In her Own World

Oh Kherington. She is one busy little girl. I keep thinking that her energy level will stay the same or even decrease but somehow it keeps increasing. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up with her much longer. She is very independent and does just what she wants.

She was going potty and I was putting clothes away in our room. I came out to find that she had moved her potty to the computer chair so she could keep watching her sesame street show.

She loves baths. At any given moment she strips and we hear the bath tub starting up (multiple times a day). On of the day's she took Ryan's body wash and used to to turn the water blue (very funny, but frustrating to waste our precious US body wash).

She is a girl of order. Toys cars in her room get lined up at night. She she goes potty all the clothes come off and the underwear get's put one place, the pants another and the shirt another (never in one big pile) before she'll sit down to go. She lines up her coloring books and will scribble on one page in each book then return it to the correct spot. When eating each piece of food needs it's own plate.

Michelle's Visit (Part 2)

Day 7: Relax
After getting home around 1:30am from London, church was a challenge. My Gospel Doctrine lesson (oh yes, I'm the new gospel doctrine teach for the adult English class) was kinda rough (my head felt like it was spinning), but still not as bad as my first Sunday teaching so that's good. We drove by the Atonium on our way home from church. Ryan had meetings after church so I left the kids with Michelle and went to pick him up thinking he'd be done. I told her I'd be back in 30 minutes...and hour and half later we returned. I fell asleep on the steering wheel (I was parked) while I waited so that was definitely a plus (not sure when the last time I got a kid free nap).

Day 8: Aachen, Germany
We had a slow morning. Ventured out to the Zaventem market after dropping Ryan off at work then finally got ourselves out the door around 11am to head to Aachen. We went to the Dom in the center of town and walked around the shopping area (I hit up the euro store...I guess it's a good thing I haven't find one of those here). We stopped for some Ice Cream right outside the Dom (how do you pass up 80 cents a scoop?). Michelle ordered the Mint, but when Kherington saw that it was green and the other two were white she insisted she have the green one. When it started dripping I traded her so I could clean (lick) it up. Man was it nasty. It tasted like they had dumped a bottle of cough medicine into the mixture. The funniest part was that she wouldn't trade back with me...apparently she could tell there was something wrong with it.

Next up was the BEST kebap place in the world called Istanbul Kebap Haus. There aren't many things that I would go out of my way to eat and this, along with Cafe Rio Pork Salad, is one of them. The kebap's are ginormous and before taking a bite Michelle couldn't believe I didn't want to share one...if you've ever eaten one of these you'd understand why I didn't want to share. Once she took a bite she understood :).

The original plan was to go to Maastricht too, but since we knew Paris was going to be a long day and we needed to finish planning it we decided to head home.

Day 9: Paris, France
This was the place Michelle wanted to visit the most so we wanted to make sure to do it justice. And when you're toting around 2 kids who have already been traveling for over a week it gets to be more of a challenge. With stops, it took us about 3.5 hours to drive to our parking location at the Saint-Denis Universite. When we got there I though it was closed because the doors closed (like a garage) instead of just a stick that moves up and down. I was recalculating the GPS when we saw someone pull up, press the button and the doors opened...good thing we saw that.

We jumped on the metro and got off at Champs Elysees. We had decided to do a hop on hop off bus tour and there are two different companies (a red and a yellow). I decided to just see which bus I saw more of and buy that pass...I saw WAY more red buses so we went with that (les car rouges). This pretty much made Paris for us. It was so easy to just relax and have the bus take us where we wanted to go.

The first ride through the loop, we got off at Trocadero and let Kherington wander. She really enjoyed the street break dancers and the bubble lady. Hopped back on at the Eiffel tower, then off at the Louve and walked over to Saint Chapelle and Notre Dame. After doing some tourist shopping (finally found me a green scarf) we jumped on the bus and rode to...McDonalds! Don't worry, only Kherington at there...Michelle and I were still full from our crepes (ham/cheese and nutella/banana). Oh and did I mention Kevin has now eaten only breastmilk and nutella/banana crepe? He has a pretty quick grab and went right for the crepe...smart guy.

We really wanted to be able to see the sites at night, so we got back on the bus right early enough to ride the entire loop. But wouldn't you know, nothing that be quite that easy with kids.

