Oh the things that they do and say

Luca: "Mom, what kind of meat is this?"
"chicken breast"
Luca: "Do you think this breast still has some milk in it?"
"em, no"
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We were in a hurry before school and the kids ate their breakfast alone while I got dressed and Lincoln got the twins downstairs. He proceeded into the dining room and saw Luca and Leea all crunched up on their chairs, very close to their bowls of cereal and munching it all up very fast with animal-like sounds.
Linc:"What are you doing?"
Luca: "We're pretending we're dust mites eating cradle cap"

The kids know I'm allergic to dust mites and were interested in what dust mites are and what they eat, so we had a little lesson on them before the above mentioned situation happened. Our kids still have cradle cap (dunno why, but I try hard to get rid of it, but it keeps coming back) and I told them that dust mites eat that and skin pieces that fall off of humans. Pretty gross, I know! :)

I just found pieces of paper with old stuff on them:

I think this is my very favorite one. A couple of weeks after I had the twins and still and enormous belly Luca (then 3) looked at it observantly and said:"Mom (pause), I think there are still a few more babies in there."
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Here's another one from a couple years ago. Leea (then 2) had a phase when she would constantly pretend she's a man. Luca and Leea played dinosaurs when Luca asked: "Leea, are you a T-Rex?" "No, I'm not a T-Rex, I'm JUST a man."
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Luca and Leea looked out of the window and said something like this, when somebody went by on a bike. Luca:"Look, Leea, there's a woman on a bike". Leea:"No, she's a MAN like me."
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Luca (then3): "Papa, I like you. You're SO pretty."

Our Little Astronauts

This is how we found Luca and Leea in the backyard a couple of days ago. Luca: "Mom, put a candle under the bike trailer, we want to blast off into space!"

Happy Birthday, Leea!

I can't believe it, but here's our little Leea on her 4th birthday! She's such a beautiful, happy and talented kid. We're so happy to have her in our family! We love you, Leea!
Leea had been asking me for a butterfly cake for her next birthday for along time. I came up with this little whole spelt creature & cream cheese frosting with natural food coloring. The taste was ok, it was more the "look" that counted for her. She actually preferred the Costco sorbet Oma Zanne had brought. It's nice that the kid's grandparents live so close now, that they're able to join us for birthdays.

My new project

I found this awesome huge old window in the trash a couples days before we left Kirksville. I had been searching for one in antique stores and they run for about $25 in way smaller sizes. I had to have one with panes, they have great potential for a decorating frame or even a picture frame. My friend Melody used hers (without glass) for decorating for Halloween and Christmas and put spider webs and snow flakes in hers. Another friend put her menu on one and made a picture frame out of the other. Hers still had the glass in them. Mine came with broken colored glass, so I had to get rid of it. I am hoping to maybe put some new glass in it and then make it into a picture frame. Of course I don't want it to be too costly. We'll see.
This reminds me of the annual Kirksville clean up. Oh, how I miss those treasures in the Ville (luckily now we have craigslist).Once a year in springtime people put out their junk for spring clean up. Within hours most of the stuff would be gone. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Really. So I put these totally broken wooden chairs outside and they were gone within an hour. I found a Little Tykes kiddie pool boat once and then a Little Tykes cube slide another time. My favorite part is the story with a vacuum cleaner. Ashley had found one and discovered it really didn't work anymore. I think it was super loud and dusty or something. She put it on her curb and found it gone soon. The next day she found it in front of somebody else's house in the neighborhood. This is classic. Melody and Charyce would find the coolest things and use them for art projects or simply repainted them. I think that's where I got my inspiration to get creative with old things. Thank you gals! :)

Laptop Lunch Box

The kids are in school until 3pm now and eat lunch there. They provide much healthier food than I've ever seen in a school cafeteria. The cook uses veggies from their school garden and they will always have fruit as well. The kids will only get seconds, if they have eaten all their food. While I'm happy with that, I'm concerned about a few other things still.They offer WW-bread and try to reduce white flour products, but still use it mainly. They use meat filled with antibiotics and milk and milk products with hormones. It's also $3.50 per lunch times 2, so I decided to pack their own lunch, at least most of the times. I do realize there will probably be times I won't be able to prepare a lunch and then I can rely on theirs. I'll probably check their menu first and then decide.

