Norah riding her 2 wheeler

Norah has been working on riding her 2 wheeler princess bike.  Ever since she turned 2, she got a Strider balance bike and mastered it pretty quickly.  She is a little speed racer on that thing.  It was apparent that she would do fine on a two wheeler.  She had already learned the hardest part and that was to balance.  We got her on some tricycles first and then put the training wheels on this bike and let her pedal around for a bit so she could learn how to pedal.  Norah is a pretty big shrimp, so we had to wait until this last summer to try her on this bike so she could touch with her tippy toes.  She still has to practice starting all by herself, but she is a champ!

Germany 2 Year Anniversary and Durbury, Belgium

October 11th marked 2 years of us moving to Germany. It really scares me how fast the time flies by. At first I was a little anxious having to be overseas for THREE years, and now I am frantically trying to plan our last year of vacations and must do/see's so I don't feel like I miss out. I am coming to the realization that no matter how much we get to do and see over the next year, there will always be so much that we don't get to see. As long as we make the best of it, I am ok with that!

It's funny when I think back to our first couple weeks here. It pretty much consisted of exhaustion, crying (on my part), and wondering what in the world had we got ourselves in to. It was weird driving around and thinking, "We live here?" Everything was so foreign to us. The architecture, language, celsius, kilometers, culture, currency, driving... I could go on and on. I felt completely lost and confused. I am very comfortable feeling uncomfortable now, if that makes any sense! I often have to remind myself when I am doing my usual stuff during the week that I am in a really cool place and I am not living a "normal" life right now. I have to say that for the past two years I have been trying to connect with Germans in some way. I realize this is a generalization, but Germans don't want to be connected with for the most part. Our neighbors are all friendly, but they don't care to talk to us or know anything about us. I really wanted to try and learn the language, but I have no time to learn the language. I feel like life with my three kids is crazy all day long and an extra moment I get, I am editing! In my experience, some of the Germans get annoyed that we don't know the language. I totally understand that, but at the same time we are not here for very long and it's so easy not to learn it. The dutch people all speak English perfectly and I am there more often than I am in Germany. I compare this for when I went to Costa Rica for 5 weeks during college. The people are so incredibly friendly and you WANT to connect with them and it makes you try harder to learn the language. I do not feel that at all here!

In a nutshell, we have loved our experiences over here and look forward to many more over the next year. Although we haven't made very many German friends, we have made friends with a really fun Dutch family. I will be so excited to move back to the States and have so many of the small and big luxuries of life back that I really miss. However, I will always cherish our time here!!

Two days before our two year anniversary, we took a day trip to Durbuy, Belgium which is a small medieval town. Abe works with a Belgian guy and he recommended that we go there. We were not disappointed! The drive was about 1 hour 45 minutes each way. I loved when we started getting close because the architecture and the feel of the towns change. Our German towns are neat, but I don't think they compare in charm that these towns have. Durbuy is French speaking and it has more of the french feel (at least what I think of!).

We started of by parking and walking into the little town of Durbuy.



It immediately is so charming!



From this spot, it split off in a couple different directions with the most darling streets I have ever seen.



I couldn't resist taking some pictures of my kids on this street!





















At the end of the town, it comes out to this ginormous rock. It looked like they may light it up at night or something, but I thought it was pretty neat.







We decided to start walking back to the car. There is a river that runs right next to the little town center. We crossed over the bridge so we could get a good view of the castle and walk back along the river.



Norah being silly of course!







The girls enjoyed collecting rocks and throwing them off the bridge.

Cheer "camp"

Last weekend Adeline attended a cheer camp. She had to attend the camp for about 4 hours on Saturday morning and then they got to cheer during the football game that afternoon. To be honest, I wasn't super excited about her doing it. Last year she asked to do it and I never signed her up. This year, she was adamant that she wanted to do it and pleaded with me to sign her up. Adeline had a lot of fun at the camp and was able to spend time with her friend Dani. When I came to pick her up before the football game, she said "they are REAL cheerleaders mom!" It's pretty funny how little girls idolize cheerleaders.




Adeline cracks me up. She gets really excited about things, but she can get very shy. I think it was a little hard for her to stand in front of the crowd and cheer. But, she did it because that is the determination in Adeline; even if she didn't feel comfortable!









It made it even more fun that her friend Katelyn was there watching!

"The Most Famous Artist in the World"

Adeline had been playing an educational game on my computer and ran downstairs to ask me if I could help her find "the famous painting" on the internet so she could draw it. Luckily Abe walked in from work at that moment and she started asking him to help her on her wild goose chase. She told us that we just needed to look up the most famous artist in the world and we would find it. We started throwing out the names of some famous painters, such as Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso.... but she replied "no" to all of them. Abe decided to humor her and took her to the computer. She asked him to look up "The Most Famous Artist in the World". Abe googled and of course it came up with several names. Immediately Adeline said, "No, he used primary colors like red, yellow, blue and black". So Abe googled, "Famous Artist Primary Colors". As some random stuff came up, Adeline said, "His name is Mondrian!". Abe typed it into google guessing how to spell his name and sure enough, Google corrected the name for Abe and amongst the different stuff that came up in the search was the "drawing" Adeline was looking for by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Apparently her teacher had talked about this artist today and Adeline really wanted to re-create it! She amazes me with the information she remembers! This is one of Adeline's "intense" qualities and I love her for it. Super persistent and knows what she wants.

