Oops

I was sitting down this morning to download a bunch of videos sadly I accidentally deleted all of them. I was so sick about it I cried. So here is a brief description of what you are not going to see...

Easter Egg Hunt - We had a great Easter afternoon with our friends Melanie, Richard and Elena. They invited us over to their garden for an egg hunt and cake. The kids had a great time looking for eggs and chocolates until there was a sharing issue. We had a total melt down period but all was well after some chocolate ice cream!The kids played in the garden while the parents ate cake and drank champagne. It was a super break from our daily activities.

Water Playground - Stephan took Max to a local park that had just opened the water play ground. Picture Max running around in diaper climbing on rocks with fountains shooting water.

Play Date - We met some friends at the same park with the water play ground but stayed on the main play ground and then rode a little train that cruses around the the park.

Amusement Park - We took Max to a local amusement park last weekend. It is built on an old farm so there are lots of animals, 2 fake cows that you can milk, pony rides, an electronic donkey ride where you sit on a donkey and ride around a track. Stephan rode with Max and it was really a humorous sight. We tried out mini golf, Max got to drive us in a real tractor that runs along on rails and best of all they had a huge slide. It is about 5 stories high with 6 lanes. You carry up mats to slide down on. max started by riding with Stephan but in the end we all had our own lane and slide down holding hands. Max would have ridden a thousand times if we had the energy.

My mom, sister-in-law and 3 nephews are coming next week for a week long visit. We plan to take them back to the amusement park as well drive up the Rhein to visit some castles and to see a medieval festival. The two older boys are going to do a workshop at the Gutenberg museum where they actually get to print on old presses. In order to get all 8 of us around we are going to rent an 8 seat van. Should be interesting to see where we can park it and how well it fits in some of the smaller streets around here.

On another oops note - we were having such trouble with our dishwasher. The dishes were never really clean so I was basically washing them by hand first and just letting the dish washer heat them up to sanitize. Then one day Stephan finally looked at the powder we both had been putting in for weeks and realized it was not dish washing detergent rather powder to add to the dish washer to decalcify (apparently a big problem here since I see many kinds of decalcifier products in our pantry for some tea pots, coffee pots, pots and pans, etc,.) So now our dish washer is totally decalcified and our dishes are getting clean again with real detergent!