Little Footsteps in the Big World

The holiday season is here! I bet you're as excited as I am! Christmas is just around the corner and 2017 is coming real quick. As there's a huge chance I might be staying in the hospital during Christmas day (I'm due to give birth on Christmas eve), I decided to get my holiday gifts for the loved ones early this year. We don't usually exaggerate on Xmas gifts in our family, we exchange pretty little things, most of the times personalized, sometimes home made; then gather and have lunch together. Not everyone in our family is a traveler, but I've gathered some ideas of affordable holiday gifts for family members (or friends!) who love to travel. Personalized travel calendar What's more useful to start a new year than a calendar? That's my choice for some family members this year, including my mother in law. For a lady her age, she travels quite often. So I pick 12 best photos of her on trips with our babygirl, and ordered a personalized small on-table ca...

     

When you think of Italy, you think of Rome. Venice. Florence. Probably Milan. No one thinks of Turin. Turin is underrated. Lots of people think it's just an ordinary industrial city. I did, too. And the city proved me wrong. There are tons of reasons why you should book your next Italian trip to Turin. For once, it was the first capital city of Italy. Yup, you probably didn't know that. Not only the first capital of Italy, it's also the royal capital Turin is home to Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy, the first king of  the Kingdom of Italy. Although many other cities of Italy hosted noble families that reigned in the level of city-states, only Turin could claim itself as the first capital of the unified Italy. Turin is full of beautiful palaces in its grand squares. As babygirl said, it's full of the homes of Prince Eric (she's currently into Little Mermaid). The squares look amazing, the main square, Piazza Castello, has unusual water fountains coming out the floo...

Is there a moment, when you look at your social media timeline and see pretty pictures of your friends on vacation, then you thought, wow, they look like they're having the time of their lives! And then you think, if I were going to vacation like that, with my child, there is no way it's going to turn out to be THAT fun, it's just gonna be a catastrophe! For some reason of course I also just post pretty pictures to my social media, I'm not planning to shame my own child and post a picture of her having a tantrum, soaking wet full of tear, lying down in the middle of a square in Florence. But trust me, it happens. I wanted to share some not-to-pleasant moments happened in our last Italian road trip just to assure you, traveling parents, that it's okay to experience unpleasant incidents during your trips. Believe me it passes quickly and you'll forget them even quicker. But the sweet memories of the trips? Oh they stay forever. So last week we did our Italian ...

Babygirl has been going to the daycare since I came back to work from maternity leave, and that was when she was exactly a year old in April 2015. A year and a half going to a private daycare, in September this year she finally got into a public daycare and started her days in the new place. Although the adaptation period was planned to last around a week to get each child used to the new environment, babygirl needed three days to settle down in her new place. I took a week off from work just in case, but she already spent the whole day being there on her fourth day. On Monday the following week, I spent my normal hours at work and everything has been fine since. Since my husband is currently working in Slovenia (about that here ), our normal day looks like this: waking up around seven, have quick breakfast and leave around half to eight, I'd drop her in the daycare (where she'd have another breakfast) and go to work, and pick her up around four in the afternoon. She sleeps...

In my last post about Postojna Cave (read the post here ) I mentioned that we bought a combo ticket for the cave and Predjama Castle, so after visiting the cave, we drove toward Predjama Castle on the same day. Predjama Castle is only 9 kilometers away from Postojna Cave. In July and August they have free shuttles that drive visitors between the two objects, but we were there in September, so there were no more shuttles. Babygirl is crazy about castles in general. Our bedroom in Ljubljana is an elevated loft which is reachable by climbing sturdy wooden ladder-like book shelves. We call it our castle where we sleep at, and she's crazy about it. So although it was past her nap time after we finished Postojna Cave, she was excited enough to see the Predjama Castle. The magnificent view of Predjama Castle as we approached it Audio guide is included in the entrance fee and they're available in many languages. Each room and exhibited object in the castle show a certain number...

My obsession with Postojna Cave started in 2010 when I moved to Croatia. Wherever I go and whenever I look in Croatia, there's advertisement of Slovenia's Postojna Cave. The worst thing was actually the fact that we didn't manage to visit the freaking cave since 2010. So when we finally did this trip, my husband made fun of me every single day for the week, sending me pictures to my cell and leaving me leaflets of the cave everywhere, in my purse, on the dining table, in the car compartment... that was lots of fun for him. Postojna Cave is not even the most essential cave system of Slovenia, although it's indeed the most famous. The bigger and more important cave system is Škocjan Cave , which carries the title of UNESCO natural heritage site -this is on our list for next destination. On the day of our departure I was ecstatic. My husband asked me whether after all these years my expectation of the cave had built up so high I might be disappointed when I finally s...

