April happenings

I'm trying to get caught up on this blog....once again...or maybe I should say "still" because I never seem to get totally caught up.  Anyhow, here it is the end of June and I'm just getting around to posting April.  Hopefully, I can get somewhat caught up in the next couple of weeks. 

April was a full month for us. Some things throughout the month required a separate post, but there were just a few pictures that didn't really belong anywhere else.  So, here are the extras.

I thought this picture of Elly laughing was so cute.  She found her bunny ears from last Easter and was playing around acting like a bunny.

Like most other little girls, Elly loves to dress up.  Anytime she finds a pair of my shoes she goes clomping around in them.  This day she was having fun dancing and watching herself in the mirror. 

Elly loves organizing her books.  She wanted me to take a picture of her with the books she had all laid out.  She loves to group them into "like" categories.

She is such a great little helper around the house.  Sam needed to wash the rolladens on our downstairs windows and Elly thought it was a perfect opportunity to help Daddy :)  She loves her Daddy and loves helping so it was perfect for her. 

Anyone who knows me knows that I don't like hot weather. I am much more comfortable on the cool days. However, I'm really enjoying the weather finally being warm enough that I can put pretty little summer dresses on my sweet girl. Being overseas, I shop a lot of online sales and I've always bought clothes ahead for her. This has always served me well, but somehow I bought way to many summer dresses for this year. Partly, I think it's because she's still in some 3T clothes, but a lot of the 4T summer clothes will be too small for her next year so I pulled them all out and put them in her closet. She must have over 20 summer dresses!  I can't believe my baby is already in size 4T!! Anyhow...I need some warm days so she can get use out of all those dresses :)

Daddy and Elly were heading out to go to a playground and I just had to snap a couple of pictures.  I LOVE how Elly still carries her blankie and teddy bear with her :)  She is so sweet and I just wish I could hold on to her at this age forever.  I love her so much!!

Helping Daddy once again.  This time she had been playing in the pool out back, but then wanted to help Daddy so she got her little rain boots on and off she went :)  Oh, to be so young and carefree!

And ANOTHER day at the zoo

I'm really behind on this blog so bear with me.  I'm still trying to get March finished so I can move on to more recent activities.  Anyhow...here goes.

We have certainly enjoyed having our annual pass to the Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart. We've been there several times and once again at the end of March we went with some friends. It ended up being a long day, but the kids really enjoyed it and got some energy used up.  Elly loves her little friends and has the best time when we get to be with them.  The zoo has become a favorite place for us to spend a day.

Just inside the entrance of the zoo there is a big grassy area with a nice flower garden.  The girls were having so much fun running around there and looking at the flowers.  They were being gentle with them and hadn't picked any so we were quite surprised when one of the zoo workers came over yelling and motioning for us to get the girls off the grass.  He didn't speak English so we don't really know what he was saying, but by all appearances he wanted the girls off the grass.  We were pretty baffled though because there was no fence or signs saying to stay off the grass and the girls weren't hurting the flowers. We figured we better just move on.  We were able to snap a couple of pictures before the guy chased us off the grass.

Elly and Sydney

Elly's just gotten into the stage of picking flowers for me.  It's so sweet and I love getting flowers from her.  Here she was showing me what she brought me.

Kristal and Sammy

Watching the hippos

Elly and Maddie

Kim and Sydney

This seal was obnoxiously loud.  He would start on one side of the area, pop out of the water and bark and bark and bark.  Then he would swim to the other side and do it all over again. He did that over and over and over.  He finally got out of the water and laid out on the rocks.  I'm sure he must have been exhausted.

Sydney and Elly having a snack before we headed home.  These were Sydney's snacks, but Elly felt the need to dole them out to her and Sydney was fine with it :)

One tired little girl after a long day at the zoo.

Killesberg Park

One day in mid-March we went out in search of Rubble Hill, a hill here in Stuttgart that was created from rubble left over from the war. It is some sort of a park from what we gather, but I can't tell you first hand since we never made it there. We couldn't find it. Instead, we decided to stop by Killesburg Park. They have a very nice playground that Elly loved playing at.




There was a zip line that I was nervous about putting Elly on., but Sam said she could do it so I just told her to hold on tight when I let go of her.  I held my breath until I saw that she didn't fall off.  I was surprised at how good she did and of course she loved it.  She had to go back on it over and over again.

My daughter...the hair dresser

Elly has always loved playing with hair.  She will sit for the longest time fixing her baby's hair.  She gathers every barrette she can find then very meticulously places them ALL in her baby's hair.  It makes her day when I let her play with mine.  This is what I get for letting her have access to my hair :)






And I don't know what to say about Elly's crazy faces.  Seems like she's at that stage where when she knows a picture is being taken she has to perform in some way...thus the crazy face.

