Busy and exhausting December

November was simply busy, but December is exhausting also...

In Hungary the national (annual of the revolution) and religious (Christmas) holidays have a special national treatment. If a holiday day in Tuesday or Thursday than we get the Monday or Friday for "free day", so it expand a little bit the weekends. But it have a negative effect of it also: there are some Saturday when we have to work these mentioned "free days".

Let see the modified agenda of December:

1st December was a workday (for exchange of the free 31 December)

15th December was a workday (for exchange of the free 24 December)

Is this common in your country too?

I was at home these Saturdays but it didn't mean any relaxing, because I was so bold to ask out the little ones from nursery and kindergarden. Moreover 8th December we were at a Christmas party held by the company where I work.

6th December was the Santa Claus day, when we put candies, nuts, chocolate Santa Clauses and toys to the boots of kids. Then we started to buy gifts for Christmas and to my daughter birthday.

I left 8 days off to end of December which means I have been at home from 15th December. Yes... I was also too bold to ask out the children from nursery and kindergarden, so I have been at home alone with them. It's exhausting...

I had a plan to pay computer games, reading books, watching series and films, but some of these plans go to the trash.

An Croatian vacation

Last year we went to Senj, which is also in Croatia. This summer we chose a little bit distant destination, Pula. Senj was 5.5 hours travel by car (500km), while Pula is about 6.5 hours (600km), so it was a quite exhausting drive with a 3 and a 4.5 years old children.

Pula is a small city, but the biggest in the peninsula with nearly 60.000 inhabitants. The city is to be located on the south part of the Istrian peninsula, near to Italy. It wasn't hard to recognize the similarities with neighboring country. You can easily feel it from the air, the style of the streets and houses if you ever been Italy. And they have got a coliseum.

Our tiny but tidy apartment was an small holiday resort called Horizont. We went in the pre-season, because it was a little cheaper, and we had a feeling about the good weather. We were right, because we could go to the beach every day during our vacation. The days were usually sunny, the nights warm, except 1-2 occasion when there were a little storm. The beach of this holiday resort was rocky, but we found one bay which was pebbly and better for the children.

My 4.5 year old daughter enjoyed very much swimming in the pleasant seawater, while my son didn't like the salt in it. At the and of our vacation my daughter was able to swim without any assistance, so I'm very proud of her.

We cheated a little bit, because we spent most of our days near to a pools of the holiday resort. There we could easily look after the children, when we could read and rest a while. Moreover there were active programs at the poolside for kids, which they enjoyed very much. The last week of our vacation there were a 30 minutes Mini Disco for them, which was they favourite program.

On our active days we visited the downtown and some sights of Pula

and also visited some nearby town as Rovinj

and Fazzana,

Tito's favourite island and summer residence, Brijuni 

and an 'green' peninsula Premantura.

It was a long trip with the chlidren but enjoyable

and relaxing holiday.

I'm back...

... from my 2 weeks long summer holiday at Croatia (Istria, Pula). I had spent there very great days with my family, and I had oportunity to rest a little but. However these kind of long trips (6-7 hours by car) and spending the days with 2 lively kids are don't totally relaxing.
I'll write more about this 2 week soon, but now I try to catch up myself with many things (e-mails, Google Reader, blogs and reading articles to the Magyarítások Portál).