Week 42

This was a really hard week for everyone. I was in Ramstein, Germany all week for training with my job. It was really hard to be away from everyone for a whole week.

While I was gone I had Lauren take some pictures at the Christmas Party for Whitney's preschool class. Whitney goes to a preschool class twice a week with some other German kids her age. Some of the Moms speak a little English but they mostly speak in German the whole time, and none of the kids speak any English. The language barrier doesn't seem to affect Whitney though... she loves playing with those little kids.


Like I said, this week was the Christmas party. They had a Santa come in and call each child by name to come up and sit on his lap and then he gave them a present. When it was Whitney's turn Santa spoke English (kind of) to have Whitney come up and then talked to her in English. I thought that was really sweet for him to make the effort to communicate with Whitney in English.
Whitney loved her little toy too!!




We finished up the last of our Christmas shopping this weekend and now just have to wrap it all!! After a full day of shopping on Saturday we rewarded ourselves by going to our local Weihnachtsmarkt.



Our little village had a very small Christmas Market for today only. There are so many here but most of them are open for the entire month of December. Even though this one was small it had all the "Must-Have's" for ALL Christmas Markets...

Gluhwein (even this one had 4 different kinds!)

and Bratwurst (3 different kinds)

The kids especially liked seeing Weihnachtsmann (Santa)


He gave each of the kids a Kinder Egg (Whitney calls them 'dinner eggs'). They LOVE these things. They have the cutest little toys inside of them that you put together - so the kids get chocolate AND a toy! Unfortunately, they don't sell them in the US because the little toy parts are so small and could potentially be a choking hazard, if swallowed. (The German kids seem to be ok with them though.)

It was a nice ending to a busy/hard week.

This morning we woke up to beautiful, BIG snowflakes!


Kayla was so funny. She thought they were little balls falling from the sky and was trying to eat them.