Musings of Amy

Valentine’s Day was on a Thursday this year, which is generally a very busy day for us.  So the kids and I baked, decorated and delivered our traditional sugar cookies on Wednesday afternoon, when everyone had school off.  It is always so fun to hear the kids talk about the people they want to bring the cookies to.  “Lars is my good friend, he always plays with me”  and other such comments.  They always make sure to decorate one cookie for each person in the family, and they are very specific about which cookies go to which person.  Tasting a few samples is also pretty fun, along with the resultant sugar high.  See evidence of this in photo above. 🙂

And happily, we were home before bedtime this year. 🙂  My favorite part of this tradition is how truly happy the recipients always are to receive our humble offerings.  Many of the children have received beautiful thank you cards at school the next day. Which is exactly what this tradition is all about, spreading the love!

Valentine’s morning I hosted our traditional Valentine’s brunch with all the ladies.  Some of the faces have changed over the years, as people move in and away, but it is always fun to get together and spend a morning eating delicious food and talking with good friends.  I am so glad Julie S. brought this tradition with her from California.Plus, it’s a good excuse for me to go hog wild decorating! 🙂  This year, I finally had my wits about me enough to make some little gifts for the ladies.  Homemade peanut butter/chocolate hearts and a little felt heart bookmark wrapped up in these cute little boxes.  I also used a heart ice cube tray to make little  heart butter pats.  And a new addition, the red heart-edged serving plates that I picked up at an after Christmas sale.  (Don’t know why they were being sold as Christmas plates, maybe just because they were red?)

I don’t usually set as fancy a table as some others, but I was quite pleased with the overall look on this day.There was sure lots of pink and red. haha! I was happy that almost everyone could make it.  It’s sad enough to think of the ladies who aren’t there because they have moved away, I can’t bear missing out on ladies who live close by.

And the food was awesome as usual.  My friends are all excellent cooks, which encourages me to up my game a bit when we get together. 🙂

That afternoon the kids enjoyed another special treat, special “heart” cupcakes.  My friend Jessi gave us a little gift of a cake mix and frosting from the army base in a Valentine theme.  I had seen a way to make the cupcakes heart shaped  using marbles on Pinterest, so we thought we would try it. Yeah, this would qualify as a definite “fail”.  They just looked like regular cupcakes with a dent in them.  Not heart shaped at all.  But they tasted delicious whatever their shape. Thanks, Jessi!

On this day of love, I am so thankful for all the people I have in my life who love me and who I can love.  They are what makes life worth living.  Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!

After three weeks of classes in Geneva, Morgan came back to stay for a weekend before heading back to the States.  He had done a lot of sightseeing while there, and was happy to just hang out with us at home.  The kids were thrilled to see him again.Alexandra especially connected with him, and cried when he left.  We hope he can make it back for another visit before too long.  As proof of her devotion, Alexandra gave up her room so Morgan could use it.  This was her little sleeping corner in the girls’ room for the duration of his stay.She couldn’t decide if she wanted to sleep in Sophie’s half of the room, or Sarah’s, so she just slept in the space between them both. 🙂  They were very patient in putting up with all her stuffed animals and clothes being spread all over the place.  She is definitely not the tidiest of children…

The arrangement worked out rather well, in spite of that, but there was one problem.  After Morgan went home, Alexandra didn’t want to move back to her room.  She had gotten used to sleeping with the girls and didn’t want to be alone again.  I ended up sitting with her for the first few nights until she fell asleep.  Fortunately, the other half of her room is my craft area, so I wasn’t just sitting doing there doing nothing. haha

When her toe started to feel a bit better, Alexandra let me paint her other toe nails.We have so many colors that she can never pick just one.  Usually, every toe gets a different color, just like here.  Sometimes the combinations are too crazy for my taste, but whatever makes her happy.

One of the last days of Christmas vacation, we played a giant Settlers tournament using elements from all of the variations we own.  It was quite intense and took a long time.  I think we ended up playing over the course of three days, finally finishing up Monday evening.We set it up in the boys’ room so that we could still eat on the dining room table. 🙂  Alexandra and Noah hung out with us while we played.  She was on my team and helped me roll and kept track of my resource cards, and Noah just played or read.  He just doesn’t like to be alone and wanted to be where we were.  So sweet.  It was really fun and we are already planning to do it again during summer vacation.  (too many other things planned for the other vacations in between….)

Just after school started back up again, I got a call from Alexandra’s teacher.  She wanted to tell me what had happened in Kindergarten that morning.  They had been moving the tables and benches together for snack time, and one of the tables got set down on Alexandra’s toe.  Frau Meier said that Alexandra looked like she was in pain, but didn’t cry.  She asked her if she was okay, and Alexandra just nodded her head.  But the teacher felt bad and wanted to let me know she may have gotten hurt.

