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from the last week or so…
As you can see… E is quite into dressing up in all sorts of outfits.
Here is a hand-me-down from S… from Daddy when he was in Ghana!
She also has started the typical Princess stage…
Also a hand-me-down from S & N… from Mommy when she was in 7th grade dancing class!
Her sister, however, has started the typical STANDING stage! Woo-hoo!
She can’t get there on her own yet, but when we put her in a standing position, she can stay there for 15 minutes or so and is happy as a little clam.
She is also a very curious girl– you can see it in her eyes.
She’s very nosy and watches everyone and everything so intently these days.
In answer to some questions– E is doing really well with potty training. Accidents are rare. Today was a completely accident-free day, for example!
We are all doing fine.
I planned to make this and post on Mother’s day, but I’m obviously late. J has really been making progress over the last two weeks. You can access the video here. It is big so save it. We’ll take it down in a few days.
We’ll add more text and pictures today. Because everything is closed on Sunday, we have all our errands to run.
We made this video of our time in Budapest. While J had a stomach flu during some of it, we still had a nice time. J got a lot of attention and plenty of time to sleep.
You can access the video here. It is big so save it. We’ll take it down in a few days.
Because it takes so long to make the movies, we didn’t make two - short one for internet and long one for home movie. It will be pretty boring for most. Also, we should put a bit of a disclaimer for others with small children that will be traveling. While people are usually smiling and things always seem to be going smoothly in the video, this is the magic of editing. 
Both girls were sick at different times. Also, moving around with 2 small children, two large suitcases, two backpacks and two car seats was usually challenging. Especially when taxi cab drivers insist on giving you a “special” price. In total though, it was still a lot of fun. We just traveled at a different speed, took a lot of naps and followed Uncle Lee’s rule about ice cream on vacation.
Ah… blogs… So, this blog serves many purposes. Not only is it a way to communicate with our family and friends, but it also serves as our personal journal and… frankly… baby books for the girls. This entry falls squarely in the category of “personal journal”… so I apologize if it is less than interesting to most of you.
At 11:00 today, I was walking back to my office from a meeting in another part of the factory. I heard a whistle blow loudly (an actual whistle like a police officer blows to direct traffic) and then heard lots of people walking.
Welcome to the German world of strikes. They are very cute, friendly little things. Everyone just left work at 11 today and got a nice afternoon off. No picket lines, no angry words. I was walking in the direction of going “in” while they were all leaving, and everyone did the customary friendly greeting as we passed in the hallway. Just like a regular end-of-the-day. 90%+ of the factory line workers have left, but only a small percentage of the office workers, who are also represented by the same union. The area around me– marketing and product support– is still pretty full of employees today.
The workers are asking for a 6.5% annual raise and management is offering 2.5% plus a small bonus for profitable times. Their reasoning for the 6.5% is to reflect the company’s stock price rise (which has gone from about $48 a share to $110 in the 5 years I have been here) which has benefitted shareholders and the bonuses that have been paid to management employees, but which they have not directly benefitted from. Seems very reasonable.
Unfortunately, we do our accounting on a factory-by-factory basis and this factory has not always done very well. So finding that extra expense money in the factory budget (bonuses come from a different budget) would be pretty difficult. They are in negotiations these days.
We have gone through strike periods like this twice before (as I recall), since we have been here. They really don’t affect much from a general non-union employee perspective. We can expect a few more of these planned walk-outs over the next few weeks, but probably no full-day shut-downs. We’ll see. It is the busiest production time of the year (of course, they aren’t dumb!), so a week-long strike would have a real impact here. But a few hours here and there is not going to cause any real harm. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.