The Past Couple of Weeks for us in Germany

Hi Family,
We don't have much time to write a detailed description of everything we've been up to for the past couple of weeks, but we will post some pictures of some things we've done.  We have been doing a lot of hiking with the kiddos since the weather has been so nice.  It is nice and cool here in the summer...usually a high in the low 70s.  If you have any questions about a picture or activity you see just ask and we'll explain it better.

 Philip riding his bike in our driveway early in the morning.  It's bright and sunny by 6am!

Our favorite restaurant near where we live. 

On the Train.  Philip was so excited!

At the Olympic Stadium in Munich

Philip's Birthday Bundt

Philip is very loving to Stella and likes to giver her lots of hugs and kisses

Our apartment in Dresden where we stayed for 2 weeks so Andrew could take an intensive German language course at the university there.

After a fun bike trip to the Czech Republic (we parked about 10 minutes from the border, so it isn't that impressive!)

Biking while we were staying in Dresden.

Some cliffs near where we live. Actually right in our back yard.  They are a 5 minutes walk/hike from our neighborhood.  The path and the little mountain that they are on is designated as some kind of memorial to the Celts who used to live in this region many centuries ago (before the migrated to the British Isles).  Even the name of our street is Keltenstrasse (Celt street)

Coming back from the Cliffs

Playground in our neighborhood

Hiking in the foothills of the Alps in Garmisch Germany.  Andrew is wearing both of the kids.  Philip on back and Stella on front!  What a dad =)

Cafe St. Martins half way up the mountain with Garmisch down below

On the way back down the mountain

Almost back to the "base camp" i.e. our parked car.  The Zugspitz is just behind Andrew.  It is the highest point in Germany.  The highest point in the Alps is in Switzerland.

Boston's 4th of July

Hello again. While we had the momentum going we thought that we should also post our pictures from the 4th of July. We spent most of the day going down town to look at the "Tall Ships." In short, lots of tall ships from around the world sail in to Boston every 4th of July. This year was special because it was the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, and the USS Constitution, which was used during that war, is still afloat in Boston's harbour. There were ships from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, and of course our USA. The ship that I was most excited to see, a near 400 foot vessel from Russia, never made it, but we still had a good time.

 In the above and below picture, it was extremely bright out, despite the dark clouds in the background, thus the squinting.

 This beauty below is from Brazil. I don't remember the name, but I do remember that it was pretty darn cool.

 This ship is the only one we boarded, and it was from Indonesia. I believe it was crewed by sailors from the Indonesian equivalent of the Naval Academy. There was a chart on deck that mapped their route, and supposedly it took them around 70 days to reach Boston from Indonesia.

As you can see, it is quite crowded. When we decided we had had enough, it took us about 10 minutes just to get off.

 I would have loved to check out this ship, just because it looks so cool, but we didn't know where it was docked.

Below is the USCG Eagle. It used to be called the SSS Horst Wessel, and was christened by Adolf Hitler himself. It was named after a famous Nazi, who among other thing wrote the song that was their national anthem. After the war, the US acquired it, and it is now used by the Coast Guard Academy and Coast Guard OCS for training purposes and ambassador-ish visits. It is one of only two sailing ships in the U.S. military.

One particularly interesting thing for us was that Regina's dad trained and sailed on it to Grenada when he was in OCS for the Coast Guard.

Later that evening, we went to a barbecue with some friends and watched the fireworks over Boston's Charles River. It was a wonderful night, and at the end of the day we were both very thankful for the blessing of living in this great nation.

Hello everyone. I think Regina and I promised to share this a long time ago, and we are finally getting around to it now. What can I say, we are both Phlegmatic (Or P's, on the MBTA, if you prefer that one), so we put things off and don't make decisions well. Just today in fact, we both got home early from work and spent a good thirty minutes deciding if we would go on a walk, go for a run, make lemonade, make dinner, sit on the porch, or watch The Return of the King. As soon as I recognized the pattern of behavior, I made an executive decision to go on a walk, and then it took us another ten minutes to actually do that.

We started this porch garden at the end of April, right after Easter. We had visited the Ermine clan, and when Regina and I saw their herbs, we were inspired to plant some of our own. We were also probably a bit envious. When we started, I told Regina that she would soon be obsessed with it and would have to expand the porch garden to satisfy her addiction. It took about a month for that to happen, and then we got another herb planter, and made our own self-watering* buckets for tomatoes. In case anyone wants to know how to make them, I thought we would do somewhat of a step-by-step explanation with pictures.

To do this, you need (per plant):

2 five gallon buckets
1 piece of PVC pipe that is higher than both the buckets when nested (probably about 27 inches)
1 drill
1 1/4" drill bit
1 sharp knife or strong fist
1 empty plastic bottle
Dirt
Plant
Optional: old stocking, cheese cloth, or other mesh material.

To start, choose one bucket that will be the top bucket. Invert it, and then drill some holes in the bottom. Probably about 15-20 should do.

