Joy in Moments

I have to admit that as parent I am struggling a little bit.  The 1.5-2.5 age span is not my favorite and Abby has just started a new stage of sass talk and out-right defiance. She's had a really good year of being simply awesome so I can't complain too much.  One of my favorite General Conference quotes regarding mothering is: There are moments of great joy and incredible fulfillment, but there are also moments of a sense of inadequacy, monotony, and frustration. It seems as though the good moments are pretty far-and-between this week. I know it will get better, but I am very, VERY much looking forward to the Jeremy-and-Denise only cruise we're leaving on next week. Sometimes you just need a few days (or 14 of them!) away from the ones you love to remember why you wanted an eternal family to begin with. 

I love this picture so much. Ollie is doing the two things he loves best: screaming and pointing. Ollie doesn't speak, but he is very opinionated. If I can't figure out his myriad of frantic screams and hissing fast enough he will LOSE it. And I mean LOSE it. There is no distracting this kid or redirecting his focus. He wants what he wants and he is going to ruin your hearing until he gets it. I am sure his first word will probably be one that puts in him in time out.

One of my biggest struggles is getting Ollie to eat. He has serious texture issues and won't eat ANYTHING that is not baby food. He eats five jars a day. I've been offering him real food for 1.5 years now but he wants nothing to do with it. He won't even put it in his mouth. He also won't eat finger food but is okay feeding himself yogurt. He'll also eat the German version of animal crackers. It's incredibly annoying to have to carry huge amounts of glass baby food jars all over town. And it's a serious time waster having to hand-feed him at every meal. Plus, baby food is DANG expensive over here and I'm too busy hand feeding my 2 year old to make my own. He went through a short phase where he ate puffs and one day he ate 1/2 a peanut butter sandwich but he's not taken a second look back. The doctor says just to keep feeding him baby food and offering him other choices. Here is an example of how that turned out:

On a good side, he is such a charmer and you can easily forgive his crazy antics and hilarious mean expressions. People just can't enough of him and are always asking to babysit him and play with him. Yup, I'm okay with that :)

Abby loves anything with a "twirly" skirt.

Here are Abby's school photos this year:

I'm too lazy to write anymore. The End.

The Final Showdown

I've always wanted to run a half marathon, but it's never worked out that Jeremy is home enough before a big race for me to have time to train and deal with two dad-sick kiddos at the same time. I can usually get in a 3-5 mile run in the evenings on the treadmill after the kids have gone to bed, but I just can't find the energy to keep going. I also have never entered a real race and was a little intimidated about what happens and whether I could hack it. 

Enter Shawna. In her mind she agreed to do a 5K with me. I went ahead and signed us up for the 10K because I knew deep down we could hack a bigger challenge. Well, it turns out that Shawna has serious back problems so we ended up walking instead of running. In fact, she is such a trooper that she had an MRI on Tuesday before this race and went ahead and had surgery on her leg veins almost a week after this race. Yup, she's hardcore and that's why I love her.

The race people got pretty hostile with us. They refused to give us anything smaller than an XL shirt, which was seriously so big that Shawna threw down and DEMANDED they give the "grosse" girls a different size. They kept pointing to us and putting their hands humiliatingly far apart to show us how big we were. 

Then they had Shawna's race information entered incorrectly and said it was our fault. Shawna showed them the email the race director sent apologizing for the mistake and the promise she made to correct it before the big day. Clearly, they were in the wrong. Instead of apologizing, they screamed at us that we were in Germany and we should learn German. There are some English words I'd like to teach them sometime... 

Our times were not fantastic, but we definitely were not the last walkers to cross the finish line!

Abby wore this medal to school (and church) every day for one week. She was super proud of me!

Immediately after the race the women began smoking and drinking. Apparently, this is alcohol-free beer, but I know the stuff across the street wasn't.

Total Berlin visitor shot.

We treated ourselves to a big ole rack of ribs after the big race. I ended up packing most of mine up and giving it to Jeremy. Who wants to gain back the weight they just worked off?

The Cottage Tales - Hamburg

I really wanted to see Hamburg before we left Germany. I am a big fan of water and so cities on the water appeal to me a lot. People were FREAKED right out that I let Ollie climb on this fence. There was no way he could climb over it, go through the bars, or go under the bars. Reality check: he's got a ginormous head, y'all.

The highlight in Hamburg was this awesome miniatures museum. The exhibits were SO detailed and well planned out. The lights would steadily mimic the light of a normal day so you got to see each exhibit from dawm to dawn. Oliver and Abby were memorized, especially at the airplane exhibit. They had planes that would actually take off and land. They had a HUGE train exhibit that was two stories high. Ollie would run along the tracks watching it enter tunnels and climb the mountains. Each exhibit was based on a country and this year they featured a few American cities as well. 

If you click on this picture, you will see they even had hikers and campers hidden amongst the red rocks. Seriously impressive details!

Ollie will often refuse to be let down and will pull his legs up and cry when you try to make him walk. He loves to be carried, even like this! He looks so much like his dad!

He also loves to chew on his car DVD player cord. It's pretty dangerous trying to rip the cord out of his mouth while driving. But I guess it's a little less scary than being electrocuted!

The Cottage Tales - Celle

A few weeks ago we had the honor of visiting my friend's country cottage in Wietze. I love experiencing a new places with people who know them personally. Plus, it helps that they have kids nearly the same age as ours so they had a blast playing together in the downtime. Their home in Wietze is really a series of small homes on one land. 

Inga's greatgrandma was born in this house (which would have been considered a barn at that time). It was really old, but totally revamped to have all the new age stuff I can't live without. 

It still had some sweet touches from their childhood in it.

Under the floors were big cellars. At first I was a little scared having so many spiders under my feet, but they kept the house a lovely temperature.

The highlight of our trip was visiting Celle. It was visually stunning. They are famous for their timber-framed houses. We loved trying to find the dates on the houses. They were incredibly old -- like 500 years old. 

My kids are super travelers. I think that has been our biggest blessing with this crazy overseas lifestyle we've embarked on. Abby is fearless and takes everything in stride. She might look like her dad, but she's got my adventurous spirit in her.

This tree was gorgeous. I wish I could have crawled down the branches and dipped my toes into the water. 

I loved Celle Castle. Here is one awesome fact about it: From 1772 it was occupied by the British-born, Danish queen, Caroline Matilda, the daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had been banished to Celle as a result of her affair with Johann Friedrich Struensee of Copenhagen. The unhappy queen only lived at the Celle court until 1775 when she died at a relatively young age of scarlet fever. Not a shabby place to be banished to. I'd take it.

The grounds were covered in gardens, streams, and playgrounds. Abby was in heaven.

Trying to figure out your kid's limits is probably the most difficult part of parenting. Abby REALLY wanted to go down this pole, but it was incredibly high and she would probably get somewhat hurt if she couldn't do it. It turns out she was a master at it -- as she had been rocking the one at her kita for months. I don't know how I feel about that, but I was super proud of myself for letting her at least try it. 

And see how happy she was! Who could say no to that face and those dandelion horns?

Abby promptly throw this stick into the water and then slid down the bank and into the river after it. Good thing we had extra pants!

I loved this water fountain from 1695.

This was the oldest house we could find -- but not the oldest one there by far. This house was built in 1532.

1544 for this one:

The wood frames were sagging and cracking. I  would not want to live on the bottom floor.

Again, I originally was not a fan to let her climb this tree, but she rocked it. That's my girl!

Every night we played board games and ate tons o'junk food. This is my kind of cottaging.