That being said, there were a few things that I was sad to see go and that I know I will miss in the coming months. The first among them was our car, a 2008 Honda Fit. It was the first new car that we ever bought and it fit nicely into the long and storied Souzek tradition of small, fuel efficient, manual transmission vehicles: two mid- to late-80s Toyota Tercels, a 1988 Nissan Pulsar, and a 1989 Toyota MR2 (even though it was an automatic). We were as giddy as high schoolers with freshly pressed driver's licenses when we brought it home. After driving it a whole two hundred miles, I got it washed, took it up to a scenic overlook at dusk and spent an hour and a half photographing it from every angle. It was terribly embarrassing but luckily there was no one around to point it out. I had every intention of posting them too—who doesn't want to see a close-up of the freshly cleaned 14" hubcaps of a Honda?—but I never got around to it.

It was a great car for us, small and fuel efficient but four-door and surprisingly roomy. It was fun to drive around the scenic, winding back roads of western Connecticut, weaving around the corners and working your way through the gears. It was the car that we would take whenever we went anywhere without the kids, its tidewater blue metallic finish sparkling in the parking lot of whatever restaurant we were visiting. It retained the new car smell for what felt like a year, which was an especially stark contrast to the more "lived in" smell of our Caravan. It had a CD player. We were in love.

When it came time to sell it in April, I found myself in the same position as I had been a couple of years before—getting it cleaned up, meticulously taking pictures, and extolling its virtues to anyone that would listen. With the encouragement and guidance of my brother, car buyer/seller extraordinaire, I posted an ad on Craigslist and waited. To my great astonishment and relief, I got a call in less than a week and a half from the perfect buyer—a former owner of a small, manual transmission Honda looking for a new one at a good price. After a short conversation and test drive, we both knew it was right. One day later, we were proudly sending our Fit out into the world with a new caretaker and a new set of plates.

How could we ever replace it, apart from the obvious option of buying the European equivalent Honda Jazz? We couldn't, at least not so soon. For the foreseeable future we'll be attempting a car-free urban lifestyle and depending on trains, buses and trams to get us around. That will also be a big change for me, having relied heavily on cars every day since getting my driver's license. I have a feeling that I may begin to miss driving in the coming months, which will make me relive the joys and ultimate heartbreak of my relationship with the Fit each time I think of it. At least I know it's in good hands.

I took a few pictures on the way to and from work today to try to capture my enthusiasm about this arrangement. Here's a link to the album:

A Walk to Work

Also, here's a large panorama of the view of the mountain from the top of the street. Not a bad way to start and end the day.

And now, to the questions:

Wow! That is huge.
I know. I mean, I've never done this before so I don't know exactly, but I agree. It is simultaneously one of the most exciting and difficult decisions that I've ever had to make.

Do you know anyone there?
Yes, Dinka's family lives there, so we'll be moving closer to many brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins.

So, is this a move for work?
No, it's a move for our family, on several levels. First, we are tired of having no family around to share our lives with. Connecticut and the Northeast are wonderful and have been great to us but with each passing year and each additional child, it became harder for us to justify living at least a few hours' flight from everyone. Going it alone has certainly helped us form a family identity of our own but I think we're done with being on our own for now.

Second, living in two countries and two cultures is an experience that I want to have and that we want our children to have. Again, I can't speak from experience here, but knowing that there are different types of people in the world with different perspectives, countries with different approaches to solving problems, or even just having to recognize that the world is larger than the place that you know, these all seem like good things. More specifically to Austria, it also will give the kids (and me) an opportunity to know the place where Dinka grew up and to understand their/our history a little better.

There are a lot of things that I think will be nice about living in Austria itself but the truth is that they're not the reason that we're moving there but an added bonus. More on those bonuses to come, hopefully, as they start to roll in.

Do you have a job lined up?
Initially I didn't but since I've started announcing our move I have found some contract work that should greatly help with the transition. Even so, we're going to be staying with family until we have a more permanent source of income in place.

That's another thing that's been difficult about this move and decision—I have to leave a great job in order to do it. It was only my second full-time job after college but I know enough to recognize that it was a unique situation and I'll have a very hard time finding a new role, company and team like the one I'm leaving.

Did you need to get some kind of special visa?
As the spouse of an Austrian citizen, I applied for and received a permanent residence permit. Our kids, children of one Austrian and one U.S. citizen, are allowed to have dual citizenship, which they have also applied for and received. Lucky them.

How long have you been planning this?
It's a possibility that we've been thinking about for several years, since we were first married, but we didn't start seriously entertaining it until the last couple of years, when we thought we were in a good enough position to potentially make the move. While it would have been great to move with a job and everything else worked out, we thought that waiting around for that perfect situation to arise might mean never moving there at all and we knew that we would regret that. So instead, we picked a date on the calendar and decided that we'd move at that time, whether a job had materialized or not. We started all the paperwork processes and investigations at the prescribed times and now here we are, two weeks from the actual move.