I had asked if Kherington needed to go potty before getting on the bus and of course she didn't. Then 1 stop in she starts bouncing up and down saying "poo poo pee pee." I tell her she has to wait...well, after about 30 minutes, plus another 15 sitting at the eiffel tower (apparently waiting for someone to buy some drinks at the stand across the street), I figured that we weren't going to make it the whole loop. But no worries, we were coming up on Notre Dame and I knew there was a potty about a block from the stop. I went down and asked the bus driver about how long we were going to be stopped (5 min) and then asked if I had time to take her potty and have it wait. He said no problem. Well, less than 5 minutes later after sprinting to the potty and back, I watched the bus drive away. So I start chasing it. It doesn't have to wait for the first light (just my luck). I throw Kherington up on my shoulders and start sprinting. Keep in mind Michelle is on the bus with all our stuff spread across 2 rows AND Kevin...but I am wearing the wrap. It's a good thing I had mentioned to meet at the McDonald's if anything happened b/c after cutting people off, j-walking and dodging cars with a toddler on my shoulders, I finally gave up. I found the metro and prayed that they'd make it back to the McDonald's. Michelle and Kevin were waiting there when Kherington and I arrived (thank goodness!). What a way to end a trip to Paris. I guess we can tell Kevin he went on his first date with his Auntie in Paris :).

Day 10: Brussels
The sun was actually shining so we walked over to the Evere market on Rue de Knoop. It is only about a 15 minute walk and in the 1.5 years I've lived here I've never been (it's only open Wed though). It was way bigger than I thought it would be and the best surprise was that the Waffle people from Stockel market (only open Tues, Fri, Sat) also do the Evere market! Michelle was able to have the best waffle made in Belgium.

After Kherington work up from her nap (she fell asleep in the stroller on the walk home), we headed over to the Breendonk Memorial. It was a concentration camp and was really interesting to walk around. I felt a little bad to have Kherington running around, but she wasn't too loud and there weren't very many people so we never had to be right next to anyone. I basically followed her around and listened to the recording (you just type a number and the hand held device starts talking so I didn't have to be standing in a certain place or anything)

Day 11: So Sad to Say Goodbye...
After stopping by the neighborhood bakery to test some pastries, we headed to the Kortenberg market. This is the first market that I've seen live chicken at. It was a smaller market with mostly older people that seem to all know each other. I love seeing that kind of thing where this is really just a normal day to stroll down to the market and chat with their favorite vendor and friends.

Weew! We had so much fun having Auntie Michelle here and can't wait for more visitors to come! But now it's time to get packed for our Baltic cruise...yes, goal was to blog this before I left b/c I didn't think I'd do it once I got back.

Michelle's Visit (Part 1)

Michelle has come and gone...we had about a week and half of fun and boy did we take advantage of it. Our adventures will definitely make you want to come visit :).

Kherington LOVED having Auntie Michelle around. We had been home from the airport for only a few minutes and Kherington was going potty. I went in to wipe her and she tells me "no, no mommy...Auntie Michelle wipe." Haha...Michelle did a lot of that :).

Okay, so now for the fun. We hit up 5 countries in that short amount of time (and went through a lot of chocolate eggs and ice cream...aka bribery). Here's the run through of the first half of the visit:

Day 1: Namur, Belgium
Since the best way to get adjusted to the time zone change is to stay up until you would normally go to sleep, I wanted to make sure to plan something that would require us going somewhere fun. We headed down to the Citedelle de Namur. I decided on the Citedelle pass that meant we could go on 2 tours and do the train ride...the only thing is, I forgot that we hadn't actually taken Kherington on any guided tours since getting kicked out of the Neuenchanstien (Disney) castle in Germany. Kevin did great (slept through it) and Kherington did okay but kept saying "All done, bye, bye". The tour was in 3 languages with one person doing all the talking. We finished the first tour (the one of the tunnels) and decided to skip out on the next one so we got some ice cream and waited for the train tour.

That night we introduce Michelle to kebap's (definitely not even on the same deliciousness scale as the ones in Germany) and frites. She thought they were putting a lot of Ranch on the frites...thinks again (it's mayo).

Day 2: Brussels, Belgium
We had some of the darkest weather I have ever seen in my life in the morning. We were driving around at 10am and it looked like 10pm...all the cars had their lights on and it was raining. It was so strange. We headed downtown to the Palace. The month of August visitors are able to walk-through it so we did that then walked down the stair to the Grand Place and wandered around. Michelle tried her first waffle...the waffle wasn't too awesome (the ones downtown are definitely inferior to other locations) but the toppings were tasty. Kherington got her ice cream. Michelle had Kevin in the wrap and was holding the cone and when I went to take a picture I notice Kevin's forehead had a big pink dot on it (framboise).

In the afternoon (after Kevin's doctor's appt), we went out to the Neuhaus chocolate outlet and then to Gaasbeek Castle. We missed the last tour, but had fun wandering around the ground (they are amazing and so picturesque).

Day 3: Amsterdam, Netherlands
When you enter the Netherlands on the way to Amsterdam, off the side of the freeway is a ginormous statue. When we took my mom, she was like, "Wow, that's a big golf tee." Yeah, definitely not a golf tee...we thought we should document it (and make fun of mom).

