Sad-aversary

My mom died seven years ago today; exactly a week after my 32nd birthday. For the first couple years, the time leading up to my birthday was also part of the yearly grieving process. For better or worse, this summer was just too packed to even process anything. 

This picture of Hugo on his first day back during the post-Kita school run pretty well sums up how I'm feeling.

At the beginning of the summer, after corona and between a couple rounds of barfies for Carmen and me, I found out that the 24th of August is also Ukraine's independence day. I vowed I would do something to honor both my mom and Ukraine on that day. Are the two related? No, but the date is easy to remember. 

My initial first thought was to start the "tap water revolution". I've always thought it was silly that in such an eco-friendly country with safe drinking water, that Germans drink bottled water. I swear it is not just me being cheap. Although with inflation, I think taking a second look at this custom might be in order. 

The "tap water revolution" idea came to me while being refused table water at a nice restaurant. (Note - I offered to pay for the table water.) The restaurant was inside a museum flying two huge Ukrainian flags overhead. It is worth noting that ninety percent of the gasoline refined in Berlin comes from Russia. The bottled water this restaurant was serving was brought in from over 250 Kilometers or 150 miles away. Does anyone make this connection?

My general rule of thumb is I don't write negative reviews before first writing the restaurant personally. I also write personal letters in German, which takes time. Someday I'll get to writing that restaurant but in the mean time I wrote positive reviews for these two places where Paul and I went on dates. 

While I am on the sad theme, last week an apartment move for our Ukrainian family, which I tried with a group to broker, fell through. The property manager didn't want to do the one extra step of doing a contract through social services. Sadly the news around here is much more consumed by inflation and staying warm in winter instead of helping the one million Ukrainians in Germany, 1/3 of them children, who are trying to build a life here. 

But my crew and I are trudging on; doing what we can to support Ukraine. My friend Shannon is taking cold showers. We're still not using our drier. I am being more strategic about showering (i.e I used the littles' bath water last night.) When it gets cold, we're planning on just heating two bedrooms in our house. The kids will have to make peace with wearing pajamas. For now, we will enjoy our last few weeks of sleeping like this:

and this