When Alexandra walked in the door at lunchtime and saw me, she immediately burst into tears.  She had been holding it in the whole time.  She cried and cried and didn’t stop, so after about an hour, I called the doctor.  He told us to come right over.  And the x-rays revealed a little crack in one of her tiny toe bones. 🙁 He wrapped it very gently and then gave her the best news of her life.  No P.E. for the next little while, and minimal walking.  You should have seen her giant grin, she hates P.E.  Well, she hates the getting changed in a big group in the same room part, so now she had official reprieve from it all.

The kids were very sweet and helped me take good care of the invalid.  They brought her books and toys, pushed her around the house on Sophie’s wheeled desk chair, and made sure no one accidentally stepped on her toes at school.  I drove her to school and picked her up for the next few days, as she wasn’t supposed to walk on it. And then after the weekend, she decided she could walk if she had on comfortable shoes.  The kids organized it amongst themselves that two would walk with Alexandra to help her, and the other one would run ahead and make sure the school bus waited for her. They can fight like hornets, but sometimes they can be so sweet!

She didn’t like me to touch her toe, and she certainly didn’t want to look at it, so we just left it alone for a bit.  When the doctor gave the okay, I removed the tape, but Alexandra still didn’t want to look at her toe.  Too afraid of what she might see, I guess.  It was a long healing process.  The damaged nail took a long time to fall off, and the new one grew back very slowly.  It still isn’t all the way there.  Every time someone accidentally bumped it, she would cry out, although I am not sure if that was due to actual pain, or just being scared it might hurt.

So now just Sophie needs to break a bone and all the kids will have experienced this rite of passage.  I still have never broken anything, so maybe she will be like me. 🙂

After all the excitement and preparation for the holidays, I always feel a bit bad putting on such a non-celebration for Chris’ birthday.  But he likes his parties to be just like him, quiet. 🙂  I cook him whatever he wants to eat, bake him an apple cake, and he is thrilled.  It just seems too easy!

  And yes, that is a Big Bang Theory t-shirt I am wearing.  Chris got it for me for Christmas.  (He doesn’t even want frosting on his cake. Seriously, it’s just too easy.)

The candles were supposed to be arranged in a 4-3 pattern to symbolize his age, but I set the cake down wrong.  I guess this means he can say he is only 34. 😉

There, now he’s back to being 43.  Hope it is as wonderful year for you, as you are husband and father to us, Chris!

On one of his last days with us before his classes started in Geneva, we took Morgan to Appenzell.  He had mentioned wanting to take a bus/train and I scoffed and said we would gladly take him.  It was one of our best visits to this beautiful town ever.  We saw things we have never seen in all our other visits.

We had stopped in at the chocolate factory outside St. Gallen on the way there only to discover that the entire factory was closed during the Christmas holidays.  Awesome for the workers, very sad for us.  No being mesmerized by the chocolate running down the conveyor belts, no free samples to munch on. 🙁  So we drowned our sorrows in cheese instead!

The factory has changed a lot over the years, since we first started bringing visitors here.  But most of the changes are for the better, more bathrooms for one, and there is now a new movie to watch. Fortunately, there is still free parking and free admission, our favorite part!  We bought a good sized chunk of all three varieties of Appenzell and decided that the surchoix, or strongest one, was our favorite.  This greatly surprised the woman by the counter, who may have been expecting my english-speaking children to turn up their noses at such an overpowering flavor, but they LOVED it.  🙂

And of course, there are still the silly cow statues out front for silly boys to ride on.

We had a picnic in the car out of respect for Sarah and her fear of the animal heads in the factory restaurant.  It was actually quite fun, and we ended up eating most of our delicious, newly bought cheese.

I think the camera battery must have died, because I can think of no other explanation of why I don’t have photos of us exploring the actual town.  We showed him the tiny chapel the kids love, and then we went inside the big cathedral we have never once entered in all our visits to Appenzell.  I have no explanation as to why this took 12 years.  It is a beautiful building.  Absolutely gorgeous stained glass windows, bright cheery colors, and dressed up as it was in Christmas finery, it was over the top delightful.  We stayed inside looking at everything for quite a long while, it was too pretty to leave quickly.  We even explored up by the organ, down in the lower chapel, and walked through most of the graveyard.  I highly recommend it.

We had “fun” using the free public restrooms right off the main shopping street.  Some of the kids needed a bit of encouragement as there were rumors of no toilet paper or soap, but it all came out alright in the end. haha!

We had delicious treats from the bakery, bought a few trinkets from the toy store, and had fun chasing the bubbles blown by the giant bear on the roof.  All in all, a wonderful day, and we are so glad we could share it with Morgan.

