Finally: the reason we went to Germany! My friend Peggy and I met when my son Lukas and her son Florian were toddlers, probably in 2003 or 2004. She's originally from eastern Germany, which was still the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik: German Democratic Republic, and anything but democratic, and from the point of view of West Germany, occupied territory) at the time. She moved to the west after the fall of Communism and has come a loooong way in rebuilding her life. Peggy and Florian have visited us three times in Cyprus, and after her nightly two-hour phone calls with "just a friend" during her last visit here, we were not particularly surprised to hear of their engagement!

Before we left the H family's house, we got Barbara to take a photo of all eight of us together, dressed up and with someplace to go:

We do technically own an iron here in Cyprus, we even bought it ourselves, so that I could iron the t-shirts that the children made at a holiday club in 2009, to set the colors. (Never mind that I ironed them the day before the holiday club in 2010.) That is, to date, the only time I have used that iron, and it stays in the guest flat. Most of our clothes for the wedding did need ironing, but Barbara has a very fancy, special iron, which she wouldn't let me use. It did not make me sad in the slightest that she ironed everything for me. Admire those wrinkle-less clothes--they only appear for weddings. (I ironed our clothes for my brother's wedding in 2009 and my sister's wedding in 2010, too, so it's not that I NEVER iron...)

Lukas was VERY excited to wear a suit and tie, still being sad that he hadn't gotten to keep the tuxedo that had been rented for my sister's wedding. We got most of the pieces at the thrift store, but did have to buy the shoes new, since Lukas refused to wear tennis shoes. (Florian wore tennis shoes, though!)

A blurry photo of the procession into the church, Florian and Lukas with the flowers, followed by Peggy and Hannu.

The church had pews on three sides, the middle ones facing the front and the ones on the two sides facing each other. We sat in the front pew on one side, so had the absolute best view of the bridal pair, as well as of the Blumenkinder. Which was quite...interesting. Lukas totally rose to the occasion and behaved flawlessly for the entire hour, even while Florian was being a bit more of a typical nine-year-old boy...

Helen fell asleep against Jacob.

Marie (wearing the dress she'd gotten for my sister's wedding), Phil and Margaret Daniell, and a sleeping Elisabeth on my shoulder.

Katie was extremely impressed with the horse and carriage.

As we drove from the church where the wedding was to the church where the cake reception was, Jörn took a photo of the horses in his rear-view mirror.

M & M's with Peggy and Hannu's names on them were scattered on all of the tables. As the reception wound down, Lukas got permission (not from us...) to go around and collect all the M & M's that hadn't been eaten yet. We probably brought home close about 500 grams of them.

The official "wedding cake" had six different cakes (the bottom one isn't visible in this photo) on a stand, and there was also a cake buffet with many more. Everything I tasted (didn't count how many...) was scrumptious. Germans really know how to do cake.

Lukas and Florian.

After the cake reception, about 40 of us went to yet another location for the evening dinner and dancing. Lukas danced nearly the entire three hours between dinner and when we left, mostly with Katie, but grabbing any other partner he could when she took breaks, or just dancing by himself when he couldn't get anyone to dance with him. I have a great video of Lukas dancing with Katie, which I keep meaning to post on Facebook, and here's a photo of him dancing with Helen.

Helen's shoes, which we found in the too-big-for-Helen things right before we left, started to come apart during the reception. Jacob whipped out his trusty roll of duct tape and repaired them. (No, I do not know why he took duct tape with him to a wedding. But I'm glad he did.)

Peggy and Hannu. :-)

Nobody took any photos of Jörn and me dancing, but here's a nice blurry one of Marie with Jörn. Her dress is actually bright turquoise (with a black sweater over it), I don't know why it looks so dark here.

Elisabeth, my only non-party-animal, wanted to go to bed. She kept asking to go out, to go to bed, go to sleep. She finally fell asleep anyway, without a bed, and I put her on these chairs.

Helen sharing a special moment dancing with Jörn.

Peggy and Hannu danced the official first dance, and just after that a few other people joined in for one or two songs, but for the vast majority of the evening, it was only Langes on the dance floor, sometimes up to seven of us. (Jacob was the only one who wouldn't dance.) We had a great time and were sorry to leave before the party was over, but both of us had to drive (we had two cars), and we knew we had to get up early-ish the next morning, so we left at 11:30.

...two more days in Germany...

On May 3rd, I did say it might take me until June to actually post about the wedding, but I hadn't really meant to take that long...and now it's June 13th! Oops. And I may or may not get to the wedding today, because I tend to be a bit OCD about chronology, so have to finish up the two days before the wedding first...

