Week 16

Exploring

We got out and explored our new town a little this week. One of the best parts of Huttenfeld is a great biking/walking path that takes you to the next town. I pulled Aiden and Whitney while Connor was in school almost every day this week. It only takes about 15 minutes on the bike to get there and it is such a beautiful, fun ride!

My hot biker chic look. ha ha!

Now that Connor is out of school and the weather is starting to warm up we are going to be going to this lake every day this summer! It's on our bike trail.

We found a few new parks this week during our rides too!

We went to the ice cream shop almost every day!

(You can see our house in the back ground - the bright yellow one.)


Don't ask me how this happened but they sure seemed to be having fun! I had to take a pic (before I made everyone get out)


We've been going to Ikea a lot! Jeremy bribed the missionaries with home-cooked American food to come over and help him put all of our new stuff together. These missionaries are so cool. The boys love them so much and really look up to them.

Medieval Festival

The kids and I went to a Medieval Festival at a Castle in Viernheim.

Whitney would NOT take her eyes off this guy for a picture. She was so confused and curious about why he was dressed this way. lol!

We finally had to remove Whitney to get everyone looking at the camera

We saw some perfomers do a juggling act

Even though it was completely in German, the kids were mesmerized!

Connors favorite part was the meat sticks!
By the time I got my camera out he already ate the whole thing.


nobody said a word as this guy walked past us


People must think we are SO weird here!

Week 15

Well, I finally made a little progress unpacking this week. There is still a lot to do though. The problem is that we didn't bring enough furniture because we assumed we would be in a small flat in the city. Turns out that we found a large home in the country... go figure! We ended up leaving a lot of furniture in our home in Kansas that the renters are using and a lot of it went into storage in the States. Luckily for us there is an Ikea just 10 minutes from our house! :)

So here is the virtual tour of our home....

This is the street we live on. Our house is on the left.
You can't miss it... it's the bright yellow one!

This is the entrance. There are 3 homes attached here in a U shape with a common courtyard. Our landlord lives in one and his daughter in the other.

Front doorWhitney looks out this window every day around 5pm looking for Daddy.

This is across the courtyard. The door on the right is where we take our garbage.
Have I mentioned how confusing and labor intensive the garbage is here?
Well, I'm going to have to save that for another post.

The entrance.
If you go straight there is the bathroom and a door next to the bathroom that leads to the basement (the boys call it the dungeon... pics to follow).

If you turn right at the front door you are in the kitchen. This was the only house we looked at that had a kitchen included. This is because the tenants before us were also American and the landlords did this for them. Most German houses don't even have kitchen counters, sinks, cupboards, anything!!! We put the washer and dryer up here so we didn't have to go up and down from the "dungeon".

If you turn left from the entrance you will go into the living room area.

Our current, awesome entertainment center

Haven't really decided what to do with this half of the room yet.

The dungeon

Sooo much work left to do.

Downstairs bathroom

Ok... now we're ready to go upstairs

At the top of the stairs is our current solution for towels, linens etc...
You will also see baby gates everywhere. All the stairs makes us crazy with Whitney around!

Once you're on the 2nd floor (or 3rd if you count the basement - but I'm not),
if you turn right you see 3 doors

The first door on the left is a small bathroom with a shower and toilet

The second door is another bathroom... yes, right next to the first bathroom. Weird, huh?

The door to the right is the boys room.

Now... if you had turned left when you came up the stairs there are 2 doors.
The first door is our room.

Next to our room is Whitney's

Going up the spiral staircase to the top floor.
There are also 3 bedrooms up here.
The first door on the left is the playroom.

This room is a total mess. We've pretty much just thrown all the toys up there for now. We need a system to organize it. However, this will probably be the last room we fix up. The kids like it just the way it is. If you turn right at the top of the stairs this is the first room. We plan to use this room for our German speaking Au Pair when we find the right one. Still looking....

She has a small bathroom in her room.

This is the Guest bedroom. We've already been able to use it once already!
Hoping to use it LOTS more. :)