Spiders, bats, ghosts and more ... just Halloween

We just returned from our Halloween pumpkin carving party at Theda's and Jonte's preschool - now we have three sleeping kids in their beds, two carved pumpkins lit by candles and two tired parents in the house.

Coming Saturday, October 31st, will be Halloween and it seems like the entire country is going wild. In the past three weeks at preschool the topics were: bats, Halloween and pumpkins. Thus Theda's and Jonte's English vocabulary increased dramatically the past weeks in that direction. They talk about spiders, bats, ghosts, pumpkins, ... (and since tonight they know about vampires and talk about Dracula - I think they do not really understanding what they talk about, but they got Dracula teeth from their teacher).
Furthermore our front window of the house is decorated with cardboard pumpkins the kids made at preschool and on the steps to our door we put pumpkins as this is one of the traditions. Other houses are heavily decorated with ghosts, witches, skeletons, or other scary things.

Last Sunday Theda and Jonte were invited to their first Halloween party. They dressed up as postman and princess. Yesterday there was a field trip with the preschool going to a pumpkin patch which seems to be a must-do before Halloween. They had all the different farm animals there and a hay maze we luckily did not get lost in. Aftre some time on the farm we went onto a tractor ride to the pumpkin patch where each child could pick a pumpkin. It did not rain and we all enjoyed the day outside (not Sunke, he had to work :-( ).

...  next thing was tonight - we took the pumpkins to preschool to carve them at the party. The party was a lot of fun. All kids and most parents were dressed up. Besides carving there was food, games, a costume parade and at the end all pumpkins were lit with candles.

Tomorrow there will be no preschool. So we have one day to relax before we go for "Trick or Treaty" on Saturday night. As you see this has been an exciting time!

Besides all this, we are enjoying beautiful fall days in the garden and at the different parks in Seattle. Last Saturday we made a trip to the Cascades and had a nice walk on an old railroad trail finding two geocaches on the way.

 (animals in our backyard) 

(Magnusen Park)

 (walk on the old railroad trail - the "Iron Goat Trail")

 (Theda and Jonte are proud and happy about their caches)

Furthermore Narne has been very eager to figure out how to crawl. He gets on his hands and knees rocking back and forth. We are as excited as him about this!

progress and frustration

I knew this day would come some day and the day came. Two days ago, when I brought Jonte to bed he said that he would like to go back to Kiel again. He wants to play and live there again. Asking him why, he answered, he doesn't understand all the kids and can't speak English. I could feel how sad and frustrated he was, which of course, made me feel sad - especially knowing how social Jonte is and how he loves to interact with others and be part of a group of kids and realizing that the language barrier is in his way right now and what stress that causes him. Theda instead is convinced that she can already speak English :-). The truth is that they pick up a lot of words. I am impressed by how they also pick up words and sentences and use them by intuition. About two weeks ago, we left the house to go to preschool, we sat in the car and I started driving and Theda and Jonte were shouting "Bye, bye house. See you later". One block further up, Jonte asked: Mom, what does "See you later" actually mean? So he used it in a correct way, but didn't really know what he was saying. When they play together, mostly in the mornings, they speak in their fantasy-English-language and it sounds like English more and more. They often play preschool and they sing the preschool songs. I also started to read more English books (since we got simple children books from the library last Saturday) and I hardly have to translate - often the pictures are explanation enough. Though they don't speak English yet to other people (as far as I know, except "My name is ... and I am 3 yrs."), I think they are on a good track.

I am convinced about that, especially because another day came which I expected to come some day, but honestly I didn't expect it to come so quickly: Jonte started to correct my pronounciation of English names. The other day he corrected me, when I talked about our neighbor Terry and today I could not pronounce the name Sam right. In his eyes I just couldn't do it.

Other than that days are exciting. Yesterday (Tuesday) I went to Home depot together with Narne while Theda and Jonte were at preschool. I wanted to get more wood to build another raised bed which we can use as a compost during winter and we will turn it into a vegetable bed next spring. And I wanted to get some construction material to cover our raised bed during winter. Since I had a hard time transporting all this material through the market with Narne, I found some guys working at home depot - I told them what I would like to buy, they collected it for me in the market and brought it to the loading zone, while I paid and pulled into the loading zone. They loaded the material, fixed the steel construction fence-like thing on the roof of my car and I could go. How easy!!!