So...going back to April once again, our third full day in Germany was Thursday, the 19th. At some impossible hour of the morning, Elisabeth and I left, taking a couple of trains and a bus to get to Ratingen for Elisabeth's two-year-old check-up. While the well-baby/well-child check-ups ARE now compulsory for people living in Germany, we can get excused from them because of not living there full-time (although we still have our residency there), but we receive notifications for every one as it comes due, and then warnings that a social worker will visit us (really? here in Cyprus?) if we don't respond by such-and-such date. It's not a big deal, but I don't mind the check-ups, and so when I can make them happen while we're in Germany, I do. As I have been told at EVERY single U7 (the two-year-old check-up), this particular one is known as the "screaming check-up", as two-year-olds have such a reputation for not being cooperative. However, with most of my children, I've been told that by a very surprised nurse or doctor, because most of my children thought the whole thing was very interesting and cooperated very well. Elisabeth, however, was quite into the two-year-old thing, and it wasn't a great experience for either of us.

I ran a few errands in Ratingen, got the bus back to the airport, two (or three?) trains back to Hamminkeln, and arrived just in time for lunch with my brother-in-law and his wife, who had taken time off of work to drive the three hours one-way to spend an afternoon with us. Didn't get any great photos, but here are a few.

Tante Claudia with Katie, who just happens (truly, it wasn't planned!) to be wearing a dress that Lars and Claudia gave to Marie when she was six or so.

Not sure what Katie is doing to Onkel Lars here, but he was laughing...

Just before Lars and Claudia left, Lars decided to show the boys how to do a hand-stand against a wall. He didn't notice the clotheslines hanging up and broke one with his feet...

Thursday night Jörn took the train to Düsseldorf to pick up the car that the C family was lending us for the weekend, and Friday morning E from Globe Europe took me into Wesel to pick up a rental car. I also took Marie, Katie, and Elisabeth with me. While I went to my doctor's appointment (routine check-up, no, I am NOT pregnant), Jörn took the other three children with him to take Lukas to his orthodontist appointment, also in Mülheim. Jörn's Cypriot telephone doesn't work in Germany for some reason (mine, a cheaper one, does), so we had no way to contact each other, just agreed to meet up at 1:00 at the house of friends in the north part of Essen.

I was finished with plenty of time to spare, and as we were driving past the ´main city cemetery anyway, I stopped there. Neither Marie nor Katie wanted to get out, so they stayed in the car reading, while Elisabeth and I went to the "Sternenfeld"--the place where babies under 500 grams are buried. I'd only been back there one time after the funeral for our son in 2007 and surprised myself with walking straight there, taking all the right turns without even thinking. The graves are unmarked, but the area is marked off, with a statue in the middle where people can put flowers and such, if they want. (Which I don't.) I took the photo first, then walked closer...and realized that there was going to be a burial that morning, possibly any minute. The funerals are only twice a year, once in April and once in October, always on a Friday morning, and this was exactly five years and three days after our own baby's birth, five years to the day after that year's April funeral. Because of tests that were run on our baby (because of that being my third miscarriage), we just missed being able to participate in the next funeral and had actually had to wait until October ourselves, but I hadn't forgotten the date. For no reason that I can explain, I did want to see the burial area again, but I did not want to meet the funeral procession coming from the chapel, most definitely did not want to see that tiny, tiny coffin containing all of the miscarried and aborted babies born in Mülheim since October. Nor did I think that any of the parents who might be there would be really happy to see me with Elisabeth, so I hurried away.

A more cheerful sight on the way to the Autobahn: a field of daffodils.

We all met up at Thomas and Caro's house with no problem and had a wonderful few hours with them and their two gorgeous daughters, with whom my own daughters immediately ran off to play princesses and lots of pink and girly things. Elisabeth enjoyed riding on this quadracycle:

We took several nice photos, but I try not to post photos of other peoples' children without their express permission.

From Essen, the four youngest children and I headed back to Mülheim for Mutter-Kind-Kreis ("mother-child-circle", a playgroup for children up to about age 6, which I was part of from when Marie and Jacob were four and two), where I thoroughly enjoyed seeing lots of old friends. Lukas participated in the Jungschar group (a sort of junior youth group, ages 6ish to 12ish), excited to see Florian, and I got to see Peggy briefly and meet Hannu, as they were setting up for the wedding reception the following day. In the meantime, Jörn and the other children went to the H family's house in Oberhausen, where we met up with them after Mutter-Kind-Kreis.

