Jani

For Jani, midsummers eve, Latvians take off a couple of days for this celebration. They stay up all night, it doesn't get dark till around 1pm and light again around 3/4 am. They build bon fires and dance around them. The women make crowns of flowers for their heads. The men have jumping over the fire contest's, that doesn't mix too well with alcohol, many accidents. Last year in Latvia we went to the church' celebration, which was pretty fun, and this year we decided just to take a 4 day weekend and go out to the countryside and stay in a country house. Funny enough, the most authentic celebration of Jani we experienced was in DC before we flew to Latvia. We were invited to a Jani celebration by Kelly's teacher. It was in the woods around DC and all the Latvians in the area were there. They had tons of food, fire and head crowns. It was a nice introduction into the Latvia culture.

So for this last holiday we had in Latvia, we drove about 4 hours away and stayed in this really cute country house. We had two connecting rooms. They fed us breakfast and let us grill of chicken on their grill outside. It was a beautiful weekend. We didn't really end up doing much but hanging around, looking for fish and frogs. Sawyer and Lincoln caught a ton of frogs. They tried to fish but it was too windy. It was a really nice relaxing weekend. The only problem was I feel terrible. I was sick from being pregnant in the first trimester, constantly sick and, on top of that, I had a tooth problem. It didn't happen until we got there, but the whole side of my mouth hurt so much! The pain would come and go, but it was terrible. I couldn't function when it hurt. So we ended up leaving a day early. Not such a big deal. By the time we got home my tooth wasn't hurting anymore. I waited until September to get it taken care of. Luckily it didn't cause more problems. But it is all taken care of after a nice root canal.