Sheep Guarding Llama

It is the middle of our final week in Romania, Wednesday.  Besides my getting writing done at the desk, most of the energy around the house is put into the girls working on school, getting fruit picked in the garden and getting as much early packing completed as can reasonably be.  There is always so much to do in the last week.  It is easier, though, to back up and be ready to leave to go home than to get ready to head out again.  When we are heading home we have to back “everything”, there is no picking and choosing.  It all has to fit, there should be nothing left around the house at all.

This week is also our last week to drink all of the wine and tuica that has accumulated around the house these past months.  The village loves to shower us with drinks and we can only drink them so quickly.  So I do my best to keep up.

No more grocery stops, no more dairy runs…. this is it. It is like we just passed the point of no return.  What we have is all that we are going to get and we need to make all of it count.  We have just a little sight seeing that we want to do before we leave Romania and we are hoping to be able to take the girls to see one of the famous salt mines before we leave.  Only a few days left, but we should be able to squeeze that in, yet.  And we have not yet made it to Transylvania’s capital of Cluj-Napoca.  We need to see that, too.

The rain help off today and it was a pretty nice day.  The hay and cow traffic has been picking up significantly as of late.  More and more carts full of hay pulled by horses, and streets full of cows are daily sights.

Loose hay is practically the symbol of Romania.  You see it everywhere.  I have no idea why bailing hay is not done, but it really isn’t.

This is really the beginning of our home stretch, the last full, normal week in Baita.  We got some sun today, too.

Luciana did school today and was working on writing the number five.  It worked out well that she is recently turned five (since we were in Romania) and she took the cutest picture to celebrate how well she is writing them.

It was writing and homeschool around the Miller house today.  Soon there will be plenty of disruption as we begin traveling back to the United States and we spend time with family and the cousins and so we need to get things done now while we can.  Dominica has started looking into the packing, our time is running out.

This evening the girls and I made one of our final dairy runs over to the farm next door.  Some of their friends were there and we were just enough early that the cow had not been milked yet, so the girls went into the barn and watched the cow get milked first hand.  They have kind of seen this but this was the most “in your face” milking yet.  Now they can appreciate just how fresh this milk really is.

It wasn’t so rainy today and we had a nice sunset.

Only a week and a half left for us living in Romania, and even less here in Baita as we need time to get down to Bucharest, return the car, get ready for our flight back to the US and everything.

It’s Sunday and we had no plans today.  Just a family day at the house.

It is a quiet, warm and sunny Saturday here in Baita, Romania.  The house owners came by this morning and did some work in the garden.  They invited us out to help with the strawberry picking so the girls went out and set to work getting fresh produce from our own garden.  Everyone had a great time and it was a gorgeous day for it.

That made for a very fun, authentic and different morning.  What a great way to start the weekend.  They told us that we could have all the produce that we wanted and that we should come out and pick every day as there would be so much of it.

After strawberry picking Liesl baked a cake in the kitchen with Dominica.  Luciana bundled up in our bedroom and played video games on the Steam laptop all morning.

The dogs came by to visit this morning.  Got the cutest picture of Liesl with Negrut, Frunze’s dad.

After a kind of busy morning it was a nice, relaxing weekend for the family.  No travelling of any sort today.

This evening we Facetimed dad to wish him a happy birthday.  He is seventy today!  The girls are very sad that they are far away on his birthday.

This evening Dominica cut up a melon that we got from the grocery store this week.  We thought that it was going to be cantaloupe but it turned out to be a galia melon that looks like cantaloupe but tastes like honeydew.