Although we thought we're officially done with this year's summer vacation (read the post about our summer vacation here ) now that we're in Ljubljana (read the post about the reason why we're in Ljubljana here ) we decided to spend one weekend at the Slovenian coast. Slovenian coastline is only 43 kilometers long so we basically saw most of it in one weekend. It might be short, but doesn't mean it needs to be missed, right? For financial reason I booked us a hotel in Ankaran, which came out much cheaper than hotels in more famous areas such as Portorož or Piran. We got a triple room at Hotel Arija for €55 per night with breakfast, in a resort complex with private beach, outdoor and indoor pools, children playgrounds, restaurants, basketball and tennis courts. It's just a little more than an hour drive from Ljubljana so we drove off right after my husband's done with his work on Friday afternoon. Babygirl and her dad dipped themselves a little bit in th...

I did move abroad. Six years ago. For good. But I didn't have a job then. I didn't have a child. Would we move abroad, now that we're a family, with jobs and a mortgage? Honestly, we probably would. We don't have any good reason yet to move for good -like that dream job offer, for example, in some place warm by the sea. But there are some shorter terms options, like secondment my husband might someday get, or longer-term research I might have to do for my study in some other country. Sounds exciting, right? You get to live for some period in a new environment you're not familiar with, take your child to new parks -maybe even find a new daycare, explore the new city in a new country, visit everything, eat everything along the way? Or not? Would it be too scary? New language, cultural and climate shock for a child? This week, though, we began an adventure in some sort of a new home for the next three months. My husband got some kind of fellowship -more similar t...

Last year my husband won two free tickets to enter Paklenica National Park. Sadly, we never managed to visit Paklenica until the end of the validity period of the tickets. As we're very sorry to never make it to visit Paklenica with the free tickets, we decided to commit ourselves to visit all eight National Parks of Croatia, at least one park in one year. Earlier this year he won (again!) two free entrance tickets to Krka National Park, so we decided to start the national parks adventure in Krka. While summer vacationing in Nin in mid August, we took a one day trip to Krka NP which was around an hour drive from the coastal town of Nin near Zadar. When I googled about Krka, Skradinski buk attracted me the most. I thought, that was what I wanted to visit in Krka. Following our 6-year-old outdated GPS, we ended up in Roški slap entrance of Krka. We parked the car and consulted with a young girl at the ticket sale point about our destination. She checked the tickets my husband won...

Most Europeans spend two or three weeks on their favorite coast for a relaxing summer holiday. This year we decided to break our summer vacation to three parts because we wanted to "save" vacation days from work and spend as little paid-vacation-days as possible. This way, my husband could stay longer (probably three weeks) when I give birth in the end of this year. Our summer vacation this year looked like this: three days (long weekend) of Lovran, three days (long weekend) of Moščenička Draga and five days (extended long weekend) of Nin. All destinations were of course, Croatian coast (the first two in Kvarner, the last one in north Dalmatia). These were our third year taking babygirl to summer vacation, and here are some tips we could share:   Learn what your child likes, and it's probably sand After many beaches, if there is anything we learned, it's one thing: babygirl loves sand. She prefers sandy beaches much more to pebbly ones. As much as we love cryst...

Six years. One child. Seven countries. 120.000 km. This is a story about our little red Chevrolet Spark. Which we sold today. This morning we signed a contract with the buyers and we handed the beloved car to them. And I'm feeling very, very emotional about it. Not many people feel so emotional about a car. It's just a car. But I love cars. I watched Top Gear more than I ever watched Friends in my life. Or Sex and the City. Or anything like that. My mother used to work in a car industry and my father is a car maniac. It's genetics. We got our Spark six years ago, brand new. We didn't have much money so we got a small budget car for our daily need. The car was mostly rested during the week -except for regular house errands- because we take trains to work. But we'd go to road trips and weekend getaways whenever we could. It's been to beautiful places. It witnessed the growth of our family, and now as we're growing even more, we needed  a bigger, stronger c...

So my husband and I met when we took a Master study together in Nice, France, seven years ago. We both graduated in summer 2010 and are still in contact with some of the friends we studied with back then. Several months ago we agreed to all meet in Vienna for a weekend in July this year. Friends were coming from all over the world to meet up, so we decided to drive to Vienna for a weekend getaway on the 9th of July. Unlike our Paris trip ( read here ) this Vienna trip wasn't personally designed for babygirl. An itinerary was offered by a friend and we followed his lead (which was great, but is very different from our usual toddler-friendly plans). And because the idea of the trip was to see and talk to people we hadn't seen in a while, sightseeing was not our focus. We wanted more of conversations-over-drinks kind of thing. And we ended up eating all the time :) We left home early on Saturday, around 5am. Babygirl was asleep so I just moved her (in pajamas) into her carseat...