Parks

3/30
We have been enjoying gorgeous weather.  It has been fun to explore the parks and playgrounds.  There is a cute neighborhood playground in our town, a couple roads up.  We go there daily.  In Bad Margentheim there is a wonderful green expanse with paths, waterways, bridges, ducks and play areas.  The first play area we came across was a sort of obstacle course/fitness station set up.  It has a balance station with tight ropes, rolling logs, balance beams and rope ladder bridges.  There are other stations for situps, pull ups and a neat pedal track to stand on and pedal up and down while moving down a track!  The kids loved it!

Nearby is a concrete area with large board game designs painted on the concrete and knee high (to an adult) playing pieces.  Here are some older gentlemen playing chess!

Further down the path is a row of science based manipulatives.  I huge xylophone, a water funnel machine that you control with a crank handle and a ball knocker.  What are those things called!?

Farther down the path is a playground with sand toy pulleys, a platform swing, and some other fun new things to play on.  This park is directly behind the castle courtyard of the college.  It will be a great place to take the kids and meet up with JB for lunch or after school!

First Week!

Ok! Well. The internet here is very sporadic and is off for hours at a time, it has been out the past 20+ hours.  This is fine, it's not a lifeline or anything...she says as she white knuckles the table...  We will have to see if the connection improves or not during our stay.  We do have some fairly significant things we had been planning to use online services for but... it's fine.  Really.  Really. Just fine. 
So! Days 1-7!  The first few days were definitely an exercise in getting food and sleep.  Period.  Grocery stores have some interesting differences that have made feeding our family of 6 a full time job.  How many individually packaged heads of broccoli should we get?  No Costco here!  Each store appears to have very different specialties. I suppose this would be true of America too... a trip to Winco would be different than one to Market of Choice.  In one grocery store we could not enter before checking out a coin pay shopping cart, it had an electric sensor to make the door open! 
And the answer to why we were looking for what we now know is illegal bleach (yes, bleach is banned here) would be Landon and Anneke using the bidet to wash their hands.  Then as a drinking fountain.  Then urinal.  Ack!!! Going to have to pick just one use kiddos!  And also, AFTER we dump rubbing alcohol all over it....
The kids all responded to jet lag a little different.  A lot of this...

sleeping until 1:30!
and this... "Just somebody give me some coffee"  (AKA Drinkable yogurt)

but also this!  Two happy kids, the only ones up, playing with new toys special for the trip...

3/26
Landon came rolling out of bed at 11, earliest time yet and said in one long speech, "Mommy, its light outside, you should get making breakfast.  I'm going back to bed until you get done. Wait. I should order what I want.  Does Germany have bread and cheese?"
3/30
Everyone is fairly on track sleep wise now and lucky us we just got to have our second daylight savings time when Germany lost an hour today. 

So here we are in Germany! Or as Anneke would say, "GernAmy"
The end. 
Not!
Are you kidding?  I looove blogging, so much better than Facebook in that I get to tell you all about my life but don't have to hear anything about yours!! Oops, was that out loud?  In all seriousness, I am so excited to have this great excuse to get back to one of my favorite things, writing about my most treasured family and sharing pictures of their beautiful faces. 
Anyways... this first post will be a little, um, boring? Informative? Factual? Long? As Landon would say, "Check. Yes. Got it. Check."
The kids all did great on the long trip over.  Considering.  Actually not even considering.  They were fantastic troopers.  We started off driving up to Seattle on Saturday.

 Mom dropped us off at a labyrinth of a hotel wherein I promptly got lost.  Well, actually, first we tried to send Landon and Anneke off in the elevator all by themselves.  Emma thankfully alerted us through her hysterical giggling and flapping of arms and gesturing that they were the only ones in the elevator and the doors were closing... 

So after rescuing them we spent a nice evening of fast food,  swimming and hot tubbing.  The next day we had time to swim again. Anneke tired quickly however, and wanted to return to the room.  See previous mention where Mommy and Anneke head off, get lost, are unable to remember room #, try to call front desk via a courtesy phone, clerk is uncourteously unable to provide room # to non-registered guest and trek all the way back to swimming pool to admit we are lost... Mommy carrying Anneke up and down flights of stairs the whole way...

The kids quickly fell asleep, a shout out here to Emma's class, clutching their new stuffed caterpillars that were given to them as part of a super fun gift bag of plane activities.  Thank you Mrs. Sisler's class! We miss you all!
Whew! This is a long post and we are not even on the plane yet!  :)  
Breakfast, a hasty re-pack and we donned our matching "Hazard Yellow" Bad Margentheim custom logo T-Shirts and boarded the "Cookie Bus" to get shuttled over to the airport. 

Extremely helpful assistants lent a hand both in loading and unloading luggage as well as dropping us at the correct spot and before we knew it we were the only people sashaying up to the "Icelandic Air" check in counter.  All bags checked in at under 50#, whew! The kids signed their brand new passports (Sam carefully penning out, "Sam van Hecke"... Thank you, Mrs. Carmichael!) and off we went to visit the friendly people at TSA.  That was another walk in the park! Anneke had fallen asleep in the ergo backpack so we got the "Family Screen" which was easy.  The kids were all great at removing shoes, placing things in bins and Sam even got a compliment from the TSA agent as he carefully replaced each bin as we retrieved our belongings!

The wait in the boarding area did not last long and I made Sam and Landon work off energy by taking turns shuttling the wheeled carry-on back forth.  Anneke slept away.  

Boarding call!  Let the screen time begin!  The kids were all thrilled with their private screens and Anneke quickly upgraded her headphones to the free kids courtesy headphones that Icelandic Air handed out.  They were pink as opposed to the silver ones that Daddy had gotten her.  She navigated her little screen and carefully tipped Tic Tacs into her palm.  I think Emma tired first.  Sleep eluded everyone, the plane heated up quickly and thirst was prevalent.  Around 10:00pm our time people were out of sorts with the inability to get comfortable even though tired.  Anneke did sleep, Emma a little and finally Sam slipped onto the floor in front of the boys seats and conked out, Landon fought off sleep and protested loudly but eventually also slept a little.  We dis-boarded in Reykjavik at midnight our time and had 40 minutes to get through customs and to our next plane.  It worked. Not sure how, but it did!  Did you know Iceland uses 99% renewable energy?
Well, this is getting embarrassingly long winded... tune in next time for our arrival and to find the answer to why our first purchase in Germany was an illegal substance here.... AKA, bleach.