One measly photo, of Andrea playing with Helen:

Andrea's mother, Barbara, runs another playgroup (for children under three), which I was also part of from when Marie and Jacob were four and two, so I've known Andrea since she was eight years old and Barbara and I became good friends. She took care of the three oldest children while Katie was being born, was the person we could call at 3:00 a.m. to take all four children when I had my last miscarriage, babysat at other random times, and spent many hours packing and cleaning our flat before we left Germany. I tutored Andrea in English for a little while (I think when Katie was a baby), Barbara and Andrea visited us in spring 2010, and Andrea came and stayed with us in Cyprus for almost six months in 2010/2011, while she volunteered in a nursing home here. She and her cousin visited again in autumn 2011. She's now studying to be a nurse, and most exciting of all for us, she's here in Cyprus with us right now for 11 days. :-)

We spent the night at their house (also briefly getting to see Barbara's husband and her son, Nils), and that makes this post quite long enough.

Morning walk, day 13...

I've always enjoyed walking, but almost two weeks ago I started intentionally doing that dreaded "E"-word: exercise. All that means is that I'm walking on purpose, daily, and fast. (For me, anyway...) If I can sneak out of bed and house early enough and quietly enough, I go by myself. I took Elisabeth with me once, and Lukas with me a few days ago. (He had to trot to keep up with me, but that didn't stop him from talking non-stop, which I enjoyed very much, and also darting here and there off of the trail to look at things, and then he STILL beat me when I was silly enough to suggest racing him a short distance...) I'd be very happy for Lukas to join me every morning, as it's starting to get kind of boring on my own, but he's usually asleep when I leave.

This morning I woke up at about 5:30 and decided not to leave just yet, fell asleep again, and woke up just before 6:00. As I was getting out of bed, Katie appeared and said that Helen had wet the bed. (As it turned out, Helen hadn't--she'd woken up crying that she had, but it was only that she needed to go to the toilet.) And as I tried to get Helen re-settled in bed, Elisabeth woke up. I obviously wasn't going to get any actual exercise by walking today, but not wanting to break the habit...I went anyway, taking Elisabeth and Helen so that Jörn could sleep. (I think the children have been waking up shortly after I leave more often than he tells me, but I couldn't with good conscience leave when I KNEW they were awake...)

I had no intention of going very far, but even as slow going as it was with Helen, it was so much more interesting with her along that "all of a sudden" we were at the end of the Nature Trail! Of course, it took 35 minutes as opposed to the 18 minutes it takes me on my own, but the time felt so much faster with someone to chat with. And I took the camera with me. :-)

My shadow, nice and tall and thin (so obviously distorted by the time of day, just before 7:00 a.m.), with Elisabeth on my back (the bump at the top right) and Helen leaning against me.

Helen admiring the view.

Helen asked me to take a photo of the windmills on the other side of the Salt Lake.

If you look carefully, you can see the aiport (towards the left) and a mosque (towards the right).

Proof that we made it to the end of the trail!

  Since I'd taken a photo (two actually, and I meant to delete the one with her eyes closed but have now given up trying...I spend more time fighting with this blog than writing on it...) of Helen, she wanted to take a photo of me. Here's a fairly lousy one of my face and barely showing Elisabeth, so I asked her to take another one with Elisabeth...

...so she did. At least it's not another bad one of my face...

It doesn't really show in this photo, but on the middle of that lower branch is a bit of branch camoflauged as an iguana. At least, I always think it looks very much like an iguana, so even if nobody else can see it, I finally had to take a photo. Or two.

We sat on EVERY bench on the way back. Helen never exactly complained, but just under five kilometers was maybe a bit far for a three-and-three-quarter-year-old.

And Elisabeth wanted to get out of the Ergo, so here they are being cute together. I hadn't bothered getting Elisabeth dressed or putting shoes on her, since I just had her on my back, but the walk back was SO slow, and Elisabeth kept bouncing around, that I did wish I'd put shoes on her, as she wouldn't have had any problem at all keeping up.

It was fun, and I'm happy I finally photographed my iguana-tree! But I hope I'm able to sneak out on my own (or just with Lukas) tomorrow...

Another Monday

Last Monday, I posted on Facebook "What a day!" Later on, I elaborated:

Hmm...that's already two days ago, but I'll try to remember. To begin with, I finally finished unpacking. (But no, I didn't finish putting everything away, and still haven't...) Did four loads of laundry. Dug a grave. Buried a chicken. Comforted children. Had spontaneous visitors who arrived just until lunch and stayed until after dinner (and took Jacob and Lukas home with them for the night--thank you, Dena and Joseph!), had other visitors come in the afternoon with cheesecake just after Panos had arrived with five kgs of very ripe strawberries for us. Everyone ate as many strawberries as they could, then I pureed the rest, poured some over the cheesecake and the next morning made what was left into popsicles. Oh yes, and the refrigerator had quit on Sunday, but at least the freezer was still working. Three telephone calls with the landlord and finally, too late in the day, a phone call with an electrician, who of course couldn't come until Wednesday because Tuesday was a holiday, but told us how to use a hair dryer for a temporary fix. Made bread for us and granola for the visitors who Jörn went to pick up in the evening and I had Greek class, but Birgit had an easy evening babysitting because of the boys being gone and Elisabeth asleep before I left. Oh yes, and Jörn got lost and was over an hour late and had a hitchhiker try to get into the car, but made it, and found the visitors (not people we'd met before and no way to contact them). Some other adventures that can't be shared in public because of politics, but everything ended well. I met Jörn and the visitors just before midnight at the place they're staying until tomorrow (when they move here). Oh yes, and in the course of the evening, my computer decided to stop letting itself access the internet. (I posted this status from Jörn's sloooow computer, but that's in our bedroom and Jörn couldn't sleep with the typing, so I was only on the computer for about five minutes. Just got my computer working again a few minutes ago.) I think those were the basics of the day. Also did all the usual stuff, reading to the children and correcting math and trying to maintain some semblance of discipline...

Yesterday was Monday again, and I can't believe that I thought LAST Monday was busy.

The morning was filled with quite a few phone calls and checking of websites, etc., trying to figure out if everything was okay with the arrival of two more people (the rest of the family that had arrived last Monday evening--the last two arrived yesterday morning), including driving over to where A is staying, since I couldn't contact her by phone. Jörn went shopping twice in the course of the morning, once just for eggs and milk (the chickens had only layed two eggs at that point, and I needed four), and then after breakfast for all the regular stuff. I made waffles for breakfast, which is a ridiculously slow procedure with what must be the slowest waffle iron in the history of the world. It only makes two waffles at a time to begin with, and making 16 waffles took a full hour and a half.

While Jörn was shopping, I took the three little girls with me to get swim goggles for Katie (well, I took her to the store--she bought them herself) and bathing caps for Lukas and the children of our friends. As we were getting into the car, Katie dropped all of her money in Elisabeth's car seat, one Euro coin of which fell into the plastic molding in a place we couldn't reach. The only way to get it out would have been to take the carseat out and turn it upside down, but it's such a pain getting that seat back into the car, that I said I'd do it later. Oh, and I also dropped off an empty plant pot at a friend's house.

After lunch I started to make Jörn's birthday cake and discovered we were out of baking soda, so went to the store again, stopping on the way to drop off a couple of things I'd forgotten earlier to two different people. Once I had the cake in the oven, I went over to A's to pick up two of her children for swimming lessons, and to lend A Marie's phone and tell her that her husband and oldest son would be arriving by bus, but I didn't know what time. Since Elisabeth wanted to come with me, I took the blue car. (We have two cars: the car known by the females in our family as "the red car", except by Elisabeth, who calls it "Papa's car", is known by the males as the Suzuki, and it has five seats. The blue car, called by Elisabeth "Mommy's car", by the other females "the blue car", and by the males "the Mitsubishi", has seven seats, and that's where Elisabeth's seat is. The booster seats for Lukas, Katie, and Helen get switched around constantly.) I had taken the red car on my first outing, the blue car with the three girls, and the red car to get the baking soda, so it was the blue car's turn anyway.

So, as I put Elisabeth in her seat, I did notice that she rather smelled, but I was only going to be gone for five minutes, so decided to change her when I got home. When I got home, Jörn was just about to move the red car at the request of the workers who are opening up the street in front of our house for the FOURTH time since the major construction of a sewer system in this city started last August. Since he needed to leave to take six children to swimming, I offered to move the car instead. So Jörn went off in the blue car with six children (four of our own and two others), three of them sharing two seats in the back so as not to have to take out Elisabeth's carseat, and I put Elisabeth and Helen in the red car, no seats and no seatbelts, and moved the car across the street.

As we got out of the car, I REALLY smelled Elisabeth, so when I came in the house I put her down on the bed to change her, not bothering with the changing mat. After I finished changing her diaper, all of her clothes, and the bed, I changed my shirt as well. Big Yuck, but not exactly a new experience in 14 1/2 years of diapers.

After taking the cake out of the oven, I decided to drive to a different busstop than the one where A was waiting for her husband and son. When I got out to the blue car, I discovered that Elisabeth's leaking diaper had not started on my shirt as I'd carried her into the house, but was on the back seat where she'd sat while I moved the car. So I cleaned that up, put Elisabeth in Helen's booster seat and Helen in Lukas's (both legal, but I'm not convinced totally safe...), and drove around town, finding out nothing until just before I got home, when A called to say that she had her husband and son.

