Eurojournal - 7 August 2006 (Luna's Birthday celebration!)

Today we celebrated Luna’s birthday 2 days early. We had a really great party with about 6 children form the village. It was interesting as just about everyone from the village, adults included brought gifts of chocolate and flowers. Luna was in heaven with all of the chocolate and friends. She had connected with two friends next door, Atilla and Bella who are about she and Liam’s age. They play everyday and love each other. Monica and Alexandra are older, preteen girls who love Luna and Liam. They tickle them and carry them around. The relationship Luna has with them is much like those of the older girls at her school. Monica and Alexandra also adore the puppies. They even fed one of them a bottle once and later put one to sleep. I so wish they could adopt them. I know the pups would be well loved by them.

We had a blueberry cake made from the blueberries I bought form the Roma family at the market. We got a giant bucket of blueberries the day before. Happy Birthday was sung in 5 languages: Chinese (Liam led that one), French, English, Spanish and of course Hungarian.

We invited the minister from another village and his family. They had some friends from Hungary staying with them so said they would be a bit late. They came about 4 hours late. They were driving back from a daytrip with their Hungarian friends and dropped by with a present for Luna (a cute carved wooden snake box), homebrewed beer and home brewed polinka. The same polinka I drank a few days ago at their village festival and had too much. Oh dear. James thought it was good to have on hand to offer guests as that is what everyone does here. We spent some time with them along with their friends. The funniest thing was that they were interested in our weird vegan ways. They had never heard of soymilk. Melinda, the minister’s wife asked to taste some. Okay. We gave her a small cup and warned her many times over that it does not taste like cow’s milk. She liked it and it got passed around the room. We had a crew of Hungarian meat eaters trying our soymilk. It was funny.

Luna finished her birthday party day with staying up to watch the cows come home. This is a social event here as everyone sits outside to wait for their cows. Monica and Alexandra were out and happy to see Luna, Liam and the pups again. It turned into a big kid party. I went back out to check on everyone and James was talking to Alex. Alex is English speaking and lives across the street form us. Monica and Alexandra are his cousins. Monica, Alexandra, Luna, Liam, Byron and 4 other older girls are out playing with the puppies. Estherneni is out there hugging Liam and chatting away with him in Hungarian. Luna scored a few more boxes of chocolates form the neighbors who didn’t make it to her party.It was time to come in. Luna said she had a great birthday.

James and I were so happy that Luna had a great time. I was a little sad that she made so many friends so recently and will be leaving in 2 days. I did hope for a village party for her though and she sure had one. We laughed at the visual of the Hungarians trying our soymilk and having conversations about it.




Luna in her new birthday dress