Also yesterday night, we had the first parent meeting at the preschool. These parent meetings take place once a month and are part of the parent education program at the North Seattle Community College. The coops are run by the Community Colleges and so we as parents are students at the College and get credits for taking part in the preschool/ parent education program. Besides talking about organizational stuff at these meetings, each meeting has a special child-raising, early childhood developmental topic. There is a special parent educator with an educational and/or psychological background who observes the preschool class and who leads these sessions. Yesterdays topic was "Development of our children" - how have they developed during the past three months?, what are celebrations and what are challenges in living with the children. I found it really nice to step back from daily routine and think about these things and to once more realize how wonderful these kids are. Some of you having kids or working with kids might be interested in this link:

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/homefamily/children/development/ages_stages.htm


Now it is late at night. Friends and family in Germany and Norway and South Africa and wherever you are, you are about to start a new day, as we go to bed. Tomorrow will be another exciting day: Theda, Jonte and I will go to a children's play at the Children's Theater downtown. We go with a large group of kids and parents from the preschool and we will see the play: "If you give a mouse a cookie". So I am curios and very much looking forward to this.

Narne will stay with Sunke at work and hopefully take his noon nap there, so that Sunke is not too much distracted from work. Narne has overcome his grumpy days and is quite relaxed. He is excited to push himself up, standing on hands and feet - and we are all excited as well. He practises a lot and we will see when he actually will move forward. Other than that we finally made him eat his evening cereal. Over the past month we have tried to offer him various things: cereal with applesauce, cereal with orange juice, "swedish milk" - he was not convinced at all about this and mostly made funny faces when we once again tried to get the spoon or the bottle into his mouth. Today I tried the plain rice cereal without anything and he ate it! So hopefully he is stuffed and I get longer nights!

Sorry for not loading up any pictures - I really need to go to bed now!

already quite American

This might scare you: I got up this morning, headed into the kitchen just about to start the yeast dough for fresh buns. Jonte came in and complained - he does NOT want buns, he WANTS pancakes (Jonte: "amerikanische Eierkuchen"). After figuring out, what everyone would like to eat for breakfast - Theda wanted scrambled eggs, Jonte pancakes, Sunke didn't care - he just needed his coffee and since I love pancakes as well, we made pancakes and of course had them with maple syrup (Theda got her scrambled egg, which she ended up not eating because by the time I served the scrambled egg, she was stuffed with pancakes).

For lunch we had hot dogs (Jonte's suggestion while eating them: We should try growing sausages in our garden.) For coffee time we had fresh donuts from one of the popular donut places in town which happens to be located just down the street ... and they are really good! So make sure we go there when you come and visit us!

But we are hopefully not totally lost yet: for dinner we had German Schnitzel, Broccoli and potatoes!!

Other than that we had a great day. Since Sunke is quite busy writing an abstract for a conference in Portland in February which he has to turn in until Tuesday, we gave him some extra time to work at it and the rest of us walked to the library, which reopened today. The libary closed for remodeling just when we moved here and since then I have been waiting for it to open. The libary happens to be also just down the street and it is a nice walk to get there (taking back roads and not the busy 35th avenue). On the way, we collected leaves, counted pumpkins and looked at the decorated "Halloween houses". Then we were welcomed at the libary with apple juice, cookies and brownies! It was easy to get a libary card, which is free and you can lend up to 50 items. It got a huge kids section and that was the only section we checked out today. But I am really happy - that will be a great location to go to during rainy season.

After having been to my first yoga class yesterday (restorative yoga - one hour of lying around in different poses, not moving, just lying, changing poses every 10 to 15 minutes - one hour of peace in the middle of the day!), I got some more time off this afternoon. I went to a hairdresser which I longed for for a couple of weeks now. Since I had to wait for half an hour until it was my turn, I got a latte macchiato in the coffee shop right next to the hairdresser, sat outside in the sun and had time to read a book (!!!), which I started to read in Kiel before we started our packing procedure.