Jörn and the children got home (he dropped off the two extra ones at A's on the way home), I decorated the cake, and then I rushed out the door with Lukas and Katie to take them to Discoveries. Again, Elisabeth wanted to come with me, so I headed for the blue car. As I put Elisabeth in her seat, she said, "Poopy!" and I answered, "No, that was in the other car." But then as I reached under her to get the seat belt, I discovered that she was right...her leaking diaper several hours earlier hadn't started on the seat of the red car, either: it had started in her car seat. So I took her out and stood her on the sidewalk and rushed in the house for wipes. It turned out to be too big of a job for wipes, so Jörn drove Lukas and Katie to Discoveries after all (in the red car), while I changed Elisabeth's clothes again and took out the car seat, took the straps out and the cover off (and turned it upside down and got Katie's Euro coin out), and put on my third load of laundry for the day. (Along with the dark blue carseat cover, I put in the two new dark blue sheets Jörn had bought that morning, as well as several dark blue towels. If the new sheets bled any dye, it could only have been helpful to the ancient carseat cover and towels!)

When Jörn got home, he suggested we go to the various second-hand stores to have a look for a piece of furniture I would like. (Something with glass doors, to store/display all the silly dust collectors we brought back from storage in Germany...) We happen to have THREE toddler carseats, so it wasn't a problem to get one out of Marie's room (where it's been sitting on the floor for the six months since Helen outgrew it, waiting for me to find a place for it in a closet...) and put it in the blue car.

For this outing (my fifth or sixth? I've lost count), I went in the passenger seat, though, at least to start with. The first store we went to (Second Time Around) had one thing that was kind of nice, but rather small and expensive, and one thing that would have been perfect if not such an ugly color. If it had been cheaper, we might have gotten it anyway and said that we'd paint it (not that we likely ever would have, but we could have at least pretended, so as to excuse us having something so ugly), but it was too much money to spend for something we didn't like. Jörn had already been to The Family Thrift Store (that morning or last week, I'm not sure), so we skipped that, and went to Larnaka Thrift Store AKA "First of April Street Thrift Store". There were several possibilities, but as usual, we wanted THIS shape with THAT color and the OTHER price. We sat on a comfortable (but ugly) couch for awhile and considered, just relaxing, and finally left without buying anything.

By this time, it was nearly time to pick up Lukas and Katie, so we headed over to LCC (the church where Discoveries takes place), and all went inside to have some water and wait for them to finish.

At home I went downstairs to make up the beds for A and family, who were going to come to our place last Thursday after our last guest left, but who decided to just stay put for a few extra days, and did another load of laundry. After we had leftovers for dinner, I started trying to get children to bed, hoping to have them in bed before I left for Greek, since Jörn was really tired. But Elisabeth was screaming for me so I asked Marie to take over with Helen and Katie, and then I ended up taking Elisabeth out for a walk and skipping Greek. Jörn went to bed early and I stayed up until about 2:00, glad to just be sitting down for the first time all day. 

And those were the bare bones of yesterday. I'm glad that the extra rehearsal Marie and Jacob were supposed to have for their play was cancelled, anyway. The four older children will have swimming lessons twice a week for the next three months, but other activities will gradually be winding down, finishing completely by the end of June.

Trip to Germany, day two

The main reason for our latest visit to Germany was to attend the wedding of a very good friend of ours, Peggy. Lukas also needed to go to the orthodontist (it being considerably less expensive to fly Lukas and one adult to Germany twice a year and have it covered by our German health insurance than to continue his treatment here and have to pay it ourselves), so we first considered just Lukas and Elisabeth going with me to the wedding. (Peggy's son, Florian, is Lukas's best friend, and the two of them were the "Blumenkinder"--"flower children", which are like flower girls in an American wedding, but is totally not gender-specific by tradition or practice in Germany.) However, we hadn't been back to Germany as a family in over 16 months, and Jörn is very good at filtering through a multitude of travel websites and finding us good deals, so in the end, we all got to go. Then there was the question of balancing our desire to see as many friends in Germany as possible and not wanting to miss out on activities here at home, in particular rehearsals for the plays that all four older children are in. After talking with their drama teachers, we compromised on being gone for just nine days, missing only one regular rehearsal each, and both teachers scheduled extra rehearsals around our trip.

So, all that background to say that we would have loved to see a lot more people, but were very glad to get to see the people we did during a relatively short visit, and overall we felt we found a pretty good balance. (Our first trip back was CRAZY! We had over 45 different gatherings/meetings/appointments in only three weeks, one day having FIVE different meetings! I point-blank refused to do that again.)

On our first full day, Wednesday the 18th of April, we took our four empty suitcases and three carseats and got on the train, intending to go to Duisburg, where the A family was going to pick us up. However, just before Oberhausen we heard an announcement that the train wasn't going to be stopping in Duisburg because a bomb was being removed in the area. (I googled it later and found out that it was an American bomb from the Second World War, discovered during construction the previous Friday, but not removed until the Wednesday because of the preparation necessary to remove 500-kilogram bomb in an area that directly affected over 20,000 people...) I quickly telephoned the A family and we hastily arranged to get out in Oberhausen instead and see what the options were, then phoned them again and settled on taking the train to Mülheim-Styrum. No problem there, but it was a bit weird to be in Mülheim, sooo close to where we used to live! Because of some confusion, we ended up waiting there for awhile, but there was a green area nearby and children can always find something to entertain themselves.

I don't think Lukas has ever heard of planking, but one never knows...

The A family has a large attic, where we stored way too much of our stuff when we left Germany nearly three and a half years ago. We still have way too much stored there, but we made quite a dent in it. Jörn threw away about five boxes worth of paper and books and filled a suitcase with things to bring back to Cyprus, mostly photo albums, photos in frames (which I removed from the frames), and knick-knacks, as well as maybe 15 books. I spent most of my time sorting through just one box, wondering why on earth I'd stored these things, and eventually figuring it out: in between lots and lots of definitely-not-worth-keeping things (lots of photos of giraffes cut out of the newspaper, comic strips, notes from my German classes, newspaper articles, etc.) there were also lots of things I DID want to keep, mostly stories I'd written and some letters. Each and every piece of paper had to be looked at individually, so I can imagine that what happened in the craziness of the last weeks before we left was that I got overwhelmed with the sorting to be done and just shoved everything into a box. That one box took me hours. I did throw away well over half of the contents, and brought the rest back. I also eliminated three or four other boxes, but that was very quick, because they were larger objects that I specifically wanted: mainly my dolls, the Lion Quilt my grandma made for me when I was a baby (WHY did I leave that in Germany?!?), a stack of photo albums, our wedding video (not that we have a VCR or even a TV...), my dollhouse furniture, my Dirndl (not that it fits), and a few other miscellaneous things. We still have another box of photo albums, but there simply wasn't any more space. (And although I think we did a pretty good job in general in deciding what to bring here when we moved, I do NOT understand why we didn't bring all the photo albums to begin with...)

Rebecca played with the children while Jörn and I worked, which was a great help and they enjoyed, even if the only photo I took wasn't exactly a great one:

Here's a photo of my sorting orgy (not in the attic):

The pile of papers on the left consists mainly of ALL the birthday cards that the children had received up until the point we left Germany. I've saved all of the cards that they got when they were born, but finally parted with the birthday cards. Oh, and there are also quite a few pictures which various children (not my own--those are in a whole box of their own, still in the attic...) had drawn for me. I kept a few and took photos of a lot of them, which I will post on FB to embarrass them. :-)

Here is one of the things that I photographed before throwing away:

And here is a cheese I made out of clay in my art class in the Fachschule für Sozialpädagogik (not really translatable--"specialized school for social pedagogy", qualifying me to work with children in all areas except for school, in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, so a rather useless degree at this point...):

I only got a 1- (A-) for it, because although I had, as required, demonstrated perfectly that I had learned the techniques to make a hollow, three-dimensional object with 90-degree joins and put holes in it, the teacher gave me a "minus" because I'd painted the cheese yellow, and that wasn't creative enough.

We had lunch with the A's and then Rebecca had to go to work. Jörn and I had spent far too much time sorting stuff and were disappointed not to have spent much time with Gary and Elisabeth, except for over (a very delicious) lunch, so when they offered to drive us back to Hamminkeln, we were happy to accept because it meant we had a bit more time with them. This was the only photo I took of them, outside of where we were staying.

We had other guests coming soon afterwards (and didn't take a single photo of them :-( ) and felt a bit bad that we couldn't really invite Gary and Elisabeth to dinner, so were quite happy when the family living upstairs, who had met the A's at church a couple of weeks previously, spontaneously invited them to dinner.

Thomas and Ute H came for dinner, along with another couple we didn't know but who wanted to meet us. I got to chat with them a bit over dinner, but as they were mainly interested in Jörn's work here in Cyprus, pretty soon after dinner I started the wrestling-over-tired-over-sugared-not-in-their-own-environment children into bed, which took up the rest of my evening.

And I'd thought I might get a bit further, but this is already more than long enough. Maybe by June or so I'll get as far as the actual wedding.



