Knorr Family Adventures

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

I wrote this about 2 weeks ago but never published it. School is going ok but it's definitely been a little bit of a challenge to make sure that everything that needs to get done gets done. Anton is doing ok-ish in school - it's hard for him to sit nicely, some numbers and letters are harder than others (let's just say writing number 8 almost killed Chris :)).  He has occupational and speech therapy at school.  For now we also have him in local swimming classes as well as local soccer club, both of which meet once a week.  Part of him going to those 2 activities are to get him physically active, but part is to keep him involved with kids in our neighbourhood since he goes to school elsewhere. Ilya is slowly finding his rhythm of coming home early, having lunch and getting his homework done.  He has the most extracurricular activities but most of them were chosen by him and he loves.  He  does art class once a week, Cub Scouts once a week and soccer twice a week.  H

It's been almost exactly 2 months since the last time I wrote here.  Our summer has come and gone as well as 3 weeks of school have passed.  The life has been busy but I knew that since all the kids are in new schools and our schedules are completely different from last year.  We are still trying to figure stuff out but anyway ... Our house looked like that most of the summer  Night before school Anton has started 1st grade.  He goes to school for kids with hearing issues and from what I understood the kids in his class are all over the spectrum regarding their issues.  Anton does not have a problem with hearing but his brain does not process what he hears at normal rate and Anton's teacher knows how to work with him which has been good so far.  The school is a little bit further away but he gets picked up and dropped off right in front of our house and it's going good.  He leaves the house at 7:15 and comes home at 15:40 3 times a week and earlier on 2 other d