Hoffest 2011

One of my favorite festivals here in Germany, and it's literally right up the street from us! Amazing food, fun crafts, a corn maze, pumpkins everywhere and neuer wine. Some pics from this year...
Spider made of pumpkins

Gymnastics

I was able to make it to Colin's last gymnastics class and got some video. He does ok...he's learning to wait his turn and follow directions. Here are some pictures and video of him.

Wordless Wednesday

Colin's third 3rd birthday celebration

Colin's B-day Pt2

Yes you read that right, this kid had not one, not two, but THREE third birthday celebrations. One with a bunch of presents before we left for vacation, since it was impossible to take all his presents along with us. Then he had a birthday celebration on the boat for his actual birthday. And finally after we returned home there were more goodies waiting in the mail for him and so Colin got to have round three of birthday fun. He's going to be seriously pissed off next year when his birthday rolls around and he only gets one day of celebrating. At any rate, here are some very long overdue pictures of Colin opening gifts from Auntie Doo Dah and Cousin Charlotte, Grandma & Grandpa Harsch, and Auntie Melissa. :)

Hallelujah!

THE VACATION BLOGS ARE ALL DONE AND POSTED. Nothing short of a miracle! You have no idea how much work it is to organize, upload and caption all those damn photos, then to write the blog post too. I know I will be so glad to have the blog posts to look back on, but boy am I relieved to have that task done and over with and off my back! Go read!!! :)

Wordless Wednesday

LOTS of new posts :)

Scroll down or go over to the right in the blog archive and open up August to see the latest trip posts. I put up 6 new posts this morning (Days 18-24) and I'm working on more. Gotta get this done!! It takes forever though...

Wordless Wednesday

Little Gymnast

First day of Gymnastics

Today was also Colin's first day in gymnastics class. His preschool group all attends a class on Tuesdays and the first class was last week. We were still on vacation so Colin missed the first week, and today was his first class. Since Shelby and I both had the day off we dropped in on the class to see how it was going and watch. Colin had a BLAST. He is one of two boys currently in the class. He definitely was the most "active" (to put it nicely) in the class. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was just super excited with it being is first class and all the equipment was just too tempting. The teachers definitely had to do a lot of reminding him of the rules, lol! Hopefully he does a better job next week and still has as much fun.

First day of PRESCHOOL!

When did this happen? When did my baby turn into this opinionated, smart as a whip, nonstop chatterbox THREE year old that attends preschool?! Today was his first real day of preschool. We eased him back into care with just a few hours there since he's been with us exclusively since July he's a bit clingy. He was excited about his new Lightning McQueen backpack I gave him this morning. He saw his old Chuggington one in the car as we loaded up to go to preschool and told me "Not this one Mommy, I need my new preschool pack!" So cute!

Video Overload!

We are finally home from vacation and I've had time to upload some videos to go along with the vacation posts you already have on here. I'm working on the pics and posts for everything from Garmisch on (which is pretty much two thirds of our trip) and doing my best to get it up on here. Patience please :) ***REMINDER vacation blog posts will be posted with the actual date we toured each place, so scroll down to be sure you are seeing new posts. They won't be at the top up here! :)

Sooo on to the videos. Here is Colin playing in puddles in Prague after dinner one night:


Here he is chasing birds at a park in Prague and getting the other kids on the playground to join in the chase:






Here is some of the model train restaurant Vytopna in Prague where the trains deliver your drinks:




And here we are feeding the ducks at Eibsee in Garmisch:






Now that should keep you busy for a while so I can go upload pictures and try to get more posts up :)

Day 33 Heading Home

This morning we woke up to rain again, welcome to Germany! After so long with no rain and seeing how dry and burned up Italy looked I don’t mind the rain at all. Give me a week or two of solid rain every day and I might tell you differently though, lol! We packed up, headed down to the breakfast area and ate a typical German breakfast of sliced meat, cheese and bread. I do slightly miss the honey filled croissants from Italy. Shelby was smart enough to check and see if Freiburg had a Starbucks, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me because I didn’t think it was that big of a place, and sure enough…score! Not only were we disappointed that we paid 16 CHF (about 20 USD) for two coffees yesterday in Switzerland, we were bummed we could have had Starbucks twice yesterday and gone to the one in Freiburg that evening when we arrived! Oh well. The GPS decided to take us the very scenic route for some reason today and we ended up driving out of Germany, through France a ways and then back into Germany. It wasn’t that far out of the way, since our house is very close to France anyway, but it was not the way either of us were expecting to go. It was pretty and scenic though. Coming home was actually nice! Usually you go on vacation for a week or so and you aren't ready to come home and go back to work when the week is over. When you go on vacation for a whole month though you are a little eager to get back to a regular routine, sleep in your own bed, and be in your house. I was actually a little excited about cleaning up my kitchen that afternoon when I got home! LOL That won't last long!

Day 32 Freiburg

We awoke this morning to a strange and foreign sound, the sound of thunder and rain. It was the first rain we’d seen in almost three weeks! It was quite peaceful laying in bed listening to the thunder echo off the mountains surrounding us. After getting up and around we hit the road and very soon after that we said "arrivedirce" to Italy and entered Switzerland. Huge mountains and turquoise lakes make for gorgeous scenery on the autobahn. We stopped in the beautiful town of Luzern for Starbucks and lunch. We’d visited Luzern last year and it is absolutely gorgeous. Compared to Italy the weather was so nice too, finally not so hot and humid. The city is very clean and there are no street vendors harassing you and following you trying to get you to buy their junk. It’s funny how two countries right next to one another can be so totally different. Switzerland is very expensive though, we knew that from the last time we visited. We ended up eating lunch at McDonald’s (oh how life changes once you have kids!) so Colin could run and play on the playground while we ate. It was the most expensive meal I’ve ever had at McD’s for sure. Two value meals and a happy meal cost us 34 Swiss Francs, roughly FORTY USD!! Yep we spent $40 on lunch at McDonald’s! I guess it’s a good thing we had Colin with us to keep us from going to a nicer place that would have cost a small fortune for lunch. We arrived in Freiburg, about 5pm and got checked into our gästehaus/hotel. It was a nice little family run place and we were greeted by the owner and given our room key. The hotel had a little grassy area for Colin to play and a few little bikes and scooter toys for visiting kids to ride out front. At the restaurant near the garden tables there was a big sand box full of toys for the kids too. The hospitality in Germany is much different than Italy, it’s so nice to be back in familiar territory…and I can understand and talk to people here, yay! Once we brought our things in we went for a walk and Colin got to ride his bike. We walked to the bike path nearby and it went along a nice little river that was crystal clear and flowing over big river rocks.



(Yes he is pretending to be a dog and drink the water, sigh.)
Colin couldn’t wait to get into the river and throw rocks. It was cold but he and Shelby stood in just by the bank and gathered rocks up to throw and then they built a dam out of rocks while I soaked my feet and watched. A little later we walked back to the gästehaus and ate at the restaurant there and relaxed before heading up to bed.