What did you do today?

Little R learned how to ride a bike today!!  The Germans definitely know what they are doing when it comes to teaching kids to ride a bike!!  You might remember this: http://youtu.be/2fC_-Mbxf58

Back in November we picked up a balance bike for little R at a flea market.  We had seen the German kids riding these things from about the age of 2!!  We thought they looked pretty cool, and thought we would give it a try.  Little R has loved it, and he has definitely mastered the balance bike now.

When we moved to our new house, we met our German neighbors, who have a 4-yr old boy.  He was riding a regular bike, and we were amazed to see such a small guy riding a bike!!  After speaking with them, and watching him ride, we decided little R was ready to give it a try, too.

We started looking at the bikes, and they are expensive!!!  But I discovered $100 in little R's Christmas money envelope the other day that we had never spent...so the bike shopping was on!!

On Wednesday we went to a local bike shop and let little R try out some bikes.  We got him a bike, a helmet (with flashing lights) and of course a pirate flag for the bike...little R's choice!!

So yesterday afternoon, we gave it a shot!!  And here is what our little man did!!!

 http://youtu.be/FGIhaqc0n6I


 http://youtu.be/Rpdl264Llq8


So, at 4 1/2 years old, our little guy is riding a bike!!!!  We are so amazed (and a little scared) that he did it so fast!! 

Our Trip to Holland

Last weekend we took another long USO bus trip...this time to The Netherlands!  We left in the middle of the night and arrived in Holland the next morning.  Our first stop was a cheese farm.  We had a big buffet breakfast...with BACON, so T was happy!  Then we got to see how they make cheese, and wooden shoes!  We did some shopping in the gift shop afterwards, and R got a small wheel of gouda.  He is so excited to try it...but waiting until after final weigh-in of our Lose To Win competition to break it open! : )

NICE!!

I think I gained 5 pounds just standing in this room!  A thought it was stinky!  It smelled delicious to me!

They even had R's size!!!

BIG shoes!!

Little R thought it made a great boat!

After the cheese farm, we hopped back on the bus for another hour's drive to Keukenhof Gardens to see the tulips.  The landscape of Holland is quite different than Germany!

LOTS of fields with these canals running through them.  And lots of SHEEP!

The first of many windmills that we saw on the trip.

I guess the traffic on the way to the Gardens should have been an indicator of how crowded it would be, but we were totally shocked when we got there and saw all the buses and all the people!!  The gardens are absolutely beautiful!!  It's amazing!!  But after trying to fight the crowds for a couple of hours (and someone walking up to R and unzipping the backpack while it was ON HIS BACK), we decided to grab some lunch and then escape to a nearby town.  We spent the rest of the afternoon (and a significant amount of money) shopping in the cute little town, watching some of the flower parade as it came through the town, and then having dinner at a highly recommended little restaurant for dinner.  Then we headed back to the bus for the VERY long ride back home!  We arrived back to Stuttgart at 5:00 the next morning!!!

This was my view as we tried to make our way through the crowds!  Having a very tall hubby does come in handy sometimes!!  We kept starting out together, but people would push and shove their way in between us.

Fountain at the entrance to the gardens...can you see all the people???

Pretty flowers....

Pretty girls with pretty flowers!

Beautiful!!

Little R had a waffle for lunch...that's healthy, right?



The pond was pretty, with ducks and swans.

It was amazing how everything was so perfectly laid out....and not a weed in sight!

More of the crowd as we were trying to leave the gardens...it was crazy!

It was cold and rainy most of the day, but the sun tried to peek out for a little while.  Still very cold though.  I am ready for pics where were aren't in winter coats or jackets!! : )

The Flower Parade...all the floats were decorated with ALL flowers...they were amazing, too!

The restaurant where we ate dinner.  The name means "the neighbor" we were told.  It came highly recommended, but it wasn't necessarily a family style restaurant.  A ate a peanut butter sandwich from the backpack! : )

This was our least favorite trip so far.  The gardens were beautiful, but it was so crowded that you couldn't even enjoy them!  We have decided that we would like to go back, but at a much less busy time, and on our own...not on a tour.  By the time we got out of the gardens, I was fussing at people (out loud...and I just don't do that) and R was about to have a full-on anxiety attack, so none of us were having much fun.  I definitely think this trip will need a "do-over"!!

