We finally went to the Opera House!!!

Last night Peter and his sister, Joe and I went to Frankfurt to see the musical Evita in the Old Opera House. It was a really fun night. Peter gave us a tour of the city that he lived in for a few years and where him and Beate were married. After the show we went to one of the bars in his "old stomping ground" and drank Apfelwein. It's an amazingly disgusting drink after the first sip, but somehow you're ready for more by the time you finish one glass.

Christmas market @ Schonbrunn Palace, Vienna!

Shopping in Heidelberg

We just found this guy walking around Old Town.

After Nikolaus enters, we sing...

here's one verse I found translated:

Let us rejoice and be merry,
and we heartily rejoice!
Funny, funny, lalalalala!
Soon Nicholas Eve is here,
Soon Nicholas Eve is here!

A video from today's sledding

Finally!! It's time for the advent calendar!

Snowy day

Today it's been snowing for 7 hours straight so far. We rode the bike to school in the snow, but by the afternoon I decided it was safer to walk then use anything with wheels. I took pictures at Jackson's school of the playground outside his classroom covered with snow, and the cute penguins hanging from the ceiling. His group is the Penguin Group. The playground actually wraps around the whole school, so it is really much bigger than this, but this is the view from his classroom. We had fun making footprints in the snow just like the book, Snowy Day, and we took the "back road" home through the trail. Wonderful winter wonderland!! Can't wait for Beate to come home so she can take Jackson skiing in the driveway!!

Baking Christmas Cookies with Beate

Jackson's school is having a bake sale tomorrow as a fund-raiser for their adopted school in Namibia. Last weekend, Beate helped us make some German Christmas Cookies. It was a lot of fun! We made the typical Christmas cut outs shown here and a hazelnut cookie with jam in the middle (those are my favorite), and a type of macaroon - also yum! I can't wait to see what yummy things are at the bake sale tomorrow. I know they made some special treats in the school too. more photos to come...

Happy Thanksgiving!!

We celebrated today in german festive style, with gleuwine in hand and strolling a christmas market in Mainz.  We'll be eating our turkey feast on Sunday, complete with crnaberry sauce and pumpkin pie.  Yes, I managed to acquire all necessary ingredients from my military connection here.  We are so grateful for the family & friends we have - old & new, here's to you!             

Riding home from school

I just came across this one in my phone.  You can see the problem with him riding his own bike.  There are some really big hills around here, and we happen to live at the top of one!!  So the trailer bike should keep us moving, movin' on up!  It will help the mommy and daddy get the exercise we need at least!

Joe & Jackson ride to school

We found a trailer bike for sale in the newspaper (with Beate's help)!  Jackson loves it and wants to ride the bike everywhere! 

Breakfast in Heppenheim

I don't think I'll ever get tired of how cute this place is.

Happy Halloween!!

Hope all of you are enjoying an evening of dressing in creative costumes, walking around neighborhood streets filled with happy children and parents, and above all, collecting as much candy as one can possibly carry. Jackson experienced tonight the tradition I grew up familiar with - dressing in full warm clothing garb before doning the costume. Thermal underwear, fleece sweater, etc. and then thePower Rangers Costume. I dressed as a cat with fuzzy ears and a tail. Joe dressed as an American in Germany ;). We attended the Halloween event in town, Frankenstein's Haunted Castle. While standing in line for an hour, I noticed that everyone around me was dressed as a zombie or a witch and that's it. No one was dressed as a princess or butterfly or cowboy, etc. That's when I realized that Germans' idea of dressing up for Halloween only included the spooky themes. That made us a little awkward, but hey, we went with it. When we finally got our tickets and entered the castle for what I thought was the family version, it turned out to be just a little too realistic for a 4 year old's creative mind. I'm not sure if we even stayed 20 minutes before we determined this was not the right place for us. It was a shame because, for adults, it is the best halloween event I've ever seen.

We came home and decided to give trick or treating a try. This was fun and interesting too. We were successful in collecting candy, but we were the only people on the street, so it wasn't quite the same festive ambiance you will all mostly encounter tonight. Most doors we knocked on gave Jackson something, and he cheerfully said,"danke schon!" It was funny though because I could tell some houses were a little caught off guard, like "oh yeah, it's halloween and I'm supposed to give you something sweet. Hold on let me see what I have in my kitchen." - literally.

It was fun to sort the candy though and try all sorts of new things. We ate almost all of it in one night, except for the one marked, "Speed." We thought that one we should leave until day light hours...just in case.