I had been intrigued by the vegan lunch box and several other lunch box sites and found the Lap Top Lunch Box to be the best fit for us. Their lunch boxes do not contain phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA), or lead. If you get the whole system, you'll also receive a bag and water bottle. I even got a steal on them at our local health food store, because they had told me the wrong price. Phew, they are expensive. I'm happy that my kids will hopefully set good examples to their peers and show them how yummy and appealing whole foods can be and that we can keep our environment cleaner by not producing trash with wrappings of all sorts. And I've found a new hobby: "lunch boxing". I had a lot of fun making them the nights before school. Here are a few of their last lunches. All these got mostly eaten during lunch and finished on the way home (the insulating bag keeps the food cool).

Star shaped cheese whole wheat sandwich with a side of parsley (one of their favorite greens), orange slices, mini tomatoes, celery and carrot sticks with Annie's goddess dressing (pink container) and a few spelt pretzels.

The twins thought it was so funny to eat star bread for lunch.

Banilla (banana&vanilla) yogurt with raspberries (container has a lid), carrots on a parsley bed, apple flower with raspberry center and whole wheat peanut butter sandwich with raspberry jam.Spinach with crumbled feta cheese and olive oil, strawberries and blueberries, half a cream cheese ww bagel, carrots and celery sticks with Asian Ginger dressing and 3 "sun drops".

Prunes and half a peach, cucumber, tuna fish with celery chunks on ww bread and bell pepper strips.

Nectarine wedges, carrots on spinach, turkey cheese sandwich on ww bread on a bed of parsley and prunes.

Green beans w. ketchup (green french fries), a mini baby-bell cheese, cream cheese ww bagel on lettuce and fresh prunes.

Back to school

The summer was long and we had a lot of fun, but yesterday it was time to go back to school for the older kids. I anticipated this very much, but was having a lot of mixed feelings as well. I love to be with them, play with them, have fun with them and teach them. I think they even speak better German then English now. Their German got really boosted up over the last 3 month with no school. Not that their English is bad, it's just noticeable that their German vocabulary has expanded more. I'm so happy they love to speak German.
Every time they came home from preschool in Kirksville, I noticed their new English vocabulary. It's amazing how they can just absorb it all. They'll probably laugh at my sometimes lousy English at some point. :)
You may wonder, don't they have a dad who speaks English with them? Well, they do, but he works such crazy hours most of the time that they don't get to see him much other than on the weekend.
We did/do get English books and Dvd's from the library and went to playgroup and had play dates over the summer, so they wouldn't be totally underexposed.

We found a very nice school for Luca and Leea. It's up to 6th grade and every class has way less students than the public schools here, which is 25 vs 15 kids for Luca's class.
The kids learn Spanish from a Native, have rich music exposure, art, PE and free play, with all wonderfully committed teachers. We got to know them yesterday and I'm very impressed. The head of the school is a former music teacher, so they have a pretty big focus on that and lots of different instruments there. Sometimes somebody will play the harp during lunch time and then kids will join in voluntarily and sing along. I love it. They also have field trips every month. I think we found the right school and I'm pretty excited for them to be able to go there. It's only possible, because we were given a wonderful grant, which we feel so blessed for.

When I was a kid in Germany and had my first day of school, we were all given a "school cone" (Schultüte) filled with goodies, little toys, things for school etc. Luca knows about this tradition very well from several of our books and my kids pictures and wanted one too. So I made him one and gave it to him for his first Day of Kindergarten. Maybe I should have made one for Leea, too, because it was her first day of preK, but now she's anticipating one for her first day of Kindergarten next year. The head of the school loved the idea and would like to introduce something like this, so the kids will remember their special first day.

Luca's Kindergarten teacher Michelle.

