We finally purchased some pottery yesterday and now that we have started, I am afraid it will be hard to stop. My sister gave us some Polish pottery as a wedding gift and we are very happy to add to the collection. The prices are great (and we hear even better if you buy in the town where they are made). According to our price-checking, what we paid for all of the above pottery would have bought only the mugs at home. (We actually had originally thought to just bring mugs home as our souvineer, but the great prices made that impossible). We still have a few more pottery pieces to pick up (I think we're going to end up with 8 place settings in different designs, plus a couple larger pieces), and we need to get a new carry on suitcase to get things home. We thought of shipping but don't know where to get packing peanuts, etc and we should be able to handle it in our carry ons. I have had a pottery problem for years now, complicated by my parents' time in England when they lived close to Stoke-on-Trent. I have some great English pottery, most of which uses the same blue as the Polish pottery. And Brian understands and supports my pottery problem since he cooks. He made some of the final pottery decisions while I waited outside the shop with the kids. Things got a little crazy for the kids and me while we waited, I'll try to not be too graphic, but there was an incident of poopy in the bushes. I was a little traumatized, but Colin was fine, poor little guy.

Brian thinks this photo will bring judgements on our bad parenting, but I think it is kind of cute. Jane is looking at a book and watching tv. Sadly, few toys and the bad weather outside has our kids watching a lot more tv than we would like. They don't care if the cartoons are in Polish. Just when I thought Colin's constant asking why could not get any worse, he now also asks "what does it mean?" all the time, I think partially due to dealing with another language. Very quickly Colin learned how to say Spongebob Squarepants in Polish. There is a cute channel of lots of PBS kids programming that is traslated, and Colin's new favorite French cartoon that he saw on Air France, SamSam. From Dora we have learned how to say "We did it" in Polish. Brian impressed his work collegues when they were talking about the opera and he was able to bust out "we did it" in Polish.