How long are you planning to stay?
We honestly don't know and we're ok with that for now. It depends a lot on how things go, on several fronts. Given the costs of an international move (which continue to add up, day by day), I hope it's not too short. We'd like to give ourselves the chance to get established there and decide if we like it or not, but that's also dependent on having enough money to support an independent life for our family. One important thing that we recognized early on was that even in the worst case, where I can't find a job for a really long time or we're really unhappy there, we can always move back but will never regret having taken the chance to find out if we could do it and what that life might be like.

Will you come back to visit?
Absolutely, yes. We plan on using more of my hopefully generous vacation allotment to visit the U.S., whenever it's financially possible. The fact that we'll be living somewhere else doesn't make you, our friends and family here, any less our friends and family than you already are.

I hope I've covered everything. Our plane tickets say July 13th and there are a lot of things that still need to be sold, donated and packed in boxes before then, not to mention all the things that the kids want to do (see below) and the people that we want to see before we go. With each passing day, it becomes more of a reality—after years of thinking about it and months of planning it, it is actually going to happen. I'm not completely sure what's waiting on the other side of this move but I am excited and eager to find out, to say the least.

I've been trying to think of the best way to express how the shared passage of time has changed how I feel. For as easy as it would be to say, "I love you more now than even before," I don't like how linear and comparative that sounds, like a line steadily climbing on a graph, marking progress. But there's no denying that feeling of ever-increasing fullness, of growth that comes with time. I think that a more accurate way to look at it is that at any point in a marriage, you love the other person not only with the love that you feel at that time but with all the love that has accumulated over your time together, with the weight of all your years together behind it. It's not two dimensions but three; there is a volume of love that grows over time.

I felt that volume was all I could ever know in the picture above. Since then it has increased in ways I could never have imagined and so has my capacity to know it. Here's looking forward to finding out how much more we both can hold.

2 oz. rye whiskey (Old Overholt is just fine for me)
2 dashes Peychaud's Bitters
1 tbsp Ricard
1 cube sugar

Fill an old fashioned glass with ice to chill the glass. Add the sugar, bitters and a bit of water to another glass and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the rye and a few ice cubes to that mix and stir. Empty the ice from the other glass, add the Ricard, and turn the glass to coat the sides with it. Dispose of any excess Ricard (however you choose!) and pour the rye mixture from the other glass into the newly anise-scented glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon and enjoy.

Must love anise.

On the evening of February 18th, I walked in the door after work and saw my mom sitting at the dinner table. Cool, a surprise visit, I thought. Before I could ask many questions, Dinka handed me this card:

Inside, it explained that I had "won" a weekend in New York City with her, including:

• Two nights at a Park Avenue hotel
• Dinner at Gramercy Taven
• An opportunity to go shopping for a suit, a task I have been reluctant to dedicate money to for years, on Madison Avenue

In order to make this all possible, she had also coordinated the following things:

• A five-day visit from Grandma that included a weekend of babysitting
• Permission for me to leave work early on Friday, by contacting my manager at work
• A substitute accompanist for Mass on Sunday, by contacting the choir director at church
• A contribution toward the purchase of the suit as my birthday present from Baka

Gulp. I was completely astounded and speechless. What can you say about a surprise like that? My mind boggled at all the planning and preparation that must have gone into it, all the details that seemed straight out of a dream, and the fact that all of it was lying directly in front of me, less than twenty-four hours away. But there wasn't much time to be flabbergasted—I had to pack.

So the next day, we went. I still can't believe that it actually happened. We ate one of the best meals of our lives at Gramercy Tavern, including one final surprise—a dram of Lagavulin 16-year (the whisky that's been on top of my to-taste list for months) as a digestif, a birthday present from my brother and sister-in-law. We stayed at a great hotel with a view of Park Avenue. I bought the perfect navy suit from Brooks Brothers, clothier of Abraham Lincoln, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Mad Men and Stephen Colbert. We went to the top of the Empire State Building at night. We went to Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. We ate enormous pastrami and corned beef sandwiches at Katz's Deli. We spent more time with each other and without the children than we have since Veronika was born. It was the perfect weekend and we were floating on air. The only thing more amazing than this present is the wife that gave it and I will be reminding her of that for years to come.

Three weeks later, I am glad that I took some pictures to remind me that it wasn't just a dream. Click the link below to see them:

30th Birthday, NYC

I've been thinking about how having children has messed with my perception of the passage of time, how sleeping problems and endless illnesses can make you think that this night, this week, this phase will never end. Or on the other hand, how each of their birthdays and a look back at the pictures from the previous year are a stark reminder of how time has flown. A year might be nothing to me, but Nikola will learn how to pee in the potty, eat on his own, sleep through the night, and start talking in the same span. Time is flying, whether I can see it in the mirror or not.

