Brrr.....

For those living in warmer climates, I want to share the joy of the cold season here in Belgium.

For the last several weeks it has been very very cold. Temperatures are still around freezing when we leave in the morning for school and/or work.

In order to leave safely, we are now putting blanket like covers over the windshield, so we don't have to scrub off the ice (and freeze in the process).

The roads are slippery - very slippery.

The other day, I drove to work and suddenly I started slipping, turning left, moving forward sideways. Then turning right, moving sideways to the other side. I just saw myself totaling that car. When I saw a driveway that looked dry I tried to direct the car that way but it only brought me closer and closer to a telephone pole. I then crashed into a hedge, 15 cm away from the telephone pole. I had nothing, the car didn't have anything, but I was shaking on my legs.
When I got out of the car, I saw a path of destruction, broken off wooden poles, tire marks in the front lawn of an old lady. But luckily, it turned out to be from a previous 'not so lucky as I was' driver.

But on the positive side, it has it's charm.
It has snowed many times so far. One particular day it snowed so much, we all went out for a snowball fight in the street. It was so beautiful, all houses covered under a thick blanket of snow, the tree branches popping out as white arms against the black night sky.
Other times, it just lays a fine layer of snow dust over fields and gardens.

You guys are missing out on something nice here :-)

Picture of a soccergame (click on the image to see how thick the snow really was)

Mendel and her plaswekker

Since Mendel has issues holding her urine at night, the doctor recommended that we use a plaswekker to help her stay dry.

Plaswekker

A plaswekker is a device that will give a loud beeping sound (compare it to a car alarm) when the person wearing a special kind of underwear is wetting that underwear.
High tech all - the underwear has a transmitter that transmits a signal to the plaswekker -> all wireless!

Then - when she is wet and the alarm sounds, she has to get out of bed and turn off the device, go to the restroom, put on a new piece of special underwear, click the transmitter to the new underwear and turn on the device again.

The first few nights, the alarm would go off at around 10PM and again closer to the morning.

But now we get her up when we go to sleep so she can go to the bathroom, and now she sleeps till the morning and gets up when she needs to go to the bathroom. No more alarms go off.

Mendel wants us now to stop getting her up at 10PM so she can try it by herself. I am sure that the promise of a little gift when she is all dry by herself has something to do with it :-)

I hope Sinterklaas went back to Spain

Over the last 3 weeks we have seen Sinterklaas and his helpers at numerous locations:

- At the toystore: the kids got a little goody bag with toys and candy/chocolates
- At the company's Sinterklaas party: this was a good one, each kid got a very nice gift and a few smaller gifts. There were Kermis attractions for them and lots of candies and chocolates.
- At the school's Sinterklaas buffet (but here only his helpers showed up to give them chocolates)
- At school.
- At soccer practice.
- At the chiro

Not to mention at home - but this was at night and we didn't really get to see him or his helpers

Another tooth came out - and how...

For a few weeks Elias had this loose tooth.

It was so loose, he could turn it in almost any direction he wanted, making it very difficult to eat.

Wim and I would feel sick to the stomach just watching him play with that tooth. Really, we didn't understand why it wouldn't fall out.

SOLUTION: let's tie a rope around it and have him pull it out


RESULT: it worked - that tooth flew through the kitchen and our son now looks like a pirate.

Halloween cookies

 


I finally used the Halloween cookie cutters that I bought more than a year ago.

It was a fun project - and tasty too :-)

Halloween tour in Wijgmaal

In true American tradition, we decided to go on a Halloween walk with the kids so on October 25, we (5 adults and 9 kids) went to neighboring town Wijgmaal.

We were supposed to make reservations (which was not mentioned on the flier) and since we hadn't we couldn't participate on any of the tours, except on the 10pm one. Way too late for our small kids.
Since these kind of tours are leading through local meadows, forests and downtown, we would be walking mostly on "public" property rather than private property, so we just started on a tour by ourselves (without paying).

We did make it a point though not to accept any soup and snacks during the walk (which are offered to the paying participants).

