Knorr Family Adventures

I knew two things about Germany before we got here - food and medicine are supposed to be really good here.  Today's topic is medicine that we've encountered so far.  It has definitely been different than what we are used to. Anton has had 3 bouts with bronchitis in 3 months and every time he had to use steroids to get rid of it.  The last time we went for a check up to make sure he was in the clear, the pediatrician said that we should use the steroid medicine until the "bad season" is over which is somewhere in March or April.  I questioned the use of a steroid as a preventative measure for 2.5 year old and she said that it wasn't a BAD steroid, so it was ok.  I came home, looked it up and didn't like what I saw - not a lot of research has been done on this particular medicine so far and it might cause some psychological, growth, and other issues.  And it's only being sold in Germany at this point.  I forwarded that info to some more medically informed

I found Wasserkuppe skiing slopes about an hour and a half away from us and yesterday we decided to give it a shot.  We brought some snacks, waters, lots of extra clothing and our sleds that we imported from America.  I mention the sleds because most of the people were using the old school wooden ones that I thought were extinct 20 years ago.  We started the day with some sledding and on the second run down, Anton fell out of the sled and bleed from his lip.  Thankfully, no teeth were broken but he's got a nice fat lip.  A little bit later that we decided to go get skis. There was an hour long wait in line but we managed.  Andrei has gotten really good at skiing - he is able to slow down and make turns.  Ilya is really good for his first time on skis as well but he stops using my favorite method - sitting down on your bum :)  Anton was not impressed with skis at all but I am not giving up hope!  Enjoy the pictures ... all taken with my phone so not the best.

Right before Christmas Ilya and I went to the Saturday Russian school in Frankfurt.  He had one class and then we went to their Christmas play which was a bit long but overall we got a really good feeling from meeting all the teachers and parents.  Starting in January, Ilya has been going every week and he has 3 classes every Saturday - Russian language, art, and Deutsch.  The Russian class has been going ok but Ilya depending on the subject at times gets lost, so the director of the school is going to start Russian intensive class with Ilya and 4 other kids, ages 5 to 8 which have pretty much near zero Russian comprehension skills.  We are happy about that.  Second class is art and he loves it.  They've done some drawing, some clay work, and some painting - he loves it all.  The art teacher is pretty creative - they used napa cabbage leaves one class to draw trees, learning about warm and cold colors, etc.  Last class is German and there are only 4 kids in that class, 3 other kids

As not much is happening in this house lately, I am finally catching up on some events from December. On Friday (a while ago by now) all 3 boys had Christmas programs at school.  They happen to all be at the same time so I was running between the two.  Interesting things that are different here - there were real candles everywhere at school including classroom for 2 year olds, there was also alcoholic glutwein, and lots of activities which included building gingerbread houses.  Since I was running between 2 parties with Anton, Suzanne was helping Andrei and Chris was dealing with Lusha.  From what I gathered, Lusha went through a couple of different activities and eventually landed in the gingerbread room while Andrei headed directly there.  Suzanne was a very hands-on helper, in fact she was probably more into it than Andrei and was nearly fighting with the principal of the school regarding some candy decorations.  There was also a concert the boys had a solo part reading a little p

I went to deposit a check to the bank the other day and it was interesting in the sense that they took the check, the lady at what looked like a customer greeting desk wrote up a deposit slip which had a LOT of information to fill in and then she gave me a carbon copy of that deposit slip and put the check into her desk.  It never went through any kind of machine.  My guess is that they run all the checks at the same time but it was still different.  I kind of looked at her and then she said "Have a nice day!" I took it as my clue to leave :) We met all of our neighbors but only kind of ... we don't see them too much but say hi when we do.  And to be honest,  as sad as it is I wouldn't recognize them on the street ...  So we share a wall with one neighbor and a driveway with a different one.  The walls here are cement so there is really no problems with the noise level.  This story was posted on facebook but wanted to write it here as well.  The other day when the t