Trip to Germany, day one

We came to Germany a week ago and are already heading home tomorrow. As usual, we've taken way too many photos and I find it difficult to only post a few, so we'll see how many different posts it takes to cover just this one week! This one will just be our trip TO Germany and the first day. :-)

We got up at 3:45 a.m. and Jörn took six of us to the airport, then drove home and parked the car, and our friend Ken then drove Jörn, Jacob, and our luggage to the airport.

Sunrise over the Mediterranean as we took off from Larnaka--having missed it both Easter Sundays, I was glad to see it that morning.

Elisabeth slept most of the flight to Vienna and woke up cheerful, and then marched through the airport singing "Doe, a Deer". I wondered if anyone thought we'd been on the "Sound of Music" tour in Salzburg...

We made our flight just in time--the children had just sat down when I took this photo, and then while I was putting the camera away, the flight started boarding.

In Düsseldorf we were pleased that our luggage had not made it, because there was another flight from Vienna only an hour or so later, and then our luggage would be delivered. Yay! As we filed the report (with a VERY nice lady who didn't get at all weird about the fact that we have more than 1.3 children, which was quite a cool welcome to Germany), we joked that we'd better hurry up or our luggage might catch up with us and we'd have to take it after all.

We took the "Sky Train" (that is what the hanging monorail in the Düsseldorf airport is called) to the long-distance train station, enjoying all the green out the window.

Then we took a train to Wesel, had lunch at a little mostly take-away Italian place (we took up over half the chairs in the restaurant), then took a train to Hamminkeln and walked the less-than-a-minute to the Globe Europe headquarters where we were staying for most of our time in Germany. There's a gorgeous magnolia right in front:

It was great being here so early and the weather was extremely cooperative. The children played outside for hours, but the only photo I took was this one, of Helen on a "Laufrad". (I don't know what they're called in English, or even if they exist in English! It's a bicycle without pedals, which is helpful for learning balance and just plain fun. The family living upstairs has two little boys who just a week before we came both learned to ride regular bicycles, so they were happy to lend us this Laufrad for Helen and Katie to take turns with.)

About an hour after we arrived, our luggage was delivered: four suitcases (one of them only containing three more empty ones) and three car seats. Three suitcases easily contained everything we needed for the week, the others were for taking back to Germany some of our things that have been stored in friends' attic for the last three years, as well as the books from amazon.de and photos from kodakgallery.de that we'd ordered and had delivered here.

Easter Sunday, take two

I knew that the date of Easter had something to do with when a full moon was after the Vernal Equinox, but not the details, and also had no idea why Eastern (Orthodox) and Western Easter don't usually coincide, so googled. This was the clearest explanation I found, although why the Eastern church uses the Julian calendar, I don't get. Before we moved to Cyprus, it didn't really make any difference to me, was just a vague sort of fact about which I knew very little. The first year we were here, the two dates were one week apart, and then both 2010 and 2011 they were the same day. This year they're one week apart again, and next year they'll be five weeks apart.

In any case, since celebrating Easter is celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, which is true all the time, and some churches don't even have a special "Easter celebration" at all because it's something we celebrate EVERY day (or at least every Sunday--the fact that Jesus rose on a Sunday is the reason I've most often heard given for why most churches have their main worship service on a Sunday), it doesn't actually matter to me when we celebrate as a family. Most of us were ill at one point or another (or several) over the last month, and I was just so tired, that we opted out of celebrating last week. I did attend the Anglican church service, though, for several reasons: I love singing with a group (not that I could very well with my cold, but I tried); I love Easter music; the service is short; I wanted to take communion; I appreciate a certain amount of liturgy and tradition (once or twice a year); friends who don't usually go to St. Helena's were going that Sunday; and the service ends before Jörn and whichever children are going with him to the house church leave, so I could go without any children. All fairly practical and pragmatic reasons, really. It was okay, but I didn't get much music until I got home again. And for me, there were two brief moments of actual worship, but that's not too bad considering my attitude about institutional church in the last couple of years.

So last night after the younger children had gone to bed, I boiled and dyed a dozen eggs. (Yes, we sometimes do it with the children, and yes, that can be fun. If any of them had remembered on their own and asked, I would have done it with them. But they didn't, so I didn't.) I thought I had plenty of liquid food coloring, but it turned out that I only had green and blue. (In fact, thanks to hand-me-downs, three of green and two of blue. But no other colors.) I also had some powdered food coloring, which someone had given me and I haven't liked much how it works in frosting (frosting for birthday cakes being the only time I ever use food coloring normally), and I had no idea how it would work for dying eggs, but I figured I had nothing to lose.

