Johanka is coming to town

Our daughter Johana Einav was born at 4:30pm on 25th May in the city of Most.

Wishing you a peaceful pesach.-)

Gearing towards Jewish education in private practice

Again, I have not posted for a long time. This time I am blogging to see again how many people still read or write blogs - it seems to me that all of my friends that used to do so are gone. I am slowly aproaching the time when I will (all being well) leve school for maternity leave - around Pesach I should leave not only my job but also Prague to move to our house in Mukov and to start a life at the end of the world taking care of our house, garden, Moshe and the expected little winemaker/teacher (not in this order). I already have several activities that I am looking forward to do during the maternity leave on my list. So I wonder if there will be anyone interested in reading about them here in case I promise I will never write about my baby´s digestion, sleep, crawling and the like:-).

Having a morgage in the times of financial crisis

Before I met Moshe, I invested most of my savings into my flat thinking that this was a safe bet - if I ever get married, I thought, my future husband would for sure move in with me because what could be better than a new, freshly furnished 4 bedroom loft flat. Having met Moshe, I realized that you cant move a vine-maker with his vineyard to Prague whatever the number of rooms your flat has; you have to start from scratch in his nice but slightly falling apart village house.

I quickly realised that whatever was left from my savings would soon have to be put into our house in Mukov. Being in love not only with my husband but also with the new home and the beautiful countryside around, I gladly started to plan and open the account for minor repairs. The minor repairs soon grew into a more serious problem and it became obvious we would need to change the whole - currently leaking - roof of the house. We have to change it before the winter to prevent further damage of the rafter.

To cut the long story short - it was obvious from the start we wouldn´t be able to handle this repair without extending our morgage. For a couple of days, this gave me a few sleepless nights. Soon, however, I realised how foolish I have been.

Our house is in the area of the town of Most , which is one of the poorest part of the country. During the communist times, there were many coal mines around the city, which gave work to many locals. While many of the mines have been closed now, the unemployment rate here is one of the highest in the Czech Republic. When I went for grocers to the local Tesco´s for the first time and read the board of customer´s adds, I could not miss the several notes saying " A young man willing to accept any job, please call #" Talking to my neigbours, I realized, that many of the locals live on half what Moshe and I make together - and still they raise kids and take care of their houses. In fact, most of the local farm employees work on very little above the minimum vages. Paying a tough extended morgage from a stable well paid job that I - on the top of that - enjoy, does not seem so bad after all.

Facebook versus blogs

Every now and then I browse back to my old blog mainly because of the bookmarks I have on it to click on my friend´s blogs to see what is new. Most of the time, I find out that...nothing much. Most of my friends stopped writing on their blogs around a year ago, undoubtedly because all of them have moved to Facebook. What a shame! Yes, I now know who woke up late and who left his work early thanks to the status changes, but where are the decently long elaborate articles that I used to enjoy so much?

While I have been a very frequent user of facebook too (let along Moshe´s unhealthy usage of facebook while he was sick at the beginning of July) I wish to say - yes, but enough is enough. I will try to get back to normal blogging and continuous text. Let´s see if there are still any readers left.-)

A few pics

Moshe and I got married. :-)

Amélie Foltýnová

Olga, my sister-in-law, gave birth to her first daughter Amálka on Friday this week. Both are fine and healthy. Bellow are a couple of pics fromour today´s visit to the hospital.

Tomáš (my brother,) Olga (my sister-in-law) and Amálka


Amálka and I