On Three Kings’ Day, we had the traditional sweet bread and hot chocolate for breakfast.  Sophie found the King almost immediately and was crowned with much fanfare and applause.  (And a bit of disappointment from others that they were not so lucky.)  Being royalty in our house means you don’t have to do any of your chores, normally a treat reserved only for birthdays and if you are very sick.  It’s a pretty sweet gig, and the year I was queen I really enjoyed it. 🙂

I bought this year’s loaves from a different store than I normally do.  It was delicious.  Some day I may get ambitious and make my own, but for now, this will do just fine.

Chris is kind of funny about New Year’s.  He thinks it’s a totally ridiculous holiday and refuses to stay up until midnight, even though he often stays up that late on other nights. In years past, he has always insisted that the kids go to bed early as well.  It’s true that they don’t sleep in really, no matter how late they stay up,thus making them sleep deprived and cranky.  But it’s New Years!  So I let them all stay up til midnight for the second year in a row.  It was fun.  We ate fun snack food that I normally never buy or make, played games, watched a movie and watched all the neighbors fireworks out of the window.

Apparently, we live in a prime firework lighting area. I say this because two different groups of people drove up in their cars, got out right in front of our house and started lighting off their fireworks in the street.  Plus, our neighbors were lighting several themselves.  So we had a really good show for several minutes.  And then there was the firework that went astray.

One of the random people light a rocket that was not pointing straight up, but rather at quite an angle.  It flew sideways, although still with enough altitude to clear the first house in it’s path, whew!  However, it then began it’s descent and bounced off the roof of the other neighbor’s house while still lit and then fell into the garden where it rolled around a few times.  Our neighbor, Heinz, who was out lighting fireworks, and his son, ran over to inspect the damage and make sure the fire was completely out.  He just retired 2 years ago from the volunteer fire department in our little village, so if anyone would know what to do it would be him. 🙂  They cleaned up the mess and went back to lighting fireworks, but it definitely put a damper on the whole proceedings.

I saw them the next morning go over and do a more thorough inspection in the daylight.  The house and garden belong to his mother after all.  I wonder if those people will come back again next year?

We, well those of us who were up, went to the Zurich zoo the next morning.  We didn’t see all the animals, as we only wanted to stay a couple hours.  But we did spend a lot of time admiring the adorable baby gorillas. Lots of other folks were doing the same thing.  The moms are just so tender with them, and they resemble humans so closely. It is a beautiful thing to witness. Next door there was also a baby orangutan. He was being very adventurous and climbing all over the ceiling of the enclosure. We were all very nervous that he would lose his grip and fall.  I mean, he is just a baby after all!  Apparently his mom must have had the same thought because after a while, he got himself into a pickle where he couldn’t maneuver anymore and she climbed up to rescue him.

Once we knew he was safe, we felt better about moving on to another part of the zoo.  And came upon the tiger just in time to watch him eating his breakfast.  I know, the camera focused on the fence rather than the tiger, but I wanted to show how close he was and what a great view we had.  He first licked all the “juice” off and then began to gnaw on the meat.  Kind of interesting to see it live.

On our way out, I had to snap a pic of the penguins.  It always cracks me up to see this giant “babies” trying to snuggle up to and get food out of their parents.  Um, you’re as big as I am kid, get your own food! 🙂

Thursday morning, two days after Christmas, I headed to the airport to pick up Chris’ cousin, Morgan Charles. He was going to be attending a special course in Geneva for his MBA and had written to ask if he could spend some time before and after his course with us.  We readily agreed.  Way back when Chris and I were newly married and had no children we took an awesome trip from San Diego to Portland.  Part of that trip we spent at Morgan’s parents house, when Morgan was just a little whipper snapper.  So it was really nice to finally be able to pay their hospitality back by hosting their son.

He was a perfect house guest and all of us really enjoyed getting to know him better.  He came with us to the temple on Friday, special because it’s the temple his parents were married in.  Thankfully some kind members of the ward gave him a ride there and back as our car is full with our own crew. 🙂

Nicholas was in heaven because Morgan was willing to play Settlers of Catan whenever he wanted. Which was a lot. 🙂

Me and the boys also took him to Luzern for the day.  It’s always fun to have a reason to play tourist.

I have passed by this church many times, but never gone in.  Today we did.  It was beautiful.  We also went to the Lion Statute.

Walking back through the old part of town we passed this shop and I made Nick pose by it.  A store dedicated to his favorite cheese!

Since it was still the Christmas holidays, all the decorations were still up.  This collection of trees stood out to me as being especially festive. And the cute little boy standing in the middle just added to it. 🙂

Along the river there was also this very colorful Advent building.  I really love this tradition, in all its forms.  We really wanted to walk along the city wall up on the hill, and so began our ascent to the entrance.  Along the way we saw these hilarious gnomes just sitting on the corner.Totally random and totally cute!  Sadly, when we got to the wall we discovered it was closed during winter.  Oops.  But at least we still had a great view of the city, and it was a nice walk.   Despite the fact that we got a bit lost and our feet were starting to get tired.  We headed home and the next day Morgan came to church with us.  Then he left for Geneva for his course.  Fortunately, we knew he would be coming back in a few weeks, so we weren’t too sad.

