This week has been full of birthdays and trying to dwell on small delights.

First the bad news in lockdown land….

After the heads of state and all of the important people met for 6ish hours on Saturday, there are more restrictions going into places of Wednesday. These are things that are confusing and not very clear but also interesting choices. Now, we have to wear N95 or FFP2 masks, the surgical blue masks are not enough. If we want to go into a shop, hairdresser or museum, you have to have a same day negative rapid test in hand. Employers bear the responsibility for testing their employees twice a week if they are in the office or they can give more work from home hours as well. The strict rest days that were to happen (absolutely nothing open from April 1-5) was taken back and apologized over but we the public holidays of Good Friday, Easter and Easter Monday remain.

And we continue our lockdown until at least April 24th in Berlin. The rates keep going up here with variants but the amount of vaccines is slowly rising, not at a rapid rate whatsoever. This morning we heard that 8 percent of Germany has gotten one dose, 4 percent two doses. Still extremely low without anyone really figuring out how this is meant to work.

So we acknowledge the lockdown blues and then move on to the good things….

On Wednesday we received a wedding date! Hooray! Ana and I will be married on July 16th at noon Berlin time. If you have been following this saga, it has taken us since August to be assigned a wedding date. We started with an appointment in August which gave us the list of all of the paperwork needed such as new birth certificates, papers from our countries that say we are not currently married, my original previous marriage certificate and divorce papers, all paperwork translated to German, etc .A few more appointments and finally an email was sent to us offering us a date and time and place (you have to get married in the Standesamt here in your neighborhood…like a neighborhood city hall). The upside is plenty but we are finding it hard to comprehend what we can plan around the day in Corona times. We will do our best.

My amazing nephew turned 5 this week! One whole hand! He laughed his way through it and I loved to see the pictures. What an amazing kiddo he is!

Ana had a birthday too! On Friday Ana had her second pandemic birthday and wanted to take a raincheck on the birthday to celebrate when we can outside of lockdown. While I assured her we could, we spent some time celebrating on the day as well. We drank bubbles on the balcony that I cleaned up for our first Spring hang out time out there. We lingered over brunch in the morning and pizza at night. There were many family phone calls and her favorite cake. It was a sweet day overall I hope.

And this week I have been trying to delight in the small delights…morning coffees, a board game that I love, hanging out in the sun when it is around, walking the pups as always, and zoom calls when they happen.

How is your week?

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