Adwoa und Ama

Matt, Becky and K spent a week here visiting and are now home safe and sound. We had a great time with them and really miss them already. We saw a lot and kept on the move. The above picture is from last Saturday in Paris. Becky had read and found a boat tour on the Seine river. It was a great way to start the morning, even though it was a little chilly. Getting to Paris was really easy. We took a train to the city and then a subway to the hotel. Paris looks a little like downtown New York and Washington DC in places. It was really pretty wherever we went.

The day cleared up a lot and we had a beautiful visit to the Notre Dame Cathedral. It was truly spectacular– we were all impressed. Afterward, the big girls played in a small park just next to the cathedral, while the Purdue guys entertained themselves and fed J.

You can see these pictures are in no particular order. This one was taken on the Sunday after Matt, Becky, and K arrived (about 10 days ago). It was taken on a terrace of the castle in Heidelberg (a really nice city about 1.5 hours away). The weather was awesome. The fall temperatures really fit well with all the walking too. Later in the day, everyone tried my first major attempt at calzones. I’m still learning. Matt had the good idea of slicing the tops a little to let out some of the pressure when they heat up.

This photo is from last Friday. After we got settled into our hotel in the Latin Quarter in Paris, we went to the Luxembourg Garden, a huge park in the city, so that the girls could run around and play. The sun and the changing colors of the leaves made for a beautiful evening.

There were a lot of evenings just hanging out and playing here in Zweibruecken. Here E had fun “holding” her little sister. J is about 2/3 the weight of E right now. She faked us out and slept through the night a week or so ago. Not since though.

One of the girls’ favorite activities was riding “bikes” around the house. K doesn’t do that at home, so she was quite excited about this. E had some tough lessons in learning to share, but she did pretty well. K was a really good teacher and didn’t need to be reminded.

If you are interested, you can see a video of E and K playing here. Recommended way to view: “Right click” on the link above, use the “Save Target As” menu item, and save it to your desktop. After it is downloaded, play it. Otherwise, it may not run smoothly for you. This one is giant so I’ll take it down soon. I had to use the MPEG format because the standard windows movie format looked so choppy, even after downloading.

In other big news, E decided to poop in the toilet this evening. Since this blog is her “baby book,” I guess we better record these milestones here. While she was here, K gave E a few lessons in using the toilet (complete with teacher-like sing-songy voice…. very cute). We think this had a strong influence on E’s renewed interest.

Matt, Becky and K made it here with no problems yesterday. They are just trying to get over the jet lag. Above is a picture from the top of a castle just over the border in France. We are having a lot of fun. Tomorrow we are going to try to get out of the house earlier and see a few more sites. Below is a fun picture of K and E this morning when we went to the outdoor market in Zweibruecken.

This is E after her hair cut on Saturday morning.

If you are interested, you can our latest video here. As always, it’s big and may be boring to all except grandparents. We’ll take it down in a couple of days.

Stil working on this post. More this afternoon…..

I guess I was hoping to get back to this on Sunday after we dropped Liz off at the Airport. She made it to Russia fine and should be home tomorrow. It is a lot of work taking care of the two girls. E and I vacuumed out the car yesterday so that it would be clean for Matt, Becky and Ks visit. J was sleeping inside the house.

A couple house items are getting finished this week before MB&K arrive. We had a water leak from the ceiling into our sunroom several weeks ago. There is a small deck on top of the sunroom and it trapped water. The ceiling rotted and eventually began to leak. It has been fixed and I’ll be able to move the furniture back into the room tomorrow after work. Because of the work in the sunroom, I had to move Nana’s couch into the dining room temporarily. E likes Nana’s couch there and would probably like it to stay. In our house you can only eat in the dining room and kitchen. The shuffling of furniture has provided a nice loophole for E. No spills. All that she has really eaten on it are dry cheerios, but you should see her face.

We have a new - used washer as of last Friday. Our other washer was always failing in the middle of the load. We had several witch doctor cures. Eventually though, they all stopped working.

On top of all this we have had several water pipe leaks in the basement too. A plumber would come to fix the broken pipe and then another would leak. I was getting tired of cleaning our remnant linoleum sheet outside on the brick driveway (to make sure we didn’t have a mold issue). I think the pipes are good now. We’ve had to turn on the radiators already and they are working fine.

Time for sleep. J is sleeping from about 8 pm to 5 am without food. That’s a big step. She does get up about 4-5 times throughout the night though. She cries until she has her pacifier or is reswaddled. This means about 2-3 hours of sleep at a time. I really don’t remember ever being this tired before. E even got up last night, which is strange. Regardless of all the restlessness, they are being very good girls. I’m a very proud dad and can’t wait to show them off in the next several months.