I am not sure what time the kids got up Christmas morning, but I actually don’t think it was too early.  I certainly didn’t hear much of anything before 6:30, so they were either completely silent (hard to believe) or still in bed.  When I got up around 7 they were only too eager to show us all their awesome stocking loot.I don’t know how he did it, but Santa managed to bring each a Book of Lifesavers, just like the ones I used to get in my stocking.  So cool!They also had lots of special flavored Hershey kisses, their favorite soda, chapstick and other fun goodies.  Thanks Santa, you rock!  He also gave them all electric toothbrushes to clean their teeth after all the sweets. 🙂

Nicholas is not a typical teenager in some respects, and for that I am grateful.  But there are definitely times when he fits a stereotype exactly.Wishing he could just sleep in on Christmas morning is one of those.  He got up even later than Chris, I think.  I don’t think I have ever been able to sleep in Christmas morning.  I am always too excited!

We followed the usual tradition of having only one person open a present at a time, and having it be chosen for them by another person. Before the total mayhem broke out, we had a few minutes of calm enjoying the beauty of the tree and the spirit of the morning.The kids were so excited to see the reactions of their siblings to the presents they had made them.  And of course, there had been much conjecture on what could possibly be in some of the more odd-shaped presents.  I think the kids are really understanding the joy of giving, because some of them even made extra presents at school for their siblings.  For example, Sophie handcrafted this wooden car especially for Noah.Which resulted in a spontaneous and heartfelt hug from him to her.  Very special moment since they don’t always get along so great.  We got so caught up in just enjoying the morning that we don’t have many photos.  There is this snippet of video however.[youtube]http://youtu.be/CuFA-wjWfI0[/youtube]

To make a record for posterity the kids’ gifts to each other were: Nicholas sewed everyone aprons, except for Alexandra who already has one.  She got a very fun chef’s hat which she wore for most of the next day while she played with her new felt food. Sarah decoupaged letters for each of the kids to display in their rooms.  The boys got “N”s covered with superhero comics and the girls got an “S’ and “A” covered in their favorite colored scrapbook paper and embellished with buttons and flowers.  Sophie sprayed painted wooden Lego display boxes for the boys, sewed felt doughnuts for Alexandra and something for Sarah at school, but I can’t remember what it was! Noah spray painted wooden Lego display boxes for the girls in their favorite colors and something for Nick. And Alexandra covered notebooks with different scrapbook papers she had picked out for each person based on their favorite colors.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing and playing with new toys and each other.  How I love Christmas!

I spent a lot of Christmas Eve day helping the kids finish up their presents to each other.  (Also, when Chris and I were first married, he would always correct me that “Christmas Eve day” wasn’t a thing and I shouldn’t say it.  Guess who now calls it that as well? bwahahahaha!)  Anyway, early that evening we had a fancy dinner complete with “cheer cups”. My mom always had a big fancy meal on Christmas Eve and I kind of liked doing it that way as well.  Christmas Day you are always so tired and just feel like lazing around, so it was nice not to have to cook a big meal.  I am going to have to do something about getting a permanent Christmas tablecloth.  That red material we are currently using is going to be the girls’ Christmas dresses next year!

Every year I think we have the best tree ever and this year was no exception.  Chris let me come along with him and the girls to pick it out this year.  He instructed me on the very detailed criteria he uses to weed out the bad ones and narrow it down to 2 or 3 contenders.  What is says on the price tag never comes into consideration, it’s all about fullness, color, height and uniformity.  That man sure does love a good Christmas tree!

See the little Santa pants and Santa jackets hanging on the tree?  Those are new this year.  I saw them in Migros and just had to have them.  There are also Santa hats, but I don’t know if those can be seen as well.  The pants and jacket just happened to fit Snowflake as well.  We know because we caught her in the tree trying them on!

I like to have the present mostly color-coordinated and have even been tempted on occasion to rewrap presents that we are sent by loved ones so they will match.  But I never actually have.  I do admit to sometimes hiding them in the back of the tree, though! 🙂  But I am not completely mental when it comes to Christmas.  I let the kids decorate the tree however they want and stopped moving the decorations to better locations several years ago. haha

After a toast to Christmas cheer, we enjoyed our delicious feast and then got ready for our nativity play.  No pictures this year, sadly.  But it was fun as usual.  Papa read a few Christmas stories and then it was off to bed for the little ones.  It is so fun to see how excited they always are, unable to sleep, full of giddy laughter and anticipation.  I am soaking it all up now, as I know it won’t last forever.  Chris and I stayed up a bit later, wrapping a few more presents, and then we also went to bed, full of excitement for the fun that lay ahead.