Soccer Fever

I am sorry I have not been able to post much this summer. Too many things to do. Between gardening, fruit picking and -processing, and watching soccer matches it's tough to get anything else done around here. I grew up playing soccer and watching it on TV with my dad. It's tough to explain to Americans since many people don't care about soccer at all.

Here is my photo of little Sophie making her first attempts at kicking the soccer ball around.

I promise she is not a biter. Even when the other doll friends are mean to her she finds a way to work things out peacefully!

Do you watch the WorldCup? Even if you are not a fan - you may find the stories and drama around it entertaining.Some games are boring. I admit it. But then there is lots of drama. Just imagine a grewn man biting another one. It's too bad for his team.

I also love to listen to the different accents of the commentators on ESPN. There is this one British dude whose comments make me laugh so hard. I hope the US and Germany will make it to the next round. Of course, it is much more fun if your team goes on!

Cherie Sophie

We have been picking lots of cherries over the last couple of days. First sweet cherries at the neighbor's house which we ate up right away. Next came the pie cherries in our backyard. I find the job of picking cherreis very enjoyable.

 

Reminds me of long summers as a child in Germany spent sitting high up in the branches of my
parents' trees.

The processing was not so much fun.

But alas the job got done and we have enough sour cherries to make 3 little pies plus a few small baggies with half-cup servings for muffin making. It will be so nice to a little bit of the flavor of summer in the dead of winter...

Sophie has been having fun with this project too. She insists that the cherries are really earrings and not meant for baking at all. A stubborn one that little one is...

Summer Reading

If you are looking for a good book to read this summer I highly recommend Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. This read may not last you a long time though. I powered through this novel in merely 3 days after receiving it for my birthday.

hope it get adopted soon...

Being an immigrant myself I am a total sucker for any literature about immigration. This one hit the spot. Orphan Train is the story of a young Irish girl who loses her family in a fire shortly after her arrival at Ellis Island from Ireland in the 1929. I had never heard of this part of US history - about the many orphaned immigrant children who were sent from Eastcoast cities by train out West to be adopted, or  rather, as happened in many cases, to be enslaved by families in midwestern towns...

Baker Kline's gripping tale not only talks about the plight of the orphan children from long ago; she manages to intertwine their story with the plight of the modern day orphan child struggling to survive in the US fostercare system.

Other than some very negative portraits I have observed on various TV shows and the stories I have read in the newspapers, I really don't know much about the US fostercare system. There must be decent people out there who do take in orphaned children and do a good job of it one hopes... But from the depiction in Baker Kline's  novel one definitely gets the idea that a lot of children suffer from abuse and do not fare well in this system. I found the parallels to the orphan children from long ago quite astounding.

I hope you give this book a try. And as you read don't forget that somewhere down the line your folks came from another place. How often were your ancestors haunted by this question: What would my life have been like if I had stayed in my home country? I leave you with one of the many passage that touched me deeply...

"My parents left Ireland in hopes of a brighter future, all of us believing we were on our way to a land of plenty. As it happened, they failed in this new land, failed in just about every way possible. It may have been that they were weak people, ill suited for the rigors of emigration, it's humiliations and compromises, its competing demands of self-discipline and adventurousness....

In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn't know until we left how much we took those things for granted." (page.32)

earthquakes and other exciting news...

So hubby returned safely from his trip, and we are all very glad for it. It's been quite a week over here. Can you believe it: we had an actual earthquake in Greeley, Colorado? Funny thing was, I was so tired from chauffeuring the kids around all week it barely registered on my scale. Haha.

It happened Saturday night. I fell in bed exhausted right around 8:30 pm. Then there was this loud BOOM. It knocked me out of bed. I thought it was loud thunder or that a tree had fallen on the house. I made it to the kitchen and called out my son's name. He was sleeping like a rock. I looked at the clock on the stove 9:35 pm. then wandered back up to the bedroom. I was just too tired to figure out where the noise came from.
Funny, next morning my husband called from Germany asking if we were okay and what about that earthquake. Me: Oh, that's what that noise was...

Now they say we get about 900 K of them in this area each year. They are just so small people never notice. Still, it does make one wonder if the fracking going on all around us could have something to do with this "bigger" earthquake.

Some people blame the quake on the recent flooding and shifting of masses of water in Colorado. Here is a picture of the latest flood.

The tan building, by the way, back behind the DIP sign is the UPS main shipping/storage center of our town. Wowser! Glad I don't have any package coming in via UPS at the moment...

Maya and the little babes say: Please, stop the fracking all around us! It is kind of freaking us out right now.

On the bright site: Yay, we survived a whole week without dad and we survived a "freakin" earthquake.

 

And then there is more good news: I got an invitation from a Waldorf school in India to teach dollmaking. I am very flattered and excited about this. Hope I will somehow be able to get the funds together to do this...