Sunke and the kids spent the afternoon in our garden, removing weeds, watering plants,... We are very amazed that there are still flowers who start to bloom at this time of the year e.g. our roses. Our vegetable seeds which we put in our raised bed are already sprouting and especially our broccoli plants are fairly big. I just talked to our neighbor Terry today and she suggested to cover the raised bed in a few weeks when it freezes at night. So we will think about how to cover it and build something. (I probably get quite old that I am so excited about gardening :-) )

The kids also had fun watching Bob (very nice man who build our bathroom in the basement). He came in the afternoon to paint the door of our garage. And when he was finished, they saw Terry, our neighbor, outside and played with her and her two cats. When I came back from the hairdresser, they were "helping" her mowing the lawn. It is nice to see that they feel more and more comfortable to interact with the people although they might not understand everything.

The kids are sleeping now and we have to clean the mess of the evening, do some laundry, press the leaves which we collected today and press the limes (Limetten). When Sunke went to Costco, he brought an entire sack of limes. (I was asking for one or two limes, but since they only had XXL packages, we now have to deal with an entire sack of limes) And before they spoil, Sunke had the idea to press them and freeze the lime juice in ice cube containers. So that is the program for tonight! I hope you are all well and also enjoy a nice weekend!

Apple week

We just got home from our first dinner invitation. Sunke's colleague John and his family invited us yesterday to come to dinner today. They have two sons, aged 4 and 7 - a perfect fit to our kids. We had spinach calzone and it was a very nice evening. I can imagine and hope that it was not the last time that we met. For us this was also a good introduction into Halloween traditions. Their entire house was already decorated - pumpkin in front of the house, spider nets and ghosts everywhere - even a ghost in a cage hanging down the ceiling in their living room and if you yelled at it, it made really spooky sounds. I expected Theda and Jonte to be scared, but they thought it was hilarious - we will see how they sleep tonight :-).

Yes, it is fall - and that means getting ready for Halloween. In front of the houses you see more and more pumpkins. Theda and Jonte get really excited about the pumpkins on our morning walks through the neighborhood. I think one of the next days I will go to the store with them and get one for our house. Since they also want me to cook pumpkin soup, we can use pumpkins anyway. The stores are filled with orange and black candy - candy is piled up everywhere - just like before christmas and easter in Germany.
... so slowly Theda and Jonte have to make up their mind how they want to dress for Halloween and we have to get costumes ready for them. (Sunke thought, we could skip Halloween this year - but I think there is no way - they are already too excited about it and learn about it in preschool and I guess it will be the dominating topic during the next weeks.)


And since it is fall, the topic at preschool this week is "Apples and the letter A". Yesterday they made applesauce, today they tried different kinds of apples (one mom told me, that Jonte really liked the apples and had quite a lot of them) and tomorrow they will press apple juice.

By the way I made some pictures of the preschool from the outside for you and I hope to catch some inside shots later.

But the actual big news are: Narne got his first tooth on Sunday! He is quite grumpy during the day and wakes me up at night two to three times. So lets hope that will get better soon again!

Other than that we are all very tired at the moment. Theda and Jonte are quite tired from their preschool experience. The preschool time forces us to give up their noon nap which they could need right now so badly. Narne doesn't get a good noon nap on preschool days either and I am trying to handle these tired kids which results in me being really tired as well - so I try to sleep as much as I can - so sorry, if it takes me a while to answer emails right now.

So hopefully more soon - I'll go to bed now.

a quiet weekend - not quite

After being on the road, better on the trail, for a couple of weekends in the row, the last weekend was supposed to be a quiet home weekend (talking about the weekend that already is 7 days ago). Well we had a BBQ invitation on Saturday afternoon and did not want to turn that one down. But Sunday honestly was supposed to be a day home doing some gardening and other stuff. One after another, let me start in the beginning.

The last week at work was pretty quiet, many colleagues were at the OceanObs meeting in Venice. I tried to use that time to do some re-calculations of dissolved oxygen changes in the ocean, new mapping, different error calculation and a lot of literature research on geostatistics, mainly variogramms and correlelograms - brrr, but finally they do make some sense, hey I think I might be able to use that with a few of my other projects. We will see. In general literature research weeks always makes me feel like I did not really achieve much, but I think it was worth it this time. In no time it was Friday, my day to work at preschool.