Then, cut the top and bottom off of your plastic bottle, and either drill some holes, or make some slashes in the bottom end of the resulting tube. Place the tube on the bottom of the bucket and trace a line. Then, using either the sharp knife or your strong fist, remove the plastic inside of the traced line. Now do the same thing with the PVC pipe. Trace around it, but don't try to punch this one out. If you really are that strong, the hole will be too big, and if you are not, you will break your fingers. You will need those for the rest of the project.

Now you should have two buckets. One that is useless as a bucket but good as a gardening pot, and one that is still a nice, good ol' bucket.

Next, nest the bucket in which you drilled the holes inside the bucket without holes. It should look like the picture below. In the pictures above I had the pipe and plastic tube already inserted, but I just did that for the pictures. At this point, if you have the stocking/mesh, I would place it over the bottom end of the plastic tube (the end that will face the ground). Then stick that end through the large hole and stick the PVC pipe in the smaller hole.

Next, fill the plastic tube up with dirt. This will act like a wick  when the bottom reservoir is filled with water. The reason you have the stocking covering it is to prevent internal erosion, at least in theory. Then, continue to fill the bucket up with dirt.

 When you have reached an appropriate height, add your plant, and continue to add dirt around it.

For the last step, hold the two buckets up to the light, and make a mark just below the bottom of the top/internal bucket. Then, drill a hole right at that mark. This will serve as a drainage hole, keeping you from over-saturating your plants, and it will allow air to get to the roots. I read that this is important, but if you have heard otherwise, please refute me. Now you are ready to fill up the reservoir with water via the PVC pipe. When water starts pouring out of your drainage hole, you are done. You now have a pot that you have to water less often, can move around into the sunlight (or away from neighbors who want to throw pizza crusts into it from below), and costs about 7 dollars to make.

And here is what it looked like when we finished. 

And here is what they look like today. The smaller one has inferior soil and never took off the way the bigger one did. Now we will know for next year.

 This is our first ripening tomato, which we found yesterday. Any advice on when to pick it?

 This was our first herb pot, which used good soil. We have basil, peppermint, and rosemary. We did have cilantro, but then it went to seed. We know that means it will be coriander, but we have never used coriander in our lives, and we didn't want it taking water and nutrients from the basil and mint, so we pulled it out and inverted it in its own hole.

*Self-watering is not actually true. They just have a water reservoir, so you water them less frequently because they can hold a lot of water at once.

Happy 4th of July!

Hi Everyone,

Last year, we were with the Laylocks for the 4th of July; we had a great time and I know the boys loved all the fire crackers that Matt and Paul did with the kids.

This year, I am tempted to let the kids stay up for a local fireworks display.  The past couple of years we've always had the kids in bed well before 9:30 so we didn't even consider it, but lately we've had a hard time making that happen so I figured we could take them to see some fire works, since they might be laying awake in bed at that hour anyway.

What are you doing to celebrate the 4th?

Paul is out picking blueberries with Dominic, Thomas, and Andre, and I have a few quiet moments so I wanted to do an updated blog post...

There are so many things I have wanted to post about these last 8 months... I don't even think I ever did a post on Carl after he was born.  But finally we are having some normalcy in our lives and I feel like I can pull away from life a little bit to do blog posts. 

This week we are in the middle of a kitchen improvement project.  We had all our old cabinets removed and new ones are being installed.  Right now, the new cabinets are in place, but none of the doors are on, and it doesn't look that much different from before.  Hopefully I will feel like it was worth all the money when all is said and done.

I am sure that by now, you are aware of what is going on with Andre, but in case you don't, I give a quick recap.  At the end of April, shortly after returning from Florida, he had a seizure.  He had more in May, for a total of five that we know of.  We took him to see a pediatric neurologist who ordered an EEG and an MRI and also recommended that we start anti-seizure medication.  So we've done all that and have a follow up appointment with the neurologist on Tuesday.  I'll try to let you know if we find anything else out at that appointment.  Theses seizure episodes were, of course, very scary, and it is frightening to think of what could happen to him if he had a seizure and we weren't nearby to make sure he was safe.  Things are temporarily better, with him being on the medication, but we are hoping to find a better long term solution, or even better, that he grows out of the seizures completely.

Today, while Paul is gone, I am hoping to start a massive re-orientation of my entire life... I am going to attempt to start getting rid of everything we don't absolutely need.  I'd love to live with much greater simplicity and much fewer things.  Do you know what I mean?  But it's hard for me.  I am so attached to the stuff!  So I am going to start with the master bedroom closet, which is a wreck.  And then I am hopefully going to make my way to every closet and room in the house, so that next time you are here, you will be so impressed with minimalism that you will want to do it too.  Good bye toys.  Good bye clothes.  Good bye numerous sentimental trinkets.  That reminds me, I need to go get to work.

Sorry I have not posted any pictures, but because my kitchen is all torn apart, I don't know where any of those handy devices are that help you get the pictures from the phone to the computer and emailing the pictures will take too long.