Back to the zoo

At the end of January I started hosting a Kinder German class at our house each Monday. There's a lady who teaches Kinder German in the Child Development Centers on post so Sam asked if she would be willing to teach a small group in our home. We've kept it pretty small, so it's just 4 little girls at this point, but has been a lot of fun.

  There are two other moms and we've gotten to be pretty good friends which has been really nice because friendship does not come naturally to me.  Part of it is knowing that most of the people I know are moving on.  Most people are only here for 3 years so it just seems like too much work to make good friends to have them leave in a year or two.  The other part of it is just pure laziness, I think. Being a friend is a lot of work for me.  I'm naturally very introverted and it takes a lot out of me to work on being a friend.  ANYHOW...all that to say it's really nice that it's worked out that the two other ladies and I have become friends.  We're together every week so it has been easier to get to know them.

We decided to take a break during the summer and reconvene in September.  Sam's parents will be here in just a couple of weeks then we have company coming in June.  I'm planning to go home to Alaska for 4-5 weeks in July/August.  One of the others had planned to be gone for 4-5 weeks too. So, it just made sense to stop the classes until we're all back together. 

So, back to the pictures in this post...Kim is one of the moms that comes to Kinder German.  She has a little girl, Sydney, who just turned two.  Elly and Sydney play so nicely together and I really like Kim.  They are contractors, which means they do not have the time limitation that many other civilians over here have on them.  I love this because it means they could be here for years just like us, which makes going through the "hassle" of being a friend worth it because she doesn't plan on leaving in a couple of years. 

At the beginning of March, Kim and I decided to take our girls to the zoo.  We love the zoo!  It's so nice having annual passes and being able to go enjoy the day and not feel like we have to cover the entire area.  Sydney and Elly had lots of fun together!


I had to go check on the baby gorillas again and they were awake this day!!  I was so excited!  They were adorable and I could have stayed and watched them for hours.  The girls wouldn't have been so excited about that though so we watched for awhile and moved on.

It was a bad day...

Yesterday I had a bad morning. It was one of those times where I desperately wanted to be back in the states. Back where I know the rules and the language. Back where I can talk to anyone on the street if needed. Back to where I feel at home, even if I've never been to a particular area because it's still my country and we speak the same language.

I've been needing to set an appointment with my kidney doctor for the last couple of years. After the issues I had with my kidney during pregnancy, he wanted me to come back for a more in depth scan of my kindeys. It had to be after Elly weaned because they'll use some sort of dye in my system to see the kidneys better. Obviously, I've been putting this off for awhile because Elly's been weaned for quite some time and I'm just getting around to it.

 So, I finally asked Sam to set an appointment for me a couple of weeks ago. I usually try to get him to go with me, but this time he had meetings that he couldn't get out of. I wasn't too concerned because I'd been to this doctor before and figured it wasn't anything I couldn't handle. Obviously, it wasn't. Obviously, I need my husband even more than I thought.

This doctor moved his practice to another location since the last time I had an appointment with him, but I figured I'd just put the address in Tom-Tom and there would be no problem. We left the house by 11:00 since the appointment was at 11:30 and it was only 15-20 minutes away.

I got to the general area and saw a parking garage and figured that would be easier than finding street parking. I parked and we went up to the street level to find the office. We walked one way then another then back again and I could not find the street that his office was located on. Then I decided to just keep walking in one direction and eventually did come to the street name I was looking for, but could not find his building number. By this time it was already 11:45. I eventually did find the building number and it had his name on the door, so I was relieved even though I was late.

My relief was short lived, however, because after walking up 3 flights of stairs, I realized I wasn't finding his office. The building was under construction and full of construction workers. I felt like I was walking through a construction site. It didn't seem to me like there were any offices in this building. I went up and down a couple of times and by that time was so frustrated I decided I was not going to make the appointment. I started walking back to the parking garage so frustrated that I was in tears. Elly was so precious! She said "Mama, are you crying? Mama, are you sad?" and I told her it was alright. I told her I was not upset with her, but I was just frustrated and she said "Mama, I love you." What a sweet little girl I have!

Anyhow, we got back to the parking garage and I could not find the kiosk to pay at. Over here, you get the ticket on the way into the garage and have to put the ticket into the kiosk and pay for it before you can get back out of the garage. I couldn't find the kiosk a.n.y.w.h.e.r.e. I went up and down the levels of the garage with no luck. I eventually went into a bank attached to the garage and asked one of the ladies "Sprechen Sie Englisch?". She said "No". I held up the parking garage ticket and asked where I pay. I guess she had pity on my because she said "Come with me" (really? you don't speak English?) took me outside and pointed to some stairs and told me the kiosk was at the bottom.