Luca all happy and excited about his Schultüte (cone).Aren't they cute? Heck, they grew up so fast! One of the things in the cone was a "frog and toad" book- one of Luca's favorite storybooks.Lincoln got home for lunch, because he needed the car to go to a different clinic. It's was perfect, because we were able to celebrate their first day with our whole family.

Me with the cone fillings. I was so excited, because it's kind of like reliving wonderful memories of my childhood and home. Plus I knew Luca would really like it. The day before I made this cone, we went to a German deli in town and bought the "Russisch Brot" alphabet cookies and the German chocolate mini cars. This place was so fun. I could have eaten the whole store, but left it mouth watering, because of the outrageous prices in there. So yes, I went a little overboard with the whole thing, but it's a once in a lifetime thing.

He got some lego cars, a balloon boat, candy, chewing gum (his new favorite), play money, a flik flak learning watch (I always wanted one as a kid) and a Biene Maja learning DVD, that came from my mom. and of course the "toad and frog" book.

Treasure Hunt

Sometimes we like to walk around our neighborhood and collect interesting looking nature things. Here are the kids with their treasures from our last treasure hunt walk.

Luca's treasures were bark, a duck feather and a chestnut-like round ball with spikes on it.

Leea's treasures were bark and a pretty yellow flower.

Here's Noa with a bunch of sticks and a nice, dirty face. Every good treasure hunt involves getting dirty.

I can't resist these pretty pictures of Ava. She looks so gorgeous here. You guessed right, she's also into collecting sticks. And there are tons of them in the park close by.

At this point I should mention that our kids really like the little park with its playground and duck pond just a few yards away from our house. After we swing and slide, we like to walk around the duck pond and listen to the bull frogs, spy for turtles and look at the ducks. We do not feed the ducks, because there are signs all over the place saying we should not feed them. Human food, especially processed white bread, is just as bad for them as it is for us. I like to teach the kids to be obedient in any way, including park signs. They get disappointed in other people feeding the ducks and disregarding the signs.

A few weeks ago Noa was playing with a stick right by the pond and I was sitting close by him in the grass and talking to Ava (the other two were with their grandparents). All of a sudden I realized that Noa was just about to fall into the water and I'm not going to make it. I jumped up as fast as I could and grabbed his hand, but he already had gone under water. Again, the water wasn't deep right there (remember Leea's incident), but he could have drowned, if I wouldn't have been there. It can go so fast. It's horrifying. I have a good friend whose very young daughter drowned while she was inside for just a few minutes. Poor Noa still keeps talking about falling into the pond and is very careful by the pond now. At least he learned something from it. Guess what happened a couple weeks later? Leea fell in.
This was the 4th incident of one of my kids needing to be rescued from the water. The first one was Ava when we still lived in MO and went to the wading pool there. I was playing with the twins in a shallow spot and all of a sudden another mom runs towards us and grabs Ava, who had gone under water. She was right by me. How did I not see that? I feel like I'm losing my sense of awareness...Not good for a mother of 4 youngsters. Anybody else have similar incidents? I like to play outside and around nature with the kids, so I guess there's always a risk of something happening, but even if I were to stay at home all day, they could get hurt. I gotta just keep teaching them to be careful, responsible and to learn from experience.

Aunt Des Visits Us

Lincoln's sister Desiree got a couple weeks off from PA school and decided to visit family and friends around Spokane and Seattle and go rock climbing in Squamish. Her hubby Dylan, who's in med-school, had his vacation earlier, so he unfortunately couldn't come. Des is so fun to be around and one of the buffest people I know. Every time I see her, I set myself new fitness goals!

Des, Ava and the "fly eye"

Ava in soccer action

Des and Leea

Lincoln's brother Jacob and Noa.

Luca really wanted to go rock climbing with auntie Des. He got all his gear (bob the builder gloves, a pick aka rake from the sandbox and some ropes) together and was so upset, when it didn't work out to go rock climbing together, like we had planned to.

Des, Leea and Noa on our new Plasma cars. They work like a champ on our wood-floor.