No more travelling for a while for the Willises!  We will be staying close to home for a while, as we are all pretty much "travel weary".  We are going to enjoy the spring here in our area, and try to get some herbs and flowers growing in our own garden!

T's Talent Show

T performed at her high school's talent show last week. She had to audition and everything! She was SO nervous, but she did a great job! For those of you who know our T at all, you know what a big deal it was for her to get up on stage in front of hundreds of people and do this!

The video doesn't do her performance any justice at all. The sound was much better in the auditorium than what the video picked up. First of all, there was a slight camera malfunction and I missed the first part of her song! And while the video makes it sound like she was missing all of her high notes, she really was hitting some of them! : ) And on a proud mama note: she learned to play this song on the piano simply by listening to it! This girl can literally listen to a song a few times, then with lots of practice, she can play it on the piano! It amazes me!! She has quite the ear for music!


To see the video, click on the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNJbtjlG-TY

Daddy Daughter Date Night

Sunday after we got home from Paris, R took T out on a date.  The local theatre group on post was doing Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  T (who is a HUGE Shakespeare fan) read Twelfth Night over the summer, and loved it!!  So when I saw this was coming, I knew it would be the perfect date for R & T!    They both had a great time, and I think it is so special for the girls to have these special times with their Daddy!

Paris-Day 4

Day 4 was our last day in Paris!  Our train didn't leave until almost 5:30 that evening though, so we had another almost full day to enjoy.

We started the day by getting packed up and getting checked out of the apartment.  The owner of the apartment offered to keep our luggage for us for the day, so that was great!

After we checked out, we headed back down to Notre Dame.  This time the line wasn't bad at all, so after a short wait, we headed right in!

Strollin'

Notre Dame

Beautiful stained glass

It was HUGE!

After Notre Dame, we sent to St. Chapelle.  It is made up almost entirely of stained glass, and it is absolutely beautiful!!  The stained glass tells the Christian story from the Garden of Eden to the Apocolypse...it was really pretty, but with over 1000 images, you would have to spend the entire day in there to see the entire story.

St. Chapelle

Very elaborate...

Beautiful stained glass windows...it wasn't very sunny the day we were there...but they were still amazing!

The floors were even amazing...beautiful OLD tiles...

After St. Chapelle, we played it safe and had lunch at a pizza spot...always a hit with the kids!

After lunch we headed back to the playground we had visited the day before.  We figured it would be good to let little R get good and tired before we put him on a train for 4 hours!

Pushing A

Just runnin'

Little R LOVED these little springy things...he jumped from one to the other numerous times...FUN!

Finally we decided it was time to walk back to the apartment, pick up our luggage, and grab a taxi to the train station.  The owner of the apartment had told R of a place where taxis line up and wait for people.  So with our luggage in tow, we headed to the line of taxis.  We found one that was big enough to hold all of us and our luggage, and R asked him if he could take us to the train station.  He said no, because he was at the back of the line, and he had to wait until he was at the front of the line.  R tried to inform him that no cars at the front of the line would fit all of us, but he wasn't receptive to that info!  So we headed to the front of the line, and none of the taxi drivers would take all of us to the train station!! : (  We decided to walk down to the bus stop and see if we could catch a bus to the train station...but we couldn't quite figure out how to get all the way to the train station without several bus changes...and that would have been quite difficult with all of our stuff!  By this time, we were getting uncomfortably close to our train departure time, with no idea how we were going to get there!  I recommended we just take control and WALK it...at least that way we knew we would get there eventually.  So we used R's excellent navigation skills...and after a VERY LONG, VERY FAST walk (through parts of Paris I hope to never see again), we finally made it to our train.  We were sweaty, exhausted and grumpy...but we made it to our seats ON TIME!!  We were SO happy to be on that train!!  We got settled in and had a great 4 hour ride to Stuttgart!

Little R napped in the stroller during our frantic walk to the train station, so he was happy and refreshed when we got on the train.

Totally tuckered out from our crazy walk...at the end I wasn't sure she was gonna make it.  I was going over ways to fit her in the stroller with little R at one point.  But she made it, so no drastic measures were necessary!

Watching Over the Hedge...little R's movie of choice for the trip home.

Peace and quiet with the Ipod...priceless!!