Amsterdam's parking in crazy expensive, so this time I decided that we'd park at a P+R outside the city and take the tram in. We went to the P+R Olympisch Stadion and waited in a line to get into the parking lot for about 30 minutes before deciding on driving downtown to park in our normal expensive location. Apparently if you're going to do the P+R you need to get there early (we got in around 11:30am). We wandered around the streets a little but it was POURING rain, so we decided to jump on the tram for a bit (fyi: to buy a ticket you just get on and pay the driver...I think it was 2.30 for an hour of riding). We took it down to the Albert Cuymarkt which is one of the largest outdoor markets in Europe. After testing some awesome fresh fruit drink (similar to the ones in Barcelona which i loved) and finding a couple other goodies, we headed back to our car.

Next up was the Zaanse Schans which is a dutch muesum town. It is free to enter the park (you still pay for parking though) most museums are free, but some cost a euro or two. There are a bunch of windmills, a bakery museum, traditional dutch crafts (wood shoes / cheese). We got there a little late but had a blast wandering around the cute houses and windmills.

On our drive home we went took the long route so we could swing by The Hague temple. Kherington thought it was an awesome trip b/c the fountains were like playing with a huge water table :).

Day 4: Antwerp, Belgium
We had a slower morning and took our time getting out the door, then headed up to Antwerp. We parked right at the train station and went into explore. If you haven't watched the flash mob that was done there you should. We wandered the streets, saw some interesting looking people...one with underwear longer then their cut-off jean short (ewwwww).

Kherington wore her monkey backpack/lease...she let Ryan hold the end part of the time which is an improvement from her deciding she 'needed' the tail (she's just wear it like a bracelet which pretty much defeated the point of having it in the first place).

I also found the new bike that I want...i think it is an upgrade from the wheelbarrow bike I wanted before :).

Day 5 & 6: London, UK
We drove up to London. I had planned on taking the eurotunnel, but tickets were sold out when I went to buy them so we took the seafrance ferry instead and it ended up being a good move. It is just an hour long to cross (eurotunnel takes 30 min) and Kherington was able to run around and get some wiggles out.

We drove straight to our hotel, got checked-in then walked around the corner to jump on the tube (we bought oyster cards for 5 pounds that are good for 5 years...then loaded enough money for a day pass onto it). Some of the highlights of wandering the streets of London included a stop at a massive toy store and the M&M store, relaxing at trafalgar square, riding the city double decker buses and playing at a park outside the castle.

Funny story...so it had finally stopped raining and we came upon a park but it was still all wet. We let Kevin and Kherington swing, then Kherington decided the slide looked like fun...the very long, steep wet slide with a big puddle at the bottom. She went soooo fast down it, flew off it and skidded through the puddle. She was soaked but very happy :).

After stopping at a pasta restaurant for dinner (and ice cream for Kherington) we took a night bus tour. It was kinda long, but totally worth it. The top was completely covered, Kherington zonked out right away and Kevin was about by about half way through.

The next morning after a full English breakfast (sausage, ham, eggs, toast, and bean) we headed over to Windsor castle. It is massive! Right near it there is a huge shopping area with a wide range of stuff...i picked up a couple thing at the pound store (think dollar store).

Next up was COSTCO. Yes, for me, a trip to London would not be complete without this...and what was on my list? Diapers, wipes, fruit snacks, muffins, cooking spray, a coat and a pizza for us to share :). Some people think Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but for me, that would be Costco.

Then before heading back to the ferry terminal we went by the London temple...I've already blogged about his before, but it has the most amazing temple ground and this time the visitors center was open too.

Now funny story #2: We're waiting in line to board the ferry and Kherington need to go to the bathroom. Ryan asks if she wants me or Michelle to take her and she says she want daddy to take her :). He stalls a little, then off they go. They were probably about half way there when it starts down pouring (it has been nice and sunny moments before). Ryan's carrying Kherington and they don't have coats so he starts running, but Kherington tells him "daddy, no running." They came back drenched!

Other Fun Stories:
Michelle pretty much got hit on in every city we went to. In London, a guy walked up to her and said he really wanted a picture with a blond haired girl (funny though that her hood was on and I wouldn't actually label her blond). At Costco she was chasing Kherington around and a guy tried to get her phone number (and then email address). We went running on night and two guys we ran by started chasing us (and she got lots of honks).

We saw a sign right before crossing a bridge that said "Weak Bridge Joint"...what is that supposed to mean? You've been warned so if this bridge falls it's on you? We thought it was strange.

Pictures I liked that didn't really have a home: