further updates

Two things have captured the attention of our son.

The first is throwing stones into a small pond. Hours have been spent searching for stones of all sizes to use to make a splash. When stones are not immediately obvious he will settle for clumps of dirt. Occasionally he will even lower his standards enough to grab handfulls of dandelions or grass and toss them into the pond. I wonder if the water level will change by the time he leaves later this summer.

The second thing to capture his imagination is chicken poop. Yes, you read that correctly. Chicken poop. Fowl excrement. There is no real way to make that sound good. What happened was that on the first day of our visit his grandfather was showing him the chicken coop. He brought out a chicken to show our son up close and much to everyones surprise the chicken took the opportunity to defecate . Obviously our son was amazed at the process and, in his own almost three years old manner, said "again, again!" The next chicken that was brought was kind enough to perform on demand and a tradition was born. Now whenever we see a chicken there is a demand for "chi poo!"

The rest of our trip is going well, if not as planned. We had hoped to visit Zakopane, a resort town in the mountains along the southern border of Poland. When we called around to get some rooms, all of the hotels were booked. It was so unusually busy there for this time of year it made the evening news. We had a similar problem when we tried to find a place to stay for a couple of days in Krakow instead. So no tourist type of stuff this visit. The fall back plan has been to hang out at home, watch the kids run around the yard and drink beer each afternoon. Since the weather has been very nice each day, this has worked out well for us. Luckily there have been no Papal visits resulting in the halting of beer sales, so there has been no interruptions like during our visit in 2002. We went to a national park yesterday and walked through a castle. The day before we walked through the pine woods on the far side of the village. So if nothing else we are keeping busy.