I paid for my ticket, but then realized I was in a totally different area of the garage and didn't know how to get back to my car so I had to go back up the stairs and walk all the way back to where I knew how to find my car. We made it back to the car and I hurriedly got Elly buckled in because I didn't know how long I had before I would owe more on the ticket. When I got to the exit gate, the ticket would not work. I went back to the kiosk to see if it was because I owed more money. I didn't. This happened a couple more times before I called Sam in tears telling him I couldn't get out of the garage. I was incredibly frustrated!! He wanted to know where I was and I couldn't even tell him. I'd just followed Tom-Tom, so didn't know how to tell him where I was.

Eventually, I saw other cars having the same problem, so I pulled up and after searching for some time I located the button to call for help. I don't know if the guy understood me or not, but I rambled on about the gate not working and it eventully was raised. Thank God! I was so happy to be out of there.

 I told Elly we were done for the day and we were just going to stop by the PX on the way home. After hearing me talk all morning about how I didn't know where the street or the doctor's office was and hearing me tell Sam I didn't know where we were at it's no surprise that the next thing Elly said was "Mama, do you know where the PX is?" I LOVE that girl! She gave me a good laugh after a very stressful morning.

Oh, and next time I'm taking Sam with me.

February review

This past week I was trying to remember the name of the kidney doctor I was seeing while I was pregnant. I looked everywhere with no luck and finally thought to look back at the blogs I wrote during that time. Of course, it was there. Dr. Schafer ~ he was my hero during that difficult period of my pregnancy. I was so thankful for him!

Anyhow... as I was looking for his name I ended up reading various blog posts. I'm so glad I kept up with the blog during that time. It's so fun to go back and read my thoughts. It made me realize how slack I've become in posting to the blog though. It seems like it's become more of a picture blog than my digital journal it started out as. After Elly's birth I had so many pictures to share and not enough time to spend just writing. Hopefully, some day I can change that, but for now....here is a look at March.

If I'm ever really busy and need Elly to occupy herself for awhile all I need to do is open a cupboard and let her at it. She LOVES to get everything out and it keeps her busy for a long time. Elly loves playdough.  When she was younger I made it a couple of times, but she was never very interested in it. A couple of months ago I found a playdough recipe that is made with Jello. It sounded interesting so I made it and it's really the best playdough I've ever made. It's so simple, it smells yummy, it has a very soft texture and stays soft for weeks. Elly has two bowls of it now that have been around for at least 2 months and it's still really nice. Another day....another cupboard. My little girl just loves to get into everything I have in those kitchen cupboards. I think this day I was making Sam's birthday cake and needed a little bit of time :) Yes, I have a mess to clean up later, but it really keeps her busy for some time. I always feel like Sam gets the short end of the stick for his birthday. It's not long after Christmas and somehow I seem to always run late for his gifts. It doesn't help that he gives me NOTHING to go on and whatever he does ask for cannot be shipped over here. All in all it makes getting him a gift quite difficult.  This year he requested lasagna for dinner, so I made that and an ice cream cake. We didn't have anyone over for his birthday, so we had a quiet evening with just us.

Elly loved to see the process of making Sam's cake and when it was done she wanted a picture with him. For the first time this year she's understanding that everyone has a birthday and that it's a special celebration. She keeps asking me when her birthday is now. Around the 10th Elly was really sick. Several days before that she just seemed "off" and I was wondering if she was coming down with something. Poor little thing. I was working down in the guest room so she was laying on the bed watching a movie. That was the first time I realized how sick she was. When Elly is just laying and not talking there must be something wrong. Over the next couple of days she got really sick. She would throw up a couple times each morning. My theory is that she wasn't eating much and had so much mucus draining that it just made her sick to her stomach. This was the first time she ever threw up. There were about 5 days where she ate basically nothing. After that week, I noticed a definite change in Elly's appearance. She lost some of her baby fat during those tough days. This was toward the end of the month and Elly was finally feeling better. We had just walked in the house after coming home from church and opened the back patio door. Elly was right back outside. I was only able to get her out of her church shoes before she was out that door playing in the sand. She sure loves to be outside.
Well, that is a quick review of February.  Seems I am forever trying to catch up on this blog.  I guess it's a wonderful thing to have a life so full that it's difficult to find the time to blog about it.  I do try to keep it updated though.  Well, I'm off to see if I can get another post done before Elly wakes from her nap :)