Sam and Me

Well, I thought I'd update real quick with a photo Thea took of me today with the baby. He's such a sweet little baby and every day he's doing more and is more alert. He's even lifting his head up a bit now.

Other than the excitement of new baby boy things are pretty relaxed around the house. Job is at a Judo camp for the whole week so there's one less person in the house. Today Ella and I went in search of conditioner for my hair at an itty bitty pharmacy about a ten minute walk from the house. They had some shampoo but no conditioner in sight so with my complete lack of Romanian it took me a while to make them understand what I wanted. I did get the message across eventually but unfortunately they didn't sell it :P So tomorrow Ella and I plan on biking into the actual city and finding some there. Should be an adventure. *smile*

It's a boy!

Well, Thea had her baby at about 10:15am yesterday morning. He's a healthy, beautiful baby boy named Sam. I promised Ineke lots of pictures so here's some from his first day home:


Sam and proud mommy Thea at the hospital just before coming home


Itty bitty baby


muisjes...a traditional treat for when a baby is born



aw, sleeping baby


Isn't he beautiful?

His brothers and sister are super excited to see him and Thea is doing wonderfully. More pictures to come *smile*

I'm a millionaire!!!!

Really I am, look!...





Unfortunately my "fortune" is in Lei...so this million lei bill I got is really worth about 25 Euros...Oh well, I still think it's fun to have a million of anything *smile*

Two monasteries and a castle

Well it was another really nice day. The weather wasn't spectacular. It was kind of rainy and chilly but really not too bad. We left at about 9am and drove two hours north (do not ask me the name of the towns though because I couldn't pronounce these Romanian names for anything, lol!) and went to some ruins of a castle/fort:


The ruins


Me in front of the ruins


a view of the inside of the ruins

It was very neat to see. I'd never been to something like it before and we could climb all over the place. It was kind of too bad that the weather was so cloudy because there would've been a really amazing view otherwise. There still was a neat view but it was impossible to capture on camera.

From there we drove a bit further to see the monasteries. And along the way I got to use one of these...


I'd never used one before, or seen one for that matter and I thought it was so funny looking, hehe.

The first monastery was so cute. It was in a tiny little village filled with flowers!


The front inside


Some of the flowers that were everywhere


The inside of the church at the first monastery. Everything is so elaborate, it's all covered in beautiful paintings and gold and silver. It's really amazing.


Before leaving we let the dogs out of the car for a little bit and met this nun. She actually spoke very good English and thought Gijs was the most amazing thing. Turns out her parents live in the same city as Thea *smile*

We drove to the second and final destination of the day. This monastery was quite different than the last one. It was (and I believe still is) a place where they print a lot of Bibles. It was neat to see the old printing presses and copies of Bibles there.


monastery number two

From there we drove home....




And that was my day...Until next time *smile*

Romania Pictures

I'm here :-) I'm having a great time too. The weather was much colder than I expected it to be the day I got here and yesterday but it warmed up nicely today, yea! Here's some pictures of my last couple days here:


It was a very long car ride from Bucharest airport to Bacau but we made it just fine


Here's the house I'm staying in. Beautiful isn't it?


This is their seriously big Great Dane with Abel (5). That thing is literally bigger than I am, luckily he's sweet.



Saturday we played inside because of the weather. I hadn't played Twister in ages, hehe

The weather improved long enough for us to take the dogs out for a walk behind the house

A shepherd with his sheep and goats not far behind the house

Today we went to the market

a lady selling her apples


a gypsy with her baby at the market

And we also went to a kind of indoor zoo, they called it an animal museum...

a big old fish at the "animal museum"


Then after lunch we took the dogs for a walk in the forest outside the city, it was really pretty but we didn't stay long because there were way too many mosquitoes

Thea picking wild flowers in the forest that we took the dogs for a walk in

So yeah, everything is going well and it looks like I'll be able to post pictures and updates every couple of days here. Until next time *smile*

Goin' on a trip :-)

Dames and Heren, I am off to Romania, the land of Dracula and O-Zone, for three weeks, woo hoo! I am excited. Unfortunately for you all that means I probably won't be updating here on any kind of regular basis. I will do my best to post some pictures from time to time, otherwise I will see you all after 10 September. *smile*

What's next?

Found this while I was going through Intermediair today and had to post it. Enjoy *smile*

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables."

What is going on?!

Blogger, you are seriously fired! *sigh* what is up with my pictures not showing up anymore? Is anybody else having this problem? Because ever since they changed the way you can put pictures up it's given me nothing but trouble...not cool :P

On a happier note, I went to the dance parade in Rotterdam today. It was fun and I got to meet a really fun new girl from the Czech Republic. The stupid thing is, she's leaving in a month and considering I'm going to be in Romania for the next three weeks this is probably the only time I'm going to see her *sigh* So much for that. The parade itself was interesting. I took some fun pictures but I'm not going to even try to post them now because Blogger is fired, it's just not worth the frustration. Basically it was dozens of semis full of dancing people, each one trying to out-blast the semi in front and behind them with their own dance music and beats. Honestly it was a bit overwhelming. You couldn't hear anything at all except the music. Seriously nothing, talking was just not an option. Once I got used to the changing and overlapping music I enjoyed it though.