Katrin called me at work in the morning and told me that Theda and Jonte are sick - thus I went to preschool to work by myself. It is great to work there, really different to every day science and the projects the kids are supposed to do are interesting. Well, the boys would rather fight with pillows, use hammers and such than having to draw, glue or paint the next number, letter, shape, their name. But in general the opportunities they have are multiple and since here in the US preschool for 3-5 year old ones actually is some kind of 'school', I guess it is desired to be this way. This Friday they did bake cookies, they analyzed old sunflowers with magnifying glasses the other day, ... many great activities.. . I worked in the writing area, - always some kind of project is prepared for each area, which is sad in my eyes. Since many different parents do help out at pre-school, I think the different ideas of anyone would constantly enrich that system more and the person in charge would be more enthusiastic about it than just helping the kids. On the other hand that certainly would require more preparation time, time most, including me, hardly have or don't want to spend. - During outdoor time we started to play chasing - the kids at Victory Heights had great fun chasing me - it was great fun but I was physically pretty exhausted. Running 35 minutes nearly non-stop being chased by 4-9 kids aged 3-5 - back and forth, up and down, under and over obstacles. These little ones actually are already pretty fast. Lucky me the outside play did not last longer.


After preschool I went to home depot to buy some wood as well as a saw to build a raised bed for the vegetables. Arriving home we immediately started to saw, hammer and screw the frame together, leaving filling the bed for Saturday. And this is what we did. After home made fresh buns on Saturday morning we went out to enjoy a warm late summer day and moved the compost into the raised bed. Really enjoying the sun we felt bad about missing maybe the last nice warm weekend of the year, not being out in nature. In the afternoon we went to the BBQ and came back just in time to get the kids into bed. A little later we followed, after deciding to stand up early and drive down to the big volcano that dominates the southern horizon on any clear day.

That was our Sunday - hiking the 'Naches Peak Loop' situated on the eastern border of the Mount Rainier National Park. It was 100miles and took us two hours to get there - same on the way back. The drive was worth it. We really hoped the kids would catch some sleep on the way there, since we have the feeling they are overtired since long (I guess learning English AND all our activities just take their toll). Unfortunately they did not, thus in the end we had two every tired kids on the last miles of the trail. They had a lot of fun and looked covered in dust after half the round already. Due to the dry season the trail was very dusty, resulting in the fact that the kids slid several times and sat down unwillingly - to a large degree this originated certainly in their tiredness. We analyzed some ice crystals, saw something that Katrin states was a chipmonk and turned many many rocks. (Why? I don't know, you have to ask the kids they were looking at them ;-) We had perfect weather, great views onto Mount Rainier and a nearly flat hike of about 3.5 miles around Naches Peak. An ideal hike for kids, 2 lakes many rocks and always changing land side and views along this hike. The only surprising and to a degree annoying thing were the many hikers with dogs, half of them even roaming free, on a hike you are officially not allowed to take any pet. Annoying to that degree that Theda and Jonte are quite scared if an unknown dog about the same size they are comes running up to sniff in their faces ... I certainly would be! Overall I think it is definitely a hike we will do again and is definitely worth the drive of two hours!

  

 (Theda doesn't wear any glases, she just 'borrowed' Katrins driving glasses.)

Monday again back to normal, Katrin started to plant the vegetables in the raised bed and the weather finally turned from summer to autumn. I even got wet on my bike already, I wonder if I should start counting the days I get wet - or better the ones I don't. Further there is the news that the bathroom in the basement is finished. It got cleaned twice afterwards and officially ready to move in. Well, going down with a vacumer, cleaning everything once more - the vacumer bag was full. Going down with a bucket of water and a mob - the water was black. I think I will have to wipe atleast once or twice more down there.

The next worth mention experience I had was Costco. Costco is similar to the German Metro I guess. Everthing in boxes sized XXL for a better per pound/unit/liter deal than elsewhere, ideal for a family of five. I filled our supplys: one packet of 36 rounds toilet paper, 1 box of 4kg of oats, 12kg bag of rice ... I think rice and toilet paper will last for a while, but most other items soon will be used up and we will head there again. In general it will cut down our grocery costs quite a bit I guess.

Again it is Saturday night and today was quiet, just some shopping of plants, new power cord for the dryer and a ball to play soccer for the kids. Same is planned for tomorrow - our first real quiet weekend since we have got the car. ;-)