Not sure what this is...his "I'm cool" look, I guess!

We arrived in Stuttgart sometime around 9:30 and called the Taxi company that we had used to get to the train station the day we left.  They gave R another number to call because they didn't have anyone to send.  R stressed that we had 5 people and luggage, and they said they would send someone right out.  The taxi arrives, and it is SMALL....again an SUV that will seat 5 people and some stuff, or 7 people and NO stuff!!  The driver was determined to make it work....but it was impossible.  He called the company and told them to send a bigger car.  And R called the company and told them (not so nicely) to send another car that would fit us all.  So after waiting about 30 minutes outside the train station (and a rat sighting), a taxi finally arrived that would fit all of us.  And we were off!!  And I think the taxi driver thought he was Dale Earnhardt, Jr....he was driving like a wild man!!  I was literally terrified that we wouldn't make it home, after all this!!  R got him involved in a deep discussion about soccer, and that seemed to make him slow down a bit.  So we made it safely home after all!  We were so happy to be back in Germany, back in our town, back in our house, back in our own beds!!  Home Sweet Home!!

Paris-Day 3

Our 3rd day in Paris started with croissants for breakfast at our apartment...YUM!  After breakfast we headed down to see Notre Dame and St. Chappelle cathedral.  When we got their it was WAY crowded...the line at Notre Dame was wrapped around the building.  So we decided to come back to them later.  We walked along the area and found some fun shopping!  We shopped the morning/afternoon away and had lunch at a cute little bistro.

Lunch!  This was my sandwich...a yummy combination of toasted bread and ham, covered in cheese! : )

T had pasta and R had roasted chicken.  A had crepes...AGAIN!



During our shopping, we came across a little shop that had a piano sitting in the window.  It was a shop selling pretty photos of Paris, but T noticed the piano, of course!  She wanted to go in and see it, so we did.  The guy running the shop saw her admiring it, and asked if she wanted to play it!  She was SO excited!!  This is one of the highlights of her entire trip...playing a grand Piano on the streets of Paris!  (You have to skip the video to around 1:20...for some reason it is in slow motion until then!)  OOPS!

We stopped and had crepes for an afternoon snack.  While A was having crepes at every meal it seemed, the rest of us hadn't tried them yet.  They were delicious!  Little R and A chose gelatto instead of the crepes, and they loved it, too! 

Chocolate...yummy!

My crepe with Nutella...it was wonderful!

After our snack we walked to the Jardin de Luxembourg.  It was beautiful, but it came quite the downpour while we were there!

R played a game of "chase the pigeons"...

The kiddoes

And speaking of pigeons...they were everywhere!!  Little R enjoyed chasing them, and the rest of us enjoyed feeding them!  We discovered that they LOVE Lara bars, and they won't eat Cheez-Its!  Our observant T noticed that most of them were missing toes or had deformed toes...not sure why this happens, but we saw very few with normal feet!

Next we moved on to a playground we had spotted on the way to the Louvre the day before.  Little R had spent most of his time confined to the stroller, so he had lots of energy he needed to get rid of (and sugar from the ice cream)!!  The playground was great!  Lots of fun for little R and A, and a nice break for us!

After the playground, we headed back to the apartment to regroup and plan our evening.  We were treated to a mini fashion show by A...she couldn't wait to get into some of her shopping finds!

We decided to try Hard Rock Cafe for dinner.  We walked down there, hoping it wouldn't be TOO crowded.  When we got there, we were told we had a maximum wait of 40 minutes, so we were okay with that.  The girls shopped around in the store and bought some t-shirts, and then we waited and waited and waited!  We ended up waiting over an hour, but other than that it was a great experience!  Probably one of the favorites of the entire family of our entire trip!  The food was amazing!!  It was actually the first "American" food we have had since we got here 8 months ago, other than the fast food options at the food court on post.  The waitress was great, the music was loud, and the food was amazing...it was a GREAT evening!!

Little R was a bit tired of waiting...

Waiting for her mac & cheese!

Happy now that he had his burger and fries!

The girls were excited about this...Steven Tyler...of all people!

After dinner, we walked back to the apartment (it was VERY late) and went to bed to rest up for our LAST day in Paris!  Day 3 was a day that didn't go as planned, but it was probably one of our best days of the trip!!