The walk goes as follows:
- you follow a path marked by tea lights and/or arrows.
- The path starts downtown but then leads you through 'it looks like' swamps. Not really swamps but a werewolf told us it is and because of the soggy pathways the kids really believed it (and screamed because they came too close to the swamp and they were afraid they were going to be taken by swamp spirits or something).
- The path went by a graveyard. There was a coffin with scary music and smog and someone in the coffin stuck his hand out. He apparently came out as well but I never saw that since Mendel pulled me away too quickly.
- Then we had to walk next to a corn field (of course people in there were running by scaring us), it was almost pitch dark at this point - no tea lights.
- At one point there were 2 withes and a wizard singing songs (really good)
- It ended with a skeleton playing the piano in a very nice park (a bit creepy at night because of all the old buildings and statues).

We walked for about an hour before the tour was over. The kids were very scared at times but they also had fun.
At one point during the tour we told some of the performers that we were a non-paying group and that was why we were not accepting food/drinks, but they decided to tell us a story anyway and directed us to the next stop. Phew ...

It was FUN !!!!

Highlights of my trip to CA

I went on a little CA (shopping) trip because I had a ticket that was about to expire.

I left on Oct 3rd.

Here are some highlights of what I did on this trip:

- It was great to see Jan and Estela again, and of course their kids Julian and Camille. I stayed over on the first night of my arrival and we ended up talking till 2am. The next morning we went to see Camille's soccer game - too cute to see her play.

- For the next 4 nights I stayed over at April's house. I was happy to help out a bit in the household (doing laundry - changing drapes - cooking soup and dinner) since she has been through a hard time. It was nice to chat at night and keep her company.

- Let's not forget the shopping, shopping, shopping,....

- I visited the Monticello school to hear the unfortunate news that Trinh's husband David has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. I really hope it's not too wide spread and treatable.

Sometimes I wonder why so often bad things happen to good people...

- I was able to catch up with Becky over Starbucks coffee - we mostly talked about a certain operation I had done (hmm... someone else is interested??) haha...

- It was so great to get together with my old Cisco crew - we had lunch together, lots of talk and ended up going for pearl tea and even coffee. I miss them, it was always a lot of laughter when we were together (and tears but that was mostly because of the managers :)

- On my last night I stayed over again at Jan and Estela's house, again talking till 2am (ouch - it was a working day for them the next day). We all got up at 5:30am (everyone except Camille) and they waved me out ... snif snif....


And then I had to fly back:

- First of all, with two heavy pieces of luggage and one rolling hand luggage, it was really hard to get all of that to the train and to the check-in counter (no carts in sight).

- Then I spend two hours at the check-in counter because it turned out that they charged me too little for my trip (I payed 250 Euro to change the ticket dates, you would think that was enough). I was arguing that you can't change the ticket price on my halfway my trip - that isn't fair. About one minute before boarding time they let me go, so I had to run through the security checkpoints (cutting in line before everyone - giving me mean looks) and barely made it in time to my gate. It's now 9am and I didn't have breakfast.

- Instead of flying to Philadelphia we made a stop at Phoenix where I was supposed to change my ticket (I still didn't have the correct ticket to fly to Brussels). When they took care of that I had to run back to the plane (still didn't eat).

- When we landed in Philadelphia, I asked another passenger what time it was, it was 7:40pm, while my next plane was boarding at 7:45pm. Again I had to run like crazy to make it to that plane. And again I hadn't eaten - I was starving !!

- I must admit: I refuse to buy food in the plane since I really hate the taste of cold soggy bread. Even when extremely hungry, I can't eat that.

- I was pleasantly surprised on the plane to Brussels: I had 3 seats all for myself. I was gonna get some sleep here !!! A girl asked if she could sit on one of those seats, but thinking back to my tough day so far I just said "no - I want to catch some sleep". Awful huh - but she found another seat where there was lots of space.

- I have never enjoyed a pasta more then I did when they served me dinner :)

- I fell asleep after dinner and woke up when they were serving breakfast. PERFECT!

So these were the highlights of my trip....