We didn't end up watching the entire parade, mostly because after about thirty or forty five minutes the loudness of everything gave me a headache. We decided to get something to eat and along the way I ran into way too many sales. I ended up buying some clothes that it's debatable whether I needed or not and some really fun boots that I definitely did need (Twenty seven euros for boots I've wanted for about a year, people! How could I resist? *smile*). The rest of the afternoon we spent just walking around and talking. We're thinking about meeting up tomorrow for Romantic Music day at the park. I went last year with my family and it was really beautiful. We'll see what the weather's going to do though I guess.

So yeah, that was my day. I'm sorry that I'm a little frustrated with technology today since both Blogger and MySpace are decided to act stupid. That's life though and on a whole I had a really nice day. *smile*

Note: pictures are back up so whatever was wrong is fixed now, thank goodness. hopefully they can keep their act together...

The Adventures of...

Morten the Super Strong!


Timo the Super Smart!


Caroline the Super Little!
(originally the Super Strong but when she couldn't even get the front door open we all decided she needed a new name, hehe)

With me of course as their faithful leader *smile*

Yes, I had an extra lot of fun with the kids today. We went to the zoo again and since I was in a silly mood I told the kids that we were spies and we had a special mission to find certain animals at the zoo. Timo had an extra special power (because he was so Super Smart) where if he used this:


he could become invisible


Here's a picture of Timo when he's invisible. (I took it right before he got into the frame and you should've seen his face when I showed him how the picture didn't work because he was invisible, too cute!)

We had a lot of fun going around the zoo all James Bond like and finding and watching different animals. Unfortunately our adventure was cut a bit short by rain so we headed home.

Since there was no bread at the house I put the boys in front of the TV and took Caroline to the Albert Hein. The weather wasn't too bad and even as we left it was still fine outside. About halfway home however the entire sky opened up and it rained harder than I've seen in a long time. I picked Caroline up, put her on my back and ran for cover.


We were soaked!

We stood under a covered walkway and watched the sheets of rain come down. It was so cold that we were invited into a little car rental place to wait out the storm. It rained so hard that the roads had about three inches of water covering them and the bike paths were like little rivers. It even hailed for about five minutes! Seriously a crazy storm. Finally it let up enough for us to make a run for it and get home. Ten minutes afer arriving home the sky was blue and sunny again. That's Dutch weather for you! lol.

And so ended another exciting day in the life of ME! *smile*

Listen to music while you work...

Robbert's glasses got broken the other day while playing with the kids (and as a result he's had to wear glasses that have made the kids point, laugh and call him an owl the past few days, lol) So his new ones were finally in and since he had to pick them up in Sassenheim where the his mom lives he took the kids to visit her. I stayed home of course and have been listening to Launchcast and ironing pretty much the whole day. Now, I like ironing but there are seriously like a years worth of clothes here! lol. Ok, maybe not that many but there are a lot. The boys are still on holiday from school so I've just been focusing on them until today so it's really built up. So yeah, I've had fun and the hours have really flown by because it's a relatively brainless activity so I just sing and kinda dance around and whatever while I'm doing it. The funny thing is though, I've ironed so much I seriously have a blister on my hand from it! And no, I didn't burn my hand it's just from the stupid handle, lol. I think it's pretty funny, I didn't even know it was possible. Anyway, that was pretty much my day. Tomorrow I get to meet with a new Au Pair from Lithuania which will hopefully be fun. She lives in Rotterdam too, yea! Until next time *smile*

Muscles!

I started doing pilates again finally. It's one of the best whole body workouts that I've found that I actually enjoy. Anna Maria (miss you chica!) got me started on it and we used to do it together. Now that she's gone and my vacation is over I have to start doing it again by myself. My plan was to start getting up an hour earlier than usual so I can get it done before I have to start my day...well that didn't happen this morning, oh well.

Instead of just skipping doing it altogether though I decided to let the boys join me while I did it. It was so cute. They both got really into following what I was doing. Morten was very attentive to make sure that he was doing "exactly" what I was doing. Timo did at first but after awhile he would get bored with what we were doing and start doing his own thing. He then of course wanted me to watch what he was doing and tell him how good it was. Also both of the boys would stop every once in awhile, flex their arms and have me check and see how strong their muscles were getting, lol.

It made my workout so much fun and while I'm still going to try and get into the habit of getting up early and doing my workout, I now know if I don't it's just as much fun letting the kids join in. *smile*

Dancing and Giant Playgrounds

I love having the boys home from school. I get to spend so much more time with them and we tend to make it a point to go out and do fun things. One of the things the kids love doing is coming into my room, putting some fun music on (think Aqua) and dancing around until we're all completely exhausted. It is so cute and so much fun. Here's some pictures of them enjoying themselves-


Morten-ballet is so cool!


Aw, such loving siblings


Timo "helping" Caroline


Timo doing some of his "cool" moves

Another thing we all enjoy doing together when they're off school is going to the zoo. This year they built a whole new playground that is just amazing. The first level is about 9 feet in the air and as you can see in the picture there are three layers altogether. I am seriously going back without the kids so I can actually just play on it...it is that cool, hehe.


Seriously...isn't that great?!


Caroline sure loved it. There didn't use to be a part for kids her size but now there is, yea!


All three of them playing in the sand box



Sand is just too much fun :-)

So that's that. The boys are still off school for the next couple weeks so you can expect more fun stories and pictures soon *smile*