We said goodbye to Germany this week. We had a really wonderful vacation this year and the boys were particularly sad to have to leave their grandparents' special little place in the world. Here are a few photos from our last days in the land of oma and umlauts.

Wee one played some soccer at a village festival. She looked like a natural! Out of all the kids, she seems the most German to me. She started talking while we were visiting last Christmas (just waiting for us to really speak German), she loves being outside in the "fresh" air (and when the Germans say fresh, they really mean cold), and she happily pointed to all kinds of crazy meats and cheeses on the breakfast table and said "try dat?". And yesterday, back home, when another child wanted to play catch with her, she refused to use her hands, instinctively let the ball drop and started kicking it.

The boys in perfect synch in a three-legged race. You gotta bet on twins in a three-legged race! They had so much fun at the festival, participating in the team games organized for the kids. I was so proud of how they dove right in to play with other kids besides their cousins and talk with other folks besides Oma & Opa. I think they're starting to feel at home in Germany and I know it makes their grandparents as proud as it makes me.

Americans eating "Americans" (a German black/white cookie). We brought home a ton of the kids' favorite German treats like Leibniz cookies, Kinder Riegel, Lachgummis and over a dozen Überraschungseier I packed in German egg cartons (although, oddly, eggs come in boxes of 10 and not 12 over there - now that's taking the metric system a little too far in my opinion)!

Wee helped pack by putting her five favorite things in a basket and carrying that around for three hours saying "time to go? time to go? time to go?" While I was trying to cram a score of new books and presents and clothes into the suitcases, she was carefully protecting her basket with her two "lipsticks" (chapsticks), a hershey kiss, a tiny pink play cell phone and a palm-sized plastic gag spider (she stole that one from B).

The boys have got this traveling thing down. With almost twenty cross-Atlantic flights behind them, they aren't phased by it at all. In the plane, they got out their headphones and watched their shows, they made everyone shuffle all their trays around cause they had to pee right when the dinner service started (don't you hate it when that happens!) and they looked just as miserable when they couldn't sleep as any adult.

Hubby was fingerprinted and photographed at entry (why do we treat all non-citizens like criminals?) and we rode home "to my house," as wee one kept repeating in the car, tired but happy to be back.

Adenauer's old train in Bonn's German History Museum

Last week, hubby and I treated ourselves (well, Oma and Opa treated us) to a kid-free couple of days - a mini-vacation within our vacation. We decided to visit Bonn, the former capital of Germany, because neither of us had ever visited it, because it was fairly small (we've seen a lot of the big cities before and wanted to have a quieter vacation) and because it was close (in case wee one decided that she wasn't quite ready to spend three days without mommy & daddy).

there's a bird on your head!

Bonn is a lovely little city, with a bright and pretty city center. It's not too big, it's not too small, it's just right. In addition to housing the West German government while Germany was divided, Bonn is also well known for being the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven. You can tour the town house his family lived in when he was born, which is right in a busy little street in the city center. (The Beethoven house has an excellent website including a fabulous page just for kids - check it out!) Or you can find him in front of the big post office building in the middle of one of the town squares. Whichever way we walked in the pedestrian zone, we kept coming back to this square and the big Beethoven statue.

And to funny Chinese restaurants. The names of these two cracked me up!

A family friend who lives in Bonn happened to mention that "there is a yarn store directly across from my apartment." Oh really?!

Wolle Rödel is an excellent chain I've visited before in both Munich and Frankfurt. This one was a little smaller but still chock full of modern yarns and patterns. You know what they had there?

I heart Ron

Opal's Harry Potter yarn! I don't know how I managed not to run into this in stores before now. (We'd even gone to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince the night before in Bonn. In German, of course. Weird listening to those kids with funny German accents instead of funny British accents.) The Wolle Rödel also sold Knitpicks needles! I recognized the harmony needles from all the way across the store. Way to go Knitpicks!

nice spot for a fortress, no?

After sight-seeing and shopping, we took a boat tour down the Rhine. There are dozens of picturesque little towns scattered along the Rhine and almost as many intriguing castles nestled up in the surrounding mountains. This is the Drachenfels (the Dragon cliff) with Roman ruins at the very top. The name of the cliff comes from the old Germanic legend of the Nibelung. This is supposedly the spot where Siegfried battled the dragon. Now that's cool.

that is so my book!

