Summer is on vacation here in Germany. It's probably gone to Italy with all the Germans. But it certainly isn't here anymore. Just us. And what the Germans call "lovely fresh air" - translation: totally not-summery, 60 degree, cloudy weather.

We left a warm and sunny Boston four days ago. The kids were excited, which was good because our flight was slightly delayed. Luckily, we found a window seat in the food court and could watch planes landing and taking off and gangways pulling up to and away from planes and just some dang cool airplanes.

who knew the Swiss were so cool?

We flew with Icelandair again this year. We seem to do that every other year. (Primarily because they seem to be the cheapest exactly every other year.) Things have changed at Icelandair in the two years since we've flown with them. Now the seat backs have these fun Icelandic language lessons on them.

this will come in handy later during our vacation

And also, they don't give you any food anymore. At least not any free food. But you can buy a sports bar or trail mix for 2 Euro. Gee, thanks. I wanted to sleep anyway. In fact, everyone slept, including all three kids. (Clearly, we have the best kids ever.) S and I even slept through the entire second flight from Iceland to Frankfurt, waking up to a map of a completed journey. Yay, us!

After the car trip to Oma & Opa's house, the kids were rejuvenated enough to try out Oma & Opa's new toy: the trampoline!

The sun doesn't really go down here until about 9:30, so they pretty much did the trampoline until then. Our anti-jet lag strategy is to keep the kids up mega late the first night so they sleep hard and can wake up at a reasonable morning time. We did and they did. It was our first post-flight, uninterrupted night of sleep since we've had kids. Wow. (Night three was a doozy, however, with wee one refusing to go to sleep at all, but we persevered and have almost ratcheted them back to a normal bedtime.)

The next day was Saturday, so the kids were forced to wait two whole days - which they bounced away on the trampoline - until we could make our first, and arguably most important, outing: the annual trip to Oma's store.

Each one of the kids has saved his/her Euros from birthday and Christmas and has been dreaming about coming to the toy and paper goods store that belongs to Oma's family. They pick out something fabulous every year (and with a 10% family discount!). Wee one knew what she wanted: "Playmobil, big Playmobil." She found the perfect set right away.

notice how she is nowhere to be found while I put it together

It's a sort of suitcase thing that opens up to be a castle and includes like 100 little princessy Playmobil bits. I had the unenviable job of putting together all the littlest bits that decorate the castle. I spent longer putting her castle together than the boys did putting together the things that they bought.

please do not ask me how we will be getting these things home

Man, do they love these race sets! The cars are motorized, so they get some real speed going. The boys have already rebuilt the tracks like six different times. They actually forgot about the trampoline for half the day. Which gave hubby time outside to do this:

The hedge at the end of the backyard that separates it from the fields beyond was a little overgrown and had to be trimmed to get ready for wee one's annual "over the hedge" picture. Coming soon....