I've been thinking about how becoming a parent makes any kind of longing for going back to relive a part of your past seem absurd. The birth of a child is such a definitive break with the way things were before that it's impossible to conceive of things returning to how they were. I had a great time with just Veronika and Ivan in 2007 and 2008, but how could I wish for that time again? There would be no Nikola, it wouldn't make any sense. Watching the kids arrive and grow has been a constant reminder of the irreversibility of time, always moving us forward as we spin out into more and more strands.

But mostly I've been thinking about what a wonderful reminder that kids are of the richness of life that comes with the passage of time. With each year, they grow, change and amaze me even more. They are turning into these awesome people that I could never know if not for time passing and allowing them to grow up. Our relationships, our memories and our love are all built on the time we've spent together.

We have a slideshow gadget on our Vista desktop (I know, gasp! It's not even horrible!) that I've set up to randomly scroll through all of our pictures. It is a tiny, wonderful thing, springing up random memories every ten seconds or so. On any given morning, I might catch a picture of Veronika learning to ride her bike, of one of our vacations in Rhode Island, or of Nikola as a newborn. With each new picture that appears, I think the same thing—I wouldn't change a moment of any of it. I don't want to be any other age than what I am right now because that would mean that somehow I'd have to give something up from the past. If you're living the life that you want to live, the way you believe it should be lived, and you wouldn't change a thing, then what else is there to be but grateful? So I am grateful, so very grateful. There is no better way that I can think of to pass the time than the way I am right now.

(all photos by Dinka)

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope your homes are filled with as many smiling faces as ours.

So, was this whole CSA thing worth it? As you might have guessed from reading my previous posts, my answer is an emphatic "yes." I got a summer's worth of fresh, local fruit and vegetables, tasted and learned to prepare things I had never seen before, and improved my diet to adapt to the bounty of the season. In re-reading that sentence, I realize that it might sound like a nightmare to some but it was really quite the opposite for me. I loved eating according to nature's schedule and adding a lot of excellent new foods to my diet. As a lifelong lover of essentially all meats (that's not likely to change soon), it was also good to know that I had other options to complement the various animal parts in my diet and that I didn't need to be completely reliant on them. Food aside, it was also good to spend my money locally and in support of people doing something that I believe in.

I haven't mentioned anything about money because I knew pretty early on that, because it wasn't an enormous investment, money wasn't going to be a huge factor in determining how worthwhile the CSA experience was. However that's what some people mean when they ask you that question, so I'll take a shot. Was the CSA less expensive than the same fruit and vegetables at the local grocery store? No, but it's not really a fair comparison. My local grocery store has produce from all over the world that's generally not organically raised and doesn't carry many of the vegetables or varieties that I got from the CSA. Was the CSA less expensive than buying equivalent (local, organic) fruit and vegetables from farmers' markets or Whole Foods? My guess is yes, but I haven't done much comparison shopping to back it up.

I would wholeheartedly recommend CSA participation to anyone out there considering it, with maybe one caveat. If you're not willing to try new foods and adapt your diet to eat what's available that week in addition to what you want, you'll probably get less out of the experience and may end up wasting a lot of food, depending on the type and quantity of things your local CSA provides. But if you go in with an open mind, you might be surprised by how much you enjoy it and how good you feel doing it.

Here's a list of my posts from the summer, in case you care to look back:

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Weeks 4 - 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Weeks 11 - 12
Weeks 13 - 14
Week 15

• edamame (highlight of the week, pictured below)
• arugula
• eggplant
• red and chocolate peppers
• collard greens (above)
• broccoli
• scallions

Over the course of the last seven years, we have tried everything with Digby. We have been through two trainers, obedience classes, two kennels, special collars, air horns, marrow bones, peanut-butter filled Kongs, and the Dog Whisperer book and season one DVD. We have tried to change him to fit our family and change ourselves to fit him but neither side could do it. Digby is a dog that requires a lot of exercise and attention, is indifferent at best toward children and an echo chamber for the stress in his environment; we are a family of five with barely enough time for each other, including a toddler that likes to harass the people and animals around him, living in a house often filled with shrieking, crying and various child-related catastrophes.

Over the course of our lives, we became incompatible with Digby and that was a difficult truth to accept. I felt like we would be letting him down, reneging on our commitment, but ultimately I realized that we weren't doing either side any favors by trying to power through the tough times. He was stressed out and unhappy, which made us even more frustrated with him, and the kids had almost no bond with him at all. So he's in a better place now, where we can visit him once in a while, and hopefully the distance will restore some fondness to all of our hearts.

Farewell for now, old friend. I hope you're happier in your new life than in the one you had with us.