 The colors looked fine, anyway. For purple I used red powder and blue liquid, but it was too blue, so I added red powder, which made it too red, so added blue liquid, etc...so by the time I put the eggs in, they were nearly black almost immediately. They were literally in for maybe a minute, and this is what they looked like:

 I left the others in longer. Red and orange also didn't take long, and after I added more blue (spilling a bit) to the blue bowl, they were also done, but green looked fairly awful no matter how much I added, and yellow just didn't get very yellow.

Here are the finished eggs. The "orange" one on the right was actually in the yellow dye along with the yellow one right below it, but it was a much darker egg to start with. Some of the eggs were from our chickens (the smallest ones--our chickens are still quite young), some from a friend's chickens, and some from the store.

I was planning to go up on the roof at 5:00 this morning to watch the sunrise, but  was less sure of my plan when I realized it was raining last night. I set my alarm for 5:00 anyway, because I did really enjoy the one time I did that before, in 2009.

Not that an alarm was necessary. The Cypriot idea of celebrating Easter includes a great deal of noise, all night long. There had already been firecrackers and bonfires at random times in the last few weeks, and a huge bonfire was being prepared at the end of our street. (The tradition here, not actually sanctioned by the Orthodox church, is to burn Judas Iscariot in effigy Saturday night.) By the time it got dark last night, the firecrackers and fireworks were almost constant. I went to bed early (well, for me...it was about 11:30), thinking that that would be a good idea if I did end up getting up at 5:00, but there was no hope of sleep. In addition to the firecrackers and occasional huge booms, there were a lot of voices of people calling to each other, and neighbors on two sides had parties with loud music going. At 11:50 the noises picked up and by midnight were so loud, I couldn't believe that the children were sleeping through it. I didn't even bother turning off my reading light until about 12:45, but there was still plenty of noise out there, as well as the smell of smoke from the bonfires. I still heard music around 3:00, and the last firecrackers at 5:30. (I've heard plenty more this afternoon, though.)

Still, at 5:00 I got up. I went outside to see if it was clear, and since it was, I got dressed, got a chair and the camera and my journal, and went up on the roof. (I have nothing against sitting actually on the roof normally, but it was wet from the rain, so that's why I took a chair!)

I miss my old Pentax K500 camera, which I bought when I was 11 and sold before we moved here, not having used it for nearly 15 years. With it, I could take photos that actually looked just like what I was seeing. There must be some kind of settings on our digital camera to override all the automatic stuff, but I don't know how to do that. This is of the tree in front of our house, with the moon to the right, taken at 5:18 a.m. East is actually slightly to the left of that, but there were too many streetlights to get any kind of decent photo while it was still dark, and even this one is with the flash. (I do know how to override the flash, but those were just completely dark.)

This next one was taken at 5:26 and it was actually quite a bit lighter than that. I still couldn't see to read, but light was definitely visible.

And this one, again, actually lighter than the photo shows, was taken at 5:33.

At which point Jörn called to me that Elisabeth had woken up, so I came down from the roof and went back to bed before sunrise had even happened.

Incidentally, while looking up on-line what time sunrise would be, I learned all sorts of new terms. "Nautical twilight" started at 5:16, so I was up there pretty much in time for that, but left again before it even got as far as civil twilight (5:47), and by the time of the actual sunrise at 6:13, I was long since fast asleep again. There is also an "astronomical twilight", which started at 4:44, but which would definitely not been visible with the city lights, and I would add the "avian twilight", which was when the birds started: 5:26. As well as the Elisabethan twilight (5:35) and the Helenic twilight (just before 6:00, I think, which is when Helen came to my bed and informed me that it was light now).

At 8:00 my alarm went again and I got up to make the Easter bread.

Braided to symbolize the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit, and in a circle to symbolize no beginning and no end. No good explanation for the eggs, though.

Just before breakfast, I cut Jacob's hair, which wasn't a good idea, as I forgot that it takes approximately ten times longer than cutting Lukas's hair. (Lukas's hair takes literally about two minutes, maybe less. Jacob's hair is a LOT thicker.) We couldn't wait for breakfast, though, because Marie, Elisabeth, and I needed to leave before 10:00, so the only photo I took doesn't have Jacob in it as he was still in the shower after his haircut:

We had some checkered green napkins, which Lukas folded into flowers, and there were two small chocolate eggs for each person.

Elisabeth and I went to Grace Church today (dropping Marie off at LCC on the way), where I loved the music and most of the rest of the service, as well. I was even liking the sermon and was disappointed when Elisabeth made it impossible for me to stay for that, and got the most out of time afterwards for lots of hugs and chatting. Marie joined us then, as I'd thought there was going to be a shared lunch, but it turned out that that was last week.

And now it's after 4:00 and Jörn and the other four children have been home for 10 minutes or so, and we're about to head out for our biweekly Sunday afternoon/evening with good friends. :-)