Hello everyone and welcome back to English Cozy Chat, a slow English podcast which helps you to learn English in a fun and natural way. I am Maria and today we are going to have a cozy coffee chat about what I've been doing lately.

I wanted to start off by talking about my coffee cup. Isn't this beautiful?

One of my friends makes pottery.

And she made this cup for me one time when I was sick. She came over to my house and she brought me this cup and some tea, I think.

It was just the nicest little gesture. A gesture is something nice someone does for someone else. And every time I look at it, I think about my friend and how she made this with her hands and how she put real work into making this and that she gave it to me. So sometimes it's just extra special when you have something could be a cup or something else that you know was made by hand and that someone really put love and care into making that object. So this cup is really special to me. Cheers to that.

Okay, so on to what I've been doing in the past weeks. We had a three-w weekek break, meaning my kids were off of school for 3 weeks for the holidays. And for any of you that have kids, you'll understand me when I say that having your kids at home for long periods of time can be hard.

It's really fun. I love it having my kids home, but wow, it's a lot of work, you know. Um, now my kids are a little bit easier than they used to be since they're not small babies anymore, but still it's a lot. But either way, I really enjoyed it. Yesterday was their first day back at school and I was just really relieved to have a moment to myself to just get myself together and to be able to focus again on work and things that I need to be doing. During all of December, I had family here visiting us.

My brother came to visit during the first two weeks of December, which is always really fun. And then my mom came to visit during the last two weeks of December. They both live in the United States and we don't have family that live near us. It's just our little family that live here in Barcelona.

So, it is always really, really nice to have family come and visit. It's a real special occasion. So my mom was here during the holiday season and whenever she is here, I feel like my whole routine and rhythm of how I normally live my life just completely changes.

because when she's here, all I want to do is to go out and do fun things and show her things and do fun things with my kids as well.

So the whole time she was here, we were going out and going to fun events in Barcelona. It was Christmas time, so there were many extra fun things to be doing.

My kids visited Santa Claus for the first time, which was really exciting.

And we just really enjoyed our time together. And as I said about not being in my normal routine when she's here, usually I work out almost every day. I eat healthy. I try to have healthy habits. But when she's here, all of that kind of goes out the window.

That's a good expression to learn. It goes out the window means it doesn't happen. So when my mom is here, all of my good healthy habits kind of go out the window. So when she was here, I was eating tons of all of the holiday food and not working out and just really taking advantage of her being here. And sometimes I think that's important to just embrace the moment. To embrace the moment means to just really enjoy the moment that you're in and to not worry about anything else. It's kind of like having a mini vacation with your regular routine just by changing your mindset.

So, I was so happy that she came to visit. She stayed with us until the day after Christmas and then she went back home to the United States. So then we still had two more weeks left of being home after my mom left and neither I or my husband were working during that time. And this doesn't happen that often that we are not working and my kids are off of school. So, we really tried to enjoy this time off and I really tried as much as possible to just really do nothing.

And I know maybe that sounds weird to many people.

I think a lot of times we think that just because we are off of work or have some free time that we need to travel or to go somewhere or to do something or to have some kind of experience to explain to others what we did during during our break.

But really, I think it's really important sometimes to just be at home, to just relax and try not to do much. And I say try not to do much because sometimes that's hard.

We are always so used to working so much all the time and thinking about work and taking care of our families that the thought of just stopping and resting can be very hard.

So at the beginning when I decided, okay, I'm going to slow down. We're not going to go anywhere. We're just gonna stay here and relax.

It was a little bit hard for me.

It feels a bit weird to really try to disconnect and take a break from the things that you usually do.

But when I got used to it and accepted it, it really was super nice. There were several days in a row that we just didn't do much.

My kids played. We played with them.

We laid on the couch, watched movies.

I cooked, but we didn't go anywhere. And didn't really do a lot.

But I really truly think this is so important for human health to just take breaks and not do anything. So I am really happy that we did that because now I feel better. I feel refreshed and rejuvenated.

which means extra fresh.

And yeah, that was really a nice time to just be together.

And I'm usually really into cooking holiday meals, but this year I decided I didn't want to cook because sometimes on the holidays I spend the whole day in the kitchen cooking. So instead of doing that, we decided to order food and just enjoy it that way. So from a local restaurant in the town where we live, we ordered the typical Catalan dishes for Christmas and were able to try them that way. And up until now, I had not actually tried the typical Catalan dishes because I'm always making different dishes on the holidays. So, that was neat to try what they eat here on Christmas. What they eat is something called escua, which is a bowl of soup that has big noodles in it and meatballs. Small. It can either have small meatballs in there or larger meatballs, but that is usually the appetizer.

And the more typical meal actually that they eat here is lots and lots of food. When they gave me the menu to see what kind of food I could order, I ordered two things. I ordered the escua which is the soup and then the Christmas chicken el poo naveno and that is a chicken which is cooked with a Swedish sauce that has raisins and prunes and maybe some nuts and that was really delicious.

But there was a menu that had so many things on it. I was like, "Wow, people really eat a lot on this holiday." And when I ordered, I said, "Okay, I want these two things." And they were like, "That's it. You don't want anything else?" And I was like, "No, but like soup and chicken and is a lot, you know, and I was going to make some potatoes and vegetables here." But they were like, "Well, there's all these other things. There's like beef and another kind of chicken and a pasta dish." And normally people eat all of this here on Christmas. So, I found that really interesting.

But we really enjoyed the food that we ate. I enjoyed not having to cook. That was kind of a Christmas gift to myself to just relax and not have to cook on Christmas. And it was just nice to try something new. And the thing that we did at home that I am the most proud of is I got started with making my own bread.

If you saw my New Year's resolution episode, I talk a lot about how this year I would like to start making my own bread.

And we did that. Well, stop. I didn't actually make the bread, but we made the starter, which is the yeast mixture that helps the bread to rise.

And it took about a week of adding flour and water and waiting and making sure that it had the right temperature because it has to ferment. Actually, wait one second. I'm going to go get my starter and show it to you.

Here they are. I actually made two in case one of them didn't work. But see, I the the mixture started down here. It's just flour and water and doing this process over and over. And now you see that the it has risen. And this is ready to use. So now I've put it in the fridge and I'm going to try to make bread.

tomorrow. And this is the other one which is also doing really well.

It's actually really funny with these sourdough starters, which is what it's called. You are supposed to give them a name to name them. So, I let my kids name them. And one of them named this one Theiona Theiona, which I thought was creative.

And the other one, my one of my girls named her Starshine. So this is Starshine and this is Fiona. And it's just really exciting. I have already gotten so much joy from making these and seeing that what we did actually worked and I'm really excited about making the bread and I will share it with you all once I actually do it.

So, that is all for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed this little cozy, casual life update.

Please let me know if you did. And thank you all so much for watching. I hope you have a wonderful day and I cannot wait to see you in the next episode.

Bye.