Even though rock climbing didn't work out, Lincoln, Des and the older kids went hiking and huckleberry picking on Gisborne Mountain in the Selkirk Mountains in Idaho, almost 2 hours north of here. There was no cell phone reception, everything smelled so fresh and clean, and the views were gorgeous. Now I kind of regret not having gone. I'll have to do it next year.

They're delicious fresh or in muffins. I find them to be a mix between red currants and blueberries in taste, and Lincoln thinks they're even better than blueberries in pancakes, especially being so crisp and juicy. It's hard to pick them, but they got a full gallon of these precious berries. They run for $35-$50/gallon. Lincoln was hoping they could pick more and sell them for profit, but it's actually pretty slow picking, especially when you eat a lot of what you pick. :) The kids had a great time and will hopefully never forget the experience.

Thanks for coming, Des! We love you! :)

A Nice Long Weekend in Oregon

We had been planning on going to Oregon for weeks, but it kept getting postponed. Finally in late July, Lincoln was post-call on Friday (and had actually gotten some sleep at the hospital) and had the the next Monday off, so we jumped on the chance to make the trip. We have lots of wonderful family in Oregon and got to stay in Portland with Lincoln's uncle Randy and aunt Carol and their awesome kids, who had just gotten home from college.

Since we have such an enormous family :), Randy set up his big tent in the backyard for us. It's been a couple of years since we went camping, so our kids were so excited to sleep outside for a couple of days. They especially liked Randy acting as a pillow fairy to get them comfortable. It was hilarious! Randy is one of the funniest people I know.

Carol cooked wonderful dinners for us and we had a great time hanging out and catching up. It's so awesome to have such nice people in our family, we felt so homey and comfortable. Thanks so much for your hospitality, Randy and Carol! :)

Kenny and Katie with our kiddos. They played so nice with them and the kids really enjoyed them. Too bad you're so far away!

Ava with their dog. At one point she was very afraid of dogs and still is with bigger dogs, but this little one was just right for her. Noa is the exact opposite. He wants to pet all of them, anywhere.

Cute Noa.

Our whole bunch.

Kenny, Katie, Carol and Randy aka the pillow fairy

We went down to Cottage Grove (where Lincoln & his mom were born, a 1/2 hr south of Eugene) for a day to see the kids great-grandma Mae (77) and great-great-grandma Marie (almost 96). Grandma Mae is actually recovering from a major heart attack (she's such a trooper), so we are grateful she is doing relatively well and that we could have such a nice long visit with her and her mom. It's always great to hear stories from the past and to see them with our kids. They're both so cool, extremely knowledgeable and on top of things. I'm amazed. It's a joy to talk to you, grandmas!

Lincoln brought his stethoscope and Leea knew just what to do with it. She must have heard something in the belly area...

Daughter and mother, what a wonderful picture of them.

I love grandma Mae's expression here.

5 generations with Lincoln's dad missing.

Here are the kids next to grandpa Kenny's (grandma Mae's 1st husband & Lincoln's dad's father) grave. He grew up close to Kirksville (where Lincoln did med-school) and Lincoln sometimes would take care of old buddies of him in the hospital. They all loved Kenny and tell what a great guy he was. Lincoln wishes he could have met him before he died, but it's been nice to get to know him through others' stories.

Here are the kids next to grandpa Norbert Krantz's grave. Norbert is "Oma Zanne's" dad, whose family came from Germany. Unfortunately Norbert never spoke German with the kids, only with the farm animals. :)

Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge on the way back home. It's simply beautiful there and the gorge is HUGE (and windy - lots of amazing windsurfers there).

Me and the twins.

Noa loves to play in the water.

Leea right before she fell into a deeper part of the water and was saved by a kind stranger near her who reacted super fast. The river was shallow, but there was one part where it went abruptly down, maybe up to my knees, and she didn't see that part and stumbled.

Here she is all wet. She thankfully still likes water.

We also got to hang out with Lincoln's aunt Mary and uncle Steve on his mom's side and their children Stephanie and daughter Mariah and Aaron with his wife Cory and their kids. They were so nice to take us in for the night and we very much enjoyed their company. Thanks guys!