A Girls Weekend in London

Our time is seeming to be really short here in Germany. Sure, we have another year left, but that will surely fly by. We had planned out our entire year with all the vacations we would like to go on. The hard part is that there are SO many places that I would like to go to and check off my bucket list. The reality is that there will always be something that we didn't get to, or didn't see. After planning out our year, it looked like we may not have a time to go to London with the family. Abe doesn't have a huge desire to go and it didn't seem like the most fun place to drag our kids around for all the things we would want to see. I planted the seed with my friend Kelsey and when our friend Heidi found out, we immediately started planning. Our plane tickets were only 19.99 euro each way, so not bad!

We left super early on a Saturday morning and got to London just after 8am. We hit the road running right when we got there and started touring the city. Our first stop was at the Wicked Theatre to buy our tickets for the Broadway play that night and then we dropped our luggage off at the B&B.



Then we headed over to the famous Portobello Street Market.



Loved this cute little antique store. We rummaged for a second, but decided not to fall in love with something since we had no way of bringing anything home with us!










There were a bunch of people gathered around a sign place looking at a specific sign. When we walked up, this is what everyone was looking at. Ha, if only people would stop smoking. That is one of my many frustrations here. I feel like you are in the minority if you don't smoke. I can never escape the smell of smoke whenever I am in a public place.



Next, we took the tube to the Westminster stop. When we came up from the tube, we immediately had this amazing view.



Then the major walking began. First we saw Big Ben and the houses of Parliament.





I can't remember if this next picture is of part of the Houses of Parliament or the Westminster Abbey, or none of the above! I just wanted to post it because it has a picture of a cute little taxi in it. I loved that this is how all the taxi's looked!



Westminster Abbey



Reading some history about the Abbey. We were going to go in, but we were not about to stand in the extremely long line to do that!





St. Margaret's Church right next to the Abbey



I'm not really sure the purpose for this building, but I loved it nonetheless. It was near the Westminster Abbey.



There was a cute little doorway on the side of the building in which we had to do a photo op.



View of the Westminster Abbey as we were walking away.



Then we started our walking journey over to Buckingham Palace. On the way, we couldn't resist photo ops with the phone booths. This is about how it went.









Yes, we are dorks! We walked through St. James Park and while walking over a bridge in the Park, we had a view of Buckingham Palace.



As we were on our walk, we kept walking past these little Princess Diana landmarks.



Another view from the bridge.



And we finally made it to Buckingham Palace!



We had to sit and figure out where we wanted to walk to next.



We decided to head towards Kensington Palace. On our way, we passed Wellington Arch and the Royal Artillery Memorial.





And then through Hyde Park.



Princess Diana Memorial in Hyde Park





Peter Pan Statue



After what it seemed like forever, we made it to Kensington Palace. Pretty sure we had only walked about 5 miles, but our feet were killing us. We did not wear the best walking shoes!



We did go into Kensington Palace and saw a neat exhibit on Queen Victoria. This was her cute little wedding dress. Other than that, I didn't really take any pictures. We also went to a "Fashion Rules" exhibit in the palace. It showed a collection of some of the Royal dresses from different Eras.



Outside the Palace, people still come and leave things for Princess Diana...



Kelsey and I decided to change shoes so we could manage to walk another 2 miles to Harrods. Thank goodness we did, or else I am not sure that we would have made it!

We passed the Albert Memorial on our way to Harrods...



And one more photo booth picture. How can you resist? At least we couldn't.





And Harrods. All I have to say is this place is INSANE! It was slam packed with people and hard to even walk anywhere. It was very glamorous inside and definitely had the "royalty" feel. We felt a little claustrophobic and most likely couldn't afford anything anyway, so we headed out and went to a nearby pub for Fish and Chips.



After dinner, we took a taxi to the theatre where Wicked was showing. We most likely had walked at least 8 miles on no sleep and we were spent. Heidi and I had already seen Wicked, but agreed to see it again because Kelsey has been waiting for years to see it. We love it, so were not in the least disappointed to see it again. Of course Kelsey kept nodding off the entire second half!



The next day we headed to the Tower of London first thing. I'm glad that we were one of the first ones there, because it got crazy crowded fast!















I loved the guards everywhere. The look like little Statues. This deserved a photo op as well.





Inside this building were all the Crown Jewels. They were AMAZING!



I guess I didn't take anymore pictures that day. We went to Oxford street and did a little window shopping. We headed to Leicester Square and decided to relax and watch a movie, and then went out for dinner. The next morning we had to wake up at 4:45am to go catch our bus that was supposed to take us to the airport. We hardly got any sleep the entire trip and the traveling was exhausting, but it was so worth it. I loved being able to walk around London and take it all in with two of my good friends! Now if only I had an entire week I could dedicate to London so I could see a lot more of it!