Radka cooks sauerkraut soup, helps us get our lives on track

Now that Radka's stay with us is almost half over, I thought it prudent to finally take her picture and post it for the world to see.

She has been a tremendous help to us.  She frequently rises well above the call of duty to put in extra time with Max and do our dishes for us.  Today she even vacuumed the house.

Today she also cooked us a traditional Slovakian Christmas dish: mashed potatoes with sauerkraut soup.  (How this dish came to be a Christmas tradition in Slovakia is beyond me.)  Greta enjoyed the meal.  But I'm not a huge fan of sauerkraut.  Of course, I ate the whole dish anyway, being a human garbage can and all.

Greta and I have been chipping away at the backlog of items on our respective to-do lists.  Thus, Radka's presence has not reduced our workload -- it's just that our workload has shifted from Max to more mundane things such as earning a living or maintaining the house.  I'm exhausted with all the work but happy that the immense weight of things I need to accomplish is lightening ever so slowly.

Just for Wendy, here's a list of some of the things I've accomplished:

• A few days ago I completed some minor renovations and cleaning in the laundry room.
• I spent much of today hauling wheel-barrels full of dirt away from our soon-to-be-built retaining wall and then filling the trench with gravel.  Leveling the tamped gravel is exceedingly difficult.  I'm not yet sure how I'll accomplish that.

As today is Saturday, Radka is nominally off-duty and so Greta and I made a token attempt to watch Max and do housework ourselves.  As I already mentioned, Radka vacuumed our house.  So much for being off-duty.

As part of this token child care I took Max in the bike trailer to Gramma and Grampa's to feed the cat. We then biked to the FreshCo where we purchased $67 worth of groceries, piled them into the chariot and saddle-bags, and biked all the way from Bridge & University to our house -- an 8km bike ride through busy suburban roads. The biking was especially tough due to our abnormally heavy groceries (Wendy-list):

• 8 litres of milk,
• 3 litres of olive oil,
• 4 litres of vinegar,
• many canned goods, and
• a 12kg child

Max got a little irritable by the end of all this, but he took it like a champ.  I'm tired.