Lena Mikado

I took my little Chloe on a girls' shopping trip today. Casually strolling with my tiny girlfriend from Target to Ross, I remembered how I used to take the boys to Pet Smart to check some cute animals out, and spontaneously decided to pop in and do the same with Chloe....

These twenty-five pages were not written by me. They were written by my grandmother in the year 2000, right after she turned seventy-one. Her diary found its way to me a month and a half after she had passed away, at the end of July, on my birthday, in 2019. The best b...

2019 has been crazy travel-wise... And it all started with Berlin...

It's funny how you always think of yourself as one type of person - in my case, daring, wanderlust-obsessed, party monster - until a few years (or fifteen years, to be more precise) fly by with the spe...

You came to me in my dream last night. It's funny how I used to think that it was freaky that people who passed on come to visit you in your dreams. But it turns out that it's not freaky at all - or scary for that matter. After almost 4 years of being bed-ridden, of li...

Yet another year has gone by, and it was once again time to mull over the question of where our crazy family of five was heading to for this Thanksgiving break. We live dangerously close to Orlando – just an easy-breezy three-and-a-half-hour ride that makes it very tem...

 I have two extremely picky kids. Every meal is a battle - some days I win and bask in the rays of maternal glory, and some days I lose and retreat in guilty desperation. Sounds familiar? The most important thing in this grueling matter is to remember one thing - you m...

Saint Petersburg, or the Venice of the North, the heart and soul of the Russian culture, is one of those cities that leaves you standing in the middle of the street, with your mouth wide open and your eyes hopelessly darting around, attempting to take all of this beaut...

Gluehwein or Mulled Wine is a German/Austrian winter-holiday drink that most tourists know as an after-ski drink. It is warm red wine prepared with spices, mainly cinnamon, oranges and lots of love! It is extremely popular in Europe, and it will make you glow and spark...

Yes! It's that time of the year and I find myself frantically running around getting art supplies in craft stores, decorating our household with all kinds of spooky evil creatures and in general, overwhelming my family with my Halloween-infused energy.

Last night, I wa...

Tonight, I am dreaming of Quebec. For some bizarre reason, Quebec has my heart. I am a Russian, who has settled in the south of the United States, so my passion for Quebec does appear strange, but the first time I set my nomadic foot in Montreal, I knew that I was in l...