I'm trying to get the kids a slew of German books on this trip, so we can come home and be German readers. There's a Charlie & Lola book for wee one and a couple of cool non-fiction books for the boys, like this one that explains how all kinds of things (like bubble gum) are made.

 
How does the sole get on the sneaker?

For fun, the boys and I are reading some vampire books.

 
The Little Vampire and Twilight

The boys are big fans of Joann Sfar. They love the Sardine in Outer Space series and had just started reading the Little Vampire series this summer. I was psyched to find the first of the vampire books in German (with the cool name Desmodus). And I picked up the first of the Twilight series for me. The series is known here as the "Bite" series and the titles are all something like Until Dawn or Until Sunset, but the word for "bite" is the same as the word for "until", just with one more "s". Clever Germans.

Wee one got the best book of all though, which she will now share with you....

Anton and the Girls

Here comes Anton.

Anton is cool.

Anton has a giant car. But the girls don't look.

Anton can jump high. Anton is strong.

But the girls still don't look.

Anton tries a couple more things, then when they don't work out, he starts to cry.

Now the girls look. Anton gets a cookie.

Anton can play with them. Anton is happy.

Here comes Lukas.

Just look at Anton's face!! Perfect. Says everything about boys and girls. All in a child's book. And all in German.

We're having beautiful weather here in Germany! This is pretty unusual for us (often our visits have had to include emergency trips to the store to buy more long pants and long-sleeved shirts) so we are trying to soak in as much sun as we can. It's almost like a vacation!

B diving at the local Freibad

And in this lovely weather, the landscape here is certainly to be admired. I'm pretty much a city girl, but the view of the hills from the local outdoor swimming complex just about took my breath away.

viking chess in the backyard

We've had hours of fun in the backyard, including playing something the Germans call "Viking Chess" (Kubb), where you have large wooden king and several pawn pieces and throw sticks at them. Cool!

genuine farm baseball (see the cows in the back?)

The boys have even managed to play some baseball. (Baseball in Germany!) Oma & Opa spotted some neighbor kids playing baseball in the field behind their backyard and discovered that their dad is American. We immediately arranged for the boys to play a game with them. Apparently, if you pack your wiffle bat (which we did) they will come. And we had perfect baseball weather!

girl meets world again

And I managed to snap wee one at the hedge again this year. One year later, almost a head taller. (Here's last years pic.) I'm hoping to make this an annual photo. Maybe get the boys in there too. If the weather stays good....

take us here!

Thursday night we packed up, got ourselves to the airport and flew to Germany!

The flight didn't take off until 10pm, so the kids had to relax a little with their blankies in the waiting area at the gate. Amazing how necessary those three little pieces of wool have become to those kids.

B was lucky enough to have an empty seat beside him and fell asleep first

B & S, who are practically professionals at flying across the Atlantic, had no trouble nodding off within an hour or so of take-off. Wee, however, held out for a good three hours before she succumbed at around 1am.

I am not sleepy and I will not go to bed

It was the first time I didn't bring any knitting with me on a plane trip. I felt almost guilty about it, but I knew there'd be no chance I'd get to knit. We all, very sensibly, slept as much as we could, although I must admit to staying up a bit longer than I should have watching the new Star Trek. And everyone was rested enough for a happy landing.

But now we must battle our old foe, jetlag.

Pardon us while we sleep now.....

We've been enjoying the kids' April school vacation, visiting friends in DC.

We stayed at one end of the Mall and saw the kids' favorites: the White House and the Washington Monument.

Then we hit some museums. Everyone had their favorites:

The boys loved the SR-71 Blackbird (the world's fastest jet!) at the Air & Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles. (That's where they keep the really BIG stuff. There's even a Space Shuttle there!)

Wee one, a total sparkle girl, got to see the ur-sparkle shoes, Dorothy's ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz at the National Museum of American History. She liked them.

Even I got to see a favorite American icon, Stephen Colbert!

The kiddos also particularly enjoyed the (creepy, crawly) insect zoo at the National Museum of Natural History. Wee one spent an entire hour watching bees and water bugs, the boys were delighted by the butterflies in the butterfly exhibit, and I was horrified by this display of moths eating some red yarn.

there's real moths in there: eeeeeeeekkk!

Naturally, souvenirs had to be bought:

We drove back through the night, through the rain. Yuck, yuck, yuck. But worth it for a wonderful vacation. Bye DC and DC buddies!

very cool picture taken by the very cool Jason!

(PS - I've still got three more days of school vacation week to fill. Wish me luck! It's going to be hard to follow all that fun.)