Knorr Family Adventures

Wrote this last week but never published :( My plan was to write about Anton and his school a bit. Or about how German language acquisition is (after being in Germany for 4 years).  However ... life!   Last week Andrei was home Tuesday and Wednesday because the teachers held parent-teacher conferences for those 2 days and kids had no school.  First time it's happening this way because in other schools meetings were always held either before or after classes.  After having him home for 2 days and meeting his classroom teacher, I learned pretty much nothing new - his grades are good but he needs to talk more in class.  That's what I got out of a 30 minute meeting.   Friday Anton was home because his school starts Carnival celebrations early.  Monday and Tuesday all the kids were home because again Carnival - Rose Monday and for no reason for Tuesday.  Anton's extended celebrations continued into Wednesday.  I am not a fan of Carnival and neither are the kids. All of

Last Saturday Anton's class organized breakfast and before I forget I'd like to take down some notes.   Anton does not go to local school, his school is in Frankfurt and also if you didn't know Anton goes to school for deaf and hard-of-hearing children (this will be important in a bit, also I will do a separate post on why Anton is in that school as well as how it's going).  Because it is a specialized school, children travel to school as far as 100 km/60 miles and that makes it really hard to have school friends.  Thus (I am guessing) is the reason why in the fall school organized family fest and now class breakfast - get to know other parents and see who your kid is friends with. The school has a hard-line against sugar and because of that I signed up to bring bread rolls - I didn't want to be the one to bring the wrong type of honey or something like that. I guess most parents thought the same thing because there was a TON of bread products with very

After living in Germany for 4 years and having German fridge and freezer for 3 of those years, I feel like my grocery shopping habits have changed and sometimes I have to wonder what would happen if we were to move back to the States.  Because German fridges and freezers are pretty small it was pretty necessary to go to the store at least once a week and often times more than once because one week worth of food for 5 people wouldn't fit.  Moreover, the freezer would not fit more than a box of pizza, fish sticks and 1 container of ice cream - freezing meats/chickens/... was not an option.    About a year ago we upgraded our kitchen and bought a new fridge and it comes with water and ice! Did I mention that nobody in Germany uses ice except my husband but he was and is super happy?!?   Anyway, there are 4 stores in our town - they are all pretty much next to each other.  One is a bio Whole Foods type of market (Tegut), we have two discount stores (Lidl and Aldi), and one re

Anton is currently right in the middle of 1st grade.  So far most of the homework has him either working on his letters in German or adding and subtracting in math.   Sometimes he fights it but most of the time, things go ok.  Especially since we bought him his new desk last week!  Today a note came home - from now on, every weekend, Anton (and the rest of his class) need to draw and eventually write what they do every single weekend.  I had no problems when this assignment came home for his winter vacation but I feel like I have to do something AMAZING (at least worthy of sharing) every single weekend now just so that Anton can draw a picture of that.    It also so happens that we don't have any plans this particular weekend.  Chris and Andrei went 2 hours away on scouting event.  They took the car so the plan is to play, watch some movies and clean.  

After an extremely long break, I have realized that I miss having the records to go back to and decided to renew my hobby :)   Also please stick with me as I try to navigate different layouts and potentially even adding some videos. Ilya on the beautiful Garmisch mountain top What happened in the last give or take 6 months? A lot - too much to recap, but as highlights in terms of travel - we went to Greece (Athens, Cyprus, Santorini) and we went skiing in Garmisch.  Both trips were amazing but very different.  Boys are doing pretty good in their respective schools.  Anton is learning how to add and subtract within 10, has learned probably 1/3 of the alphabet and is learning how to put the letters into words (not an easy task).   Ilya, who has changed schools this year, has pretty successfully navigated his transition from a small class of 5 kids to a classroom with 20 kids.  He's made several friends and has joined our local soccer team which practices every Wednesd