Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, Mom.
82 and going strong.

I was talking with my 16-18 year old students, and they were telling me about their grandmothers or great-grandmothers. Oh, they said, if we (Lithuania, for instance) are playing Germany or Russia in soccer or something innocent like that, she'll get very worried.

Since 1925, these smaller countries have been independent (as a result of WWI, before which they were part of the German or Russian empires) absorbed or partitioned by Germany/the Soviet Union, invaded/annexed (if you were on the Soviet half of that German-Soviet partition), reliberated by the Soviets, ruled by the Soviets, then independent again.