My adventure with babywearing was short, only 4 months. I was overcome by… heat. I was unable to walk with my son tied to me when the temperature was above 25 degrees. I was very sweaty. He was too. And it is known how sweating + cotton clothes + air conditioning ends. A cold.

So I was done with babywearing. When the temperatures dropped my son had better things to do. He learned to sit and, he no longer wanted to spend his days hugging with his mother.

When you travel outside of your comfort zone, you better be well prepared. Well enough so that nothing surprises you, and if it does then you can just shrug and take it in stride. In such situations what really counts are convenient solutions, minimalism, light equipment, and reliable items. When I wonder "what is the best clothing for travel?" the answer is simple: merino wool travel clothing.

If we subtract yeast, eggs, milk and butter from the classic apple pancakes recipe, then basically all we are left with are the apples... and the inevitable joy that accompanies eating something delicious and healthy, of course. Vegan apple pancakes without yeast but with crunchy almonds may be a delicious and healthy dinner for the whole family, afternoon tea for kids or an adult dessert to go with your coffee.

I wanted an older brother! I really dreamed about having a wise, patient, strong, older partner in fun. Someone who will give me a boost when I can't reach the shelf, or when the playground climber is too tall. Someone who will step in and have a word or two with the larger children in kindergarten, those who took my crayons, the ones I needed the most... And so I told my mom that my new sibling must be older, because having a younger one does not make sense and seems like a bother... But my mother insisted that it can not be older and it will be fun and it will be tiny and cute and so on.

Well, we went on vacation. A family trip, just the little one, Maciej and me. The cats were left under the watchful care of my sister. And so, with joy in our hearts and smiles on our lips we packed our car and set off. After about thirty minutes we finally got out of our neighborhood, now only four more and in an hour or so we should reach the highway. From there, only five hours of driving and we will be at the seaside. Oh well, with our positive attitude and record level of desperate longing for free and lazy days, nothing will be able to spoil our vacation, be it traffic jams or terrible roads, even if they have more holes than asphalt. ;-)

A lot has happened recently, from personal turmoil, a complete change of lifestyle, to finding a new job and moving. That's why at the end of July I happily hopped into my friends' car and during the next 40 hours of travel I felt more and more relief and inner emptiness. As if all the fatigue and anxiety filling me for the last few months were now left far behind. I did not know at the time what would take their place...

To be honest, I must admit that this blog post was inspired by facebook, or to be more specific, the profile of a gentleman who often writes about and promotes all the goings on in the Beskid Niski mountain range, where I am honored to currently reside. This time he wrote about a certain condition many suffer from, including myself and a lot of you reading this, I am sure. We’re talking about an addiction to mushrooming. When the time of year comes when mushrooms start popping up, the afflicted begin to behave irrationally. Personally, I can be found looking for mushrooms up to three times a day. No…  it’s not because I have that much free time. Yes… I am neglecting my many other duties and chores. No… I have no remorse… Yes… I like my addiction and no, I’m not going to fight it.

There are certain people in this world who dream about moving to the countryside, away from the city, the hustle and bustle. Many of them will never do it for various reasons and the dream will simply remain a dream forever. Others will take the plunge, they will live in the country for some time and then they will realize that it’s not for them because the reality of country life is not what they dreamed about and they will return to their old life. Then there are those who will fulfill their dreams and become country folk for better or worse, they will put down roots in their newly adopted homeland, and will live there for the rest of their lives. If fate spares us from some unforeseen occurrences, I dare say that we belong to the latter group. However, it was not easy, there were some incidents on the way and today I would like to tell you all about them.

I was born in the early 90s in an era of a toy frenzy and general prosperity. I had an older sister, who bestowed upon me a lot of various toys. Barbie dolls, Lego blocks and lots of stuffed animals… but I never gave them any attention, and my favorite toys were always those I made myself.

In my family I’m known as the root girl, because if I had my way I would only feed on parsley, carrots, beetroot and celery. Root vegetables, or “rooties” as I lovingly call the mix of my favorite ingredients, found a way to my heart one winter when I realized I stopped eating vegetables altogether, because somehow I could not work up an appetite for the tasteless tomatoes, hothouse plastic cucumbers and foiled lettuce.

I was supposed to write about analyzing all of the ideas I wrote about previously, but right now let’s just say that both the workshop and the fairy tales ideas were considered as good, but not scalable enough. We have the desire to conquer the world in our blood, so unfortunately we had to discard these two ideas, at least for now. Also, the moment the idea of a clothing brand was brought up and Kasia described her vision in mere three sentences, we all knew that this would be it.

As I was one day traveling on a train run by the Małopolska regional railway, I noticed an advertising slogan on the reverse of the ticket, which read: "I am from Lesser Poland, I go out into the field". Cool, right? I have always appreciated local patriotism. As many of you probably know, people from Małopolska (or Lesser Poland) say that they go out into the field to denote that they are going outside, while in general in other parts of Poland they say they go out into the courtyard. Let’s not get into the intricacies of linguistics or compare regional dialects here. I'm not an expert so I shouldn’t step into these foreign territories. The truth, however, is that since I moved to the countryside, the language I use daily has not only changed a tad but has also incorporated new words that I have never heard before. As a result, I become familiar with concepts that I want to explore linguistically as well as get to know them almost face to face.

My idea of how my involvement in this blog would look like was quite different. I wanted to write a fairy tale about our business. But since Maciek started telling you about the business aspect of what we create in his blog entries, I decided to put my "fairy tale" idea on the shelf.

Inspired by Marlena's last post about dream, I decided to make one of my dreams come true and share my culinary travels in the form of a painter’s cooking blog :)

There are different ways you can fall victim to this craze, some are connived by logic, some take it seriously or as a temporary fad, then there are those, who go crazy by accident - that’s us ;) Our family went crazy by the way, the woolen craze just popped up and stayed for good, it was quick and painless. it spread and grew into our lives quickly and painlessly. Actually, the craze found us before we could find it. 

I remember when very soon after becoming a mother I bought one of the first available books about the soon to be very popular philosophies of Attachment Parenting and Nonviolent Communication. It was like a revelation to me! The book depicted what I can only describe as a dream come true relationship with my daughter! Empathy, trust, invisibility, following a child, trusting its needs, not violating its boundaries, appealing to its needs and becoming aware of your own.

Let me begin by talking about fulfilling your dreams, or more precisely about turning your plans into a reality. We can choose to live inside our dreams, in the small and cozy space of our imagination. No one looks there. There we can think about things which can be more or less real. Our dreams belong to us alone, and if they stay in this space for the rest of our lives, there’s a chance that nobody will ever know about them. What a pity!

Our ‘paterns’ adventure started in the spring of 2016. Kasia worked two jobs back then. As an interior designer for a Big Corporation, and the second as an art student, finishing her diploma in the class of painting - by the way, the subject and scope of her final work deserve a separate entry, which I promise to write in the near future. In any case, the sheer size of her diploma project corresponded with how deeply involved she is in everything she does. Simply put, she gave and continues to give her all.

Oh, hello! I am very pleased to meet you here, on our blog. This is our first and only blog - for now ;-)  We started writing it to fulfill our need to share insights on the surrounding world and stories we are a part of. By ‘we’ I mean all of us - the many creators of this blog - and we hope there will be even more of us soon.