Bikes - Books - Legos

It has been a great past week at the Kuznia/Dalsing household.

We ordered a bunch of books from Amazon. The final shipment arrived on Monday. We have all been reading a lot since we came. There is an English book store here with a fairly good selection, but it is still cheaper to order from Amazon and have them shipped. Izzi has picked up her reading pace from Minneapolis if that is possible and Kim and I usually read for about a hour every night. I enjoy not having a television. I spent way too much time sitting in front of that thing.

On Tuesday our shipment finally arrived. We shipped some kitchen stuff as well as bikes and toys. A disproportionate amount of the shipment was Legos. Xavier is a Lego machine. In fact, he is borderline obsessive. A couple times this week he woke up early, came out to the living room, grabbed a kit and started assembling. I would guess that he easily has 20 hours of building time since the shipment arrived.

The bikes arrived as well. We have a very sweet neighbor in the building who has kind of taken us under her wing. She stopped down on Saturday morning to see if the kids wanted to go up to the school and ride bikes. I hadn't put them together yet, so I quickly slapped them together and off the kids went. Later that afternoon the kids and I went for a ride. There was no plan to go up the mountain, but one thing led to another and we found ourselves riding some trails. Things were going pretty well until Izzi said, "Hey dad, think we can go down here?" I decided to go first to make sure it was ok, about a third of the way down it got iffy. Long story short I went over the handle bars into a sticker bush. I advised the kids not to ride it. We headed back towards home and had one small patch yet to ride. Izzi's breaks are a little iffy, so another long story short she took a spill as well when her back tire slid out from under her (it is my fault, I just can't get her rear brake set right). Below is a pic after our first successful ride.

And here is the result of the ride.

Mud

Finally, today was a wonderful day. Xavier was up at 6:30 to work on Legos. Later Kim, Izzi and Xavier worked on needle felting some animals while I put Kim's new ride together. After that was completed we headed up to the mountain and rode around some more. Took a break to go look at an old quarry. We all managed to stay upright today and Kim got to try out the beautiful new bike Andy put together for her.

Kim and X walking up to the quarry