weekends. Luke doesn’t work on the weekends so we go and explore and see things. Sometimes during the week we go off places too, but only if Luke can afford the time not to work. Usually these are bigger trips also, like our trip to Milan when we were in Italy, or our trips to the Dead Sea when we were in Israel.
Here goes nothing…
7:01am // Wake up. Lior has usually been awake for a little while, and therefore I find myself waking up in a pile of books, bottles, cups, and toys each morning. It’s quite exciting. Once we get out of bed I try to find something for breakfast. This definitely involves getting my creative hat on as things are a bit… different here. We have been having lots of pancakes because they’re filling and easy and relatively healthy. I make them with coconut milk or just with water. Sometimes we have toast with peanut butter or avocado. I can not find any peanut butter in Budapest (I’m sure it is there somewhere…) and I have used the last of the stuff we brought over from Italy.
8:12am // Luke has gone off to a cafe to work by now, so Lior and I play with some toys. This also involves using my thinking hat as we ran out of exciting alternate uses for his toys about two countries ago. I wish these toys would fall out the window and get run over by a truck so that I could buy some new ones. We have no room in our luggage for more.
We have added a few new toys as we’ve travelled, usually things that aren’t made as toys. Here you can see a spare belt of mine, a necklace, and a plastic egg carton. Sometimes I wish Lior was just a LITTLE bit bigger and could play sorting games etc. One of Lior’s favourite non-toys is my old wallet filled with coins from different countries. We also put old metro and tram tickets into the card slots. He enjoys just pulling the coins out and putting them into your hand, then putting them back again.
9:47am // Today we go for a walk in the morning to visit Luke and get a lemonade. They make good lemonades here which, as far as I can tell are just lemon juice, cut up citrus, and mineral water.
We don’t usually visit Luke is the day as it is usually too much effort to try and pacify Lior in this particular hotel bar/cafe area. Sometimes we do walk with Luke to the hotel and then walk back, or if we are going out for dinner we might meet him after work. This particular place has an all you can eat dessert buffet with unlimited champagne and a one free coffee, all for a very reasonable price, so Luke is in heaven.
10:37am // Lior is asleep (he falls asleep between 10:30 and 11 – I try to stretch it till 11 if I can) and I have 1 1/2 to 2 hours of “me” time. This is usually the time I use to do some creative things.
10:44am // Today I use the tulips I got for Mother’s Day as my inspiration colour for my paints. All I have with me is a visual journal and some cheap watercolour paints from Big Dub, and I get frustrated pretty quickly with how the paper crinkles and peels from the water. I give up easily and do some blogging and work in my Scrapbooking store – Cinnamon Scrapbooking. In this time I usually blog, journal, paint, or read the bible.
12:41pm // Lior is awake and we are both hungry. I should have done some grocery shopping the other day so that we had food. I suck at food shopping over here. We buy some chips and crackers which is meant to be a snack, but we basically eat it as lunch. We go for another little walk, as there is not much else to do, and like I said above, we are sick of our toys.
Ah yes, food. While we’re travelling it’s a little hard to decide what to eat. I have realised that we eat a lot of food with lots of herbs and spices, so the food I am cooking seems quite… bland. It’s not really worth buying a whole pantry worth of herbs and spices, as you can imagine. Though, if I had of known we would be away for so long, and that it would be so easy to take food from country to country I could have bought some the first week in Jerusalem and it would certainly have been justified for 3 months! But where to put them in the luggage…
Some things we usually have for lunch include:
Leftover savoury piklets from last nights dinner (we do corn, beans, zucchini variations), toast, fruit plate, toasted sandwich (sometimes just toast with warmed up corn kernals on it), carrot, pasta etc.
It’s pretty boring. Usually I pick at stuff, and maybe have some toast or a toasted sandwich or nothing. Not very healthy, I know. I have ZERO motivation to do anything. I am not a very good traveller.
1:53pm // We are back at the same park again, which is right outside the door to our apartment. Lior plays in here for a while, but there is no one else in the playground so it’s a bit boring for him. He likes slides, and this time he slid down quite fast and landed sitting up in the sand! He wasn’t at all bothered. Lol. Usually around this time we are in the apartment playing with toys, or doing some chores like laundry. We usually visit the park from 4 till 6 (after 5 is best) as this is when it is FULL of kids. Lior has really grown a lot during these times when he can interact with other children. He is the only one who doesn’t wear shoes, and the other kids his age just seem to sit by their parents, so he is usually one of the youngest there.
5:46pm // We bought dinner earlier tonight, and I quickly put the rest of the clothes on the clothes line before Shavuot starts at sun down. The electrician comes today as well to fix our power and oven and tells us we are lucky to be alive and not burnt in a house fire because of the wires that short circuited. Anyway, we eat our Thai for dinner, and then pop in the bath for a play/wash. We do the bedtime thing and by 7:30pm Lior is in bed and asleep.
Usually dinner looks very similar to lunch!! Sometimes we make taco salad, or pasta with meatballs (also good as lunch leftovers), or some sort of hearty salad. I feel like when we were in Israel I prepared pretty good food, but the first trimester really made me hate food and I haven’t really got my groove back…
8:15pm // More free time! Usually Luke works in the evenings, but as it is Shavuot he isn’t working. We do some separate things for a while and I work on fixing the painting I started earlier. I am not terribly happy with it, but Luke likes it. After this we read a bit of the bible, as is customary on Shavuot.
9:17pm // We settle down to watch a movie – 2 Days in New York. We have seen the prequel – 2 Days in Paris, and this one doesn’t disappoint. While we watch the movie I write out a few ideas for an collaborative art project I thought of while I was lying on the bed waiting for Lior to go to sleep. When the movie’s over we go to bed and start it all again the next day!
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So that it what it is like for us (mostly me, I did write it after all…) in Budapest, Hungary. Not very exciting, and to be quite frank, rather boring and lonely! It is nice on the weekends when we get out and do stuff, and also when Lior and I go for our daily walks. As you can see, I have quite a lot of spare time, which I can only credit to forcing Lior into a once a day nap. I say “force” but it was more like just setting him up for what he really needed and wanted. I knew he was ready as he wasn’t going to sleep for his early nap easily, and his afternoon nap was getting terribly late (and both were short – about 40 minutes each), which meant that he wasn’t going to bed until our bedtime, 9:30/10pm and that was driving me a little bit batty. Now he sleeps for LONGER over all, just because I changed his naps to one a day. I had tried to change them a few weeks ago when he showed signs of perhaps being ready, but it failed, so we just waited, and now it’s working! In the two weeks that he’s been having one nap a day he has had two days where he’s had two naps. Usually our fault if we’ve had him out late the evening before, or he has been difficult in the night for some reason.
As a side note, isn’t it interesting how quickly you can get accustomed to sleep again! I mean, when we were in Israel Lior’s sleep was so bad I nearly made Luke book tickets home for the VERY NEXT DAY. He was waking up a crazy amount, and we were so tired and confused, and basically took shifts to get through the nights. Not cool. Then we decided to really start co-sleeping with him, and it took a few weeks, but we all got use to it, and he started sleeping through the whole night again, as we were accustomed to back home! If he wakes up in the night now I am like “What is happening?! Go to sleep! It’s night time.”, and usually if he does wake up he just wriggles around or cries out (bad dreams I assume), and I just cuddle him in close and he goes back to sleep. So nice! Sorry this is completed unrelated to the post, I am just babbling and will stop now…!
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