Adwoa und Ama

Liz got home safely early this morning. We celebrated with banana muffins. The plan is to have a pretty slow weekend.

It has been a long 7 weeks. Since Christmas Liz has had to catch up with travel. This week she was in Kazakhstan. In recent weeks, I have been traveling around Germany making sure my project works correctly. After work yesterday, E and J were so good that we went to the grocery store to get E a “Bretzel”. We also got a lot of other things we needed. The store is always a race for me. I know if E has a pretzel, then I have about 20 minutes to shop until she is done eating. If I deviate from my shopping list, I start to get stressed. Today, we met Frau Strauss. She is the boss of the daycare (Kinderkrippe) that E and J go to. She stopped us with her family after we got E’s hot pretzel. As soon as we started talking, I heard tick .. tick .. tick .. My minutes were fading towards a baby/toddler meltdown. I soon forgot the list though because Frau Strauss was a little sad. She said that the ladies at the Kinderkrippe were talking recently. They were sad that in 20 years that J would not remember the half a dozen German ladies that loved her and took care of her. I told her that we’d take lots of pictures and remind the girls. It is crazy, but we have been here a full year already. Our biggest worry before we came was childcare. We have been really lucky.

By the way, even with the delay, no meltdown.

Big news in our household this morning– J has her first tooth. Bottom middle.

You can see a bigger video of the Fasching (Carnaval/ Mardi Gras) parade here.

Happy Birthday Nine!

There have been parades all weekend to celebrate your birthday ( and Carnival too.) E says thanks for all the candy. You can see one of your floats here.

Liz called and says happy birthday from Kazakstan. She also wanted me to tell you that it is -20 C below.

We hope you have a happy birthday. Lots of love from all of us.

Above is a picture of E having some ice cream at the zoo. We have been making short trips on the weekends. Yesterday we showed up just before closing time and saw the elephants eating dinner. One of the elephants was using her trunk to wrap whole bunches of bananas in hay and then eating it. It was pretty neat. J still is not sure what to make of all this zoo stuff. Maybe it is too overwhelming– she tends to go to sleep.

J has started to use a sippy cup… but as you can see, it is a bit slow going. This particular model of cup she hasn’t figured out yet…

You can see a Christmas video here. No Medieval Times on this one. Maybe in another one. It was already pretty long. While it is a big file, the resolution is not as good as usual. You”ll have to play it at a smaller size. To get the higher resolution, it would have been about 40 Mb. I always debate working longer on the editing. I have to balance it with actual viewing though. Otherwise, it would be next Christmas before I got this ‘done’.