Auf Weidersehen

Our time in Germany is drawing to a close. Tomorrow afternoon we will be back home and Silas will stop believing that his father lives inside the computer. Two weeks was a long time to be away, but I am very grateful to have family in Europe to come and stay with rather than be alone at home while Orrin was back in America for work.

We had a really wonderful time while we were here of course, engaging in the perfect combination of work projects, crafts, walks, shopping, excursions, movie watching, eating, baking, goofing off, and nap taking. OK, there could have been a little more nap taking, especially among the junior members of the company.

I helped Rachel and Henry finish the wallpapering job we started during our last visit in November. The hideous Miami Vice wallpaper in their back room was just starting to lift at the seams, so a few picks with the fingernail, and an intrepid toddler and it was history. Now the room is freshly papered in a mottled neutral beige. A trip to IKEA procured a picture wreath and a sweet double wide chaise lounge. Although it won't be delivered until next week. Still the room was much more pleasant to be in and Silas, Ellis, and I used the extra floor space for crawling races.

We colored Easter eggs. And tonight constructed the Easter egg tree from a branch collected from the forest. Rachel had the genius idea of stuffing wads of newspaper into an urn to wedge the branch into an upright position. An excerpt:
me: It's working! Success! How does it feel to have one of your ideas succeed Rachel?
R: Good, weird, but good!

We baked chocolate zucchini cake, whole wheat brownies, apple walnut cake, peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies, applesauce muffins, and banana crunch cake. We also ate some other delicious meals, including salmon with miso sauce, veggie lasagna, fish tacos, ham and pea pasta with cream sauce, eggplant Parmesan, and, most shamefully, making a meal out of spinach artichoke dip and loaf of bread.

We visited the worlds biggest shopping cart. Although Rachel forbid my attempt to climb into the cart. She did agree to document my brief interaction with the cart. (Just think how many Ritter Sport would fit in that thing!)

We visited the Marchen Paradies, or Fairytale Garden on the top of the mountain. Rachel wrote a nice post about it here, my own, somewhat crappier, post about the trip is forthcoming.

We also visited the Frankfurt zoo and a very nice swimming pool in a nearby town. We took pictures and there aer a few stories to tell about each to I'll try to get a post put together in the next few days detailing each.

In the meantime, the snafu that Orrin's entire trip to America has been; delayed from Friday to Wednesday, then again to the following Friday, then lost luggage, swapped hotels, has that added twist that he's just been bumped off the flight from MN to Amsterdam to Cork. He'll now arrive 4 hours after us in Shannon after flying from MN to Detroit to London. At least he got a nice fat travel voucher so we can use that to go back to the states this summer to visit everyone before Silas turns 2.