I made a quick video of E from the past several days. The background music is public domain. You can see the video here.
I know that you all watched the AI finals last week, but I’m sure that you missed the Eurovision song contest. It’s been happening since 1956, and we’re guessing that its spirit is what inspired AI in the first place. Eurovision is a competition where European countries each submit one song (the people of that country select the winner through various means), there is a big show and people from all over Europe phone in to vote. You can’t vote for your own country’s entry. Then the vote totals from each country are tallied so that the people of each country are then counted together (like France gives first place to Sweden and second place to Albania, or whatever). Because of cultural politics, the best song usually doesn’t win. Since each country votes as a unit, people from smaller countries enjoy voting so that big countries (like Russia and Germany) don’t win. One strange thing is that almost all of the songs are in English. This year’s winner was Finland’s entry, “Hard Rock Hallelujah”. We highly recommend that you check out the Eurovision stage performance here. With all the masks and high-pitched (ala ACDC) singing it is very funny. Can you believe these guys won? The most famous Eurovision winner that you’ve heard of is ABBA, they won for “Waterloo” in 1974, and that propelled them from Swedish band to international stardom.
Last night on YouTube, we were able to find the Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee American Idol final performances. We watched them and thought that they were pretty good and that America chose correctly. It was good to know that we can watch this stuff on YouTube. You can be sure Liz will in January when AI starts again! A day or two late will be just fine for her.
While surfing YouTube, I also found this funny mockery of Star Trek. “Baby, no salsa on the leather! … keep it on the chips” I think it was produced as an ad for a television program/station called G4. I don’t know what that is though. Enjoy it.
We are very lucky to have family who love us in the US and who will send us new infant carseat bases when we accidently pack them up and send them into storage instead of bringing them to Germany… Thank you Grandma and Be-Pa!
The arrival of the new seat bases meant that we had to test them out with the old carseat, just to be sure that Graco didn’t do something dumb like make 2006 bases incompatible with 2004 carseats. Luckily, they didn’t do anything dumb. While we had the seat out and were testing it, a certain little girl decided it would be fun to climb in. We took this shot of her playing. And then we thought, hmmm… I wonder how that shot compares with her first trip in that very same carseat, home from the hospital in August of 2004…..
A lot has changed in 21 months, no? E is getting ready for “Baby Sister.” We talk about her a lot and E plays in her room a lot, too. The crib has been moved from E’s room to Baby Sister’s. Ever since E slept in her “big girl bed” that first time, she hasn’t made any move toward getting back into her crib. We were kind of surprised about that. And it doesn’t seem to bother her that the crib has now been moved to another room. We’ll see how she feels when there’s another baby sleeping in that crib…
Today is a German national holiday, Ascension Day. We all enjoyed the day together, even though it was cold and rainy. We played a lot and got quite a bit done around the house. The factory is shut down tomorrow, so Liz doesn’t have to work, but Mike does. He works in the posh office building that’s a few miles from the factory– he gets the benefit of nice office space. And the disadvantage of not following factory shutdown schedules. Hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend.
Happy Birthday Den! You came into the world with a full head of hair. It looks like you were styling it then too!
E and I went to the store after work today. On the way home, we tried another dessert from the bakery. Thumbs up to a great many other German foods, but this dessert was yet another dud. While E clapped and laughed after her piece of chocholate cake, I told her that she wouldn’t know what she was missing until she had some chocolate cake made by her Aunt Denny.
We love you and hope you enjoy your day.