Well...it was bound to happen

2010-10-29 - 2010-10-30 Jackson's fat lip

Jackson's first bike crash happened Friday night on a bike ride with daddy. I think Jackson was so excited to show daddy that he can ride down hills now that he forgot to use the brakes. He got all out of control and crashed his face into the street. This is a time when it gives you real peace of mind to live with a dentist and a maxilo-facial surgeon. They gave him a check up immediately and determined the crash as "not so bad".

Bensheim Take 2!

So now that we have more time on our hands, we are able to participate in some of the family-friendly things around Bensheim. There is a place here called the Spielerie, which literally translates to "Playful". It is a member-supported game room basically with a really super stocked room full of board games for all ages. They also sponsor activities once in while too. On Saturday we went to our first event, which was a "Rubenschnitzen" aka Pumpkin Carving. I was super excited to see this as an event and to be available to take Jackson to it. Here in Germany Halloween is not celebrated to quite the degree that it is celebrated back in the States, and no where near the extent it is celebrated in St. Petersburg, FL. So to find some community event that was teetering on the edge of spookiness was thrilling to me. We didn't miss it! Now the next feat was to find the right pumpkin. Of course being from Pennsylvania, I had visions of taking Jackson to a u-pick-it farm to hand pick his pumpkin out of rows and rows of possibility. But apparently people don't do that here. I had to justo to the market and hope that there were pumpkins left, which is just what we did. In our luck there was ONE pumpkin remaining! I think it might have weighed 8 Kg. That sucker was big and HEAVY! And did I mention that the market is in the walking area of town? So I had to carry the heavy-a** pumpkin all the way back to the parking garage where we parked. Fortunately it wasn't too far and it did stop me from making any other unnecessary purchases at the cute stores downtown.

The event turned out great. We carved ourselves a pretty darn good jack-o-lantern and met some other really nice families. It was a small gathering, so it was kind of clear that we were the new ones. That was awkward at first, but onc

e we started talking to people it was fine. I'm never sure how people will feel about the fact that we don't speak German *yet. But many of the parents spoke English and Jackson just kind of got out there and started playing. After we carved the pumpkin, they had a campfire where they roasted dough on a stick - no marshmallows here. Jackson loved this. We made three and each one got significantly better. At first he just wanted to put the dough right into the flame. I guess he learned that trick from setting his marshmallows on fire, but the dough doesn't do that, it just gets all black and dirty. So after other adults started telling him to hold it above the flame, as opposed to IN the flame, he finally listened. We had a really fun night and ended the evening by eating Kurbis Creme Suppe and bread with Pumpkin seeds. It was a pumpkin feast! Then came the debate about the lighting of the pumpin..Jackson was sure that the type of candle needed was a birthday candle, not a boring little tealight. So we had to experiment with that. The birthday candle didn't even last 10 minutes, and he finally came to the realization that, "Mommy, you were right."

On Tuesday we went back to the Spielerie and became card-carrying members.

Dolomites

The Dolomites are part of the Alps, but are different than the peaks found in Switzerland or Austria. They are much more jagged looking and the rock is very pale colored. Sometimes looking white or peach colored. Wiki says: "The name "Dolomites" is derived from the famous French mineralogist Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu who was the first to describe the rock, dolomite, a type of carbonate rock which is responsible for the characteristic shapes and colour of these mountains." We wanted to hike to the location where dinosaur footprints have been found, but reading maps in Italy and driving on the small town roads isn't that easy, which basically means, we never found the trail. So we stopped at a ski resort and "dug for fossils" there. It helps that the rock is so pale colored. You can see the one cool rock we dug up kind of does resemble a fossil, right? We stayed at a bed and breakfast of a couple who live in the downtown Belluno, but both grew up in the small (I mean tiny) farming villages in the mountains. They both spoke very little English and we actually used the little bit of German that we know to communicate. It was not the typical bed and breakfast, but more like they rented out their guest bedroom in their house for two nights. We ate breakfast in their kitchen. It was very cozy and they were so sweet. They said that we were the first Americans to ever stay with them.

Driving through Austria

After our stay in Legoland, we hit the road and headed to the Dolomites. We stopped for lunch at this place in Austria that had a little hiking trail that led to a beautiful lake. Now that's what I call a rest stop!! The color of the water was amazing, so I was happy you can see it in the picture of Joe and Jackson. Jackson wanted to go swimming, but quickly changed his mind when he stuck his foot in. Freezing!!!