Oscar sneaks Oreos

Last Sunday afternoon we came home from church and there were Oreo cookie crumbs on the carpet in the living room. I knew Tina had run the vacuum Saturday night after the boys had gone to bed so I thought it likely that one of them had gotten into the Oreos. This has happened in the past when we have accidentally left treats on the counter within reach of little arms.

I asked Tina about the whereabouts of the Oreos. She told me they were up high in the cupboard. I wasn't sure what to think. Neither she nor I had made the mess. And the boys were unable to reach things that were up in the cupboard. Or were they?  After some back and forth, I got Oscar to agree to show me how he got into the cookies.  He is very proud of this accomplishment.

He steps onto the Home Depot bucket under the sink and uses it to hoist himself onto the ledge.  Once there, he opens the door to the cupboard and finds tasty treats like Oreos and Fig Newtons to be no longer out of reach.  He would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for his meddling parents.

A Sunday afternoon nap

Calvin has mostly stopped taking afternoon naps.  He surprises us every now and then by falling asleep for an hour or two. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Tina took a photo of Calvin and Sara asleep on the couch.

Father / Son Camping Activity at Manderscheid Castle

I took the boys on a church-sponsored father / son camping activity this weekend. Some of you may know that I really dislike camping. Let me count the ways: insects, primitive and disgusting bathroom facilities, uncomfortable sleeping conditions, wet grass in the morning that gets my socks wet, out of control children lacking adult supervision, smoke from the fire blowing in my direction, bad food, staying up too late and getting up too early, no place to take a shower, and dirt that transfers to clothes, tents, and cars.

The event was described to me as camping in a castle. The most important word in the previous sentence was "in". I was actually kind of looking forward to camping "in" a castle. Camping "in" a castle couldn't be nearly as bad as camping outside, right? There would be no bugs, the floor would be level, the fire would be outside (if it existed at all), there wouldn't be dirt / mud everywhere, and the bathrooms might even be decent.

I left work at 2PM on Friday afternoon and by 5PM I had the car loaded up and the boys and I were off for the 90 minute drive to Manderscheid Castle. The weather this month has been unseasonably cold and rainy but Friday was a different story. Spring finally seemed to arrive -- temperatures were in the low 70s and the were no rainclouds in sight. The forecast for Saturday was more of the same.

We spent about 30 minutes in stop-and-go rush hour traffic but once we hit the rolling hills the traffic thinned, the speed limits disappeared, and we were able to make up some time. We arrived at the castle a little before 6:30 to discover that camping "in" the castle could have been more accurately described as camping "at" the castle. The castle was a shell of its former self. It was more of a ruins than anything -- just a bunch of walls. Whatever roof may have existed at one point had been missing for several hundred years. So all of my hopes for a less rugged camping experience were dashed before I had even unloaded a sleeping bag.

There were no designated camping spaces -- people were just expected to make their own camping spots anyplace they could find enough room to erect a tent. The castle was basically a series of zigzag uphill climbs to a tower. People were camped out all along the way to the tower. Somebody even set up a tent at the observation deck on top of the tower. It took us about 20 minutes to hike from ground level to the top of the tower. I didn't really want to lug camping gear up a bunch of stairs so I found a spot at ground level next to some friends and started unloading the car.  Here are some photos of the various places where people set up their tents:

 The last photo above shows the view from the top of the tower.  The tent we slept in is the purple and gray one in the first photo (next to the small orange tent).

Somehow I managed to get the tent up without having to ask any boy scouts for help. The boys played Bocce Ball while I set up the tent. Later they "helped" me get the fly on the roof. Then we ate dinner -- hot dogs, hamburgers, chips, soda, and dutch oven peach cobbler for desert. Yum. At 9PM we had a brief devotional meeting (maybe 20 minutes) and then I helped the boys make Smores. Only we didn't actually get the making Smores part. Once they saw the marshmallows they were overcome with greed, decided the wait wasn't worth it, and just ate plain marshmallows instead.

At about 10:30 they boys were tiring (by their own admission) so we started to get ready for bed. We had to wait in line to use the disgusting bathroom and brush our teeth. While we were waiting, Oscar ran off. I couldn't chase him without losing our place in line so I stayed in line with Calvin and brushed his teeth. When we came out, I found Oscar stuffing himself with the Hershey's chocolate bars that people had brought to make Smores. Eventually I got his teeth brushed and we went to bed.

The boys slept fine. I slept most of the night but never really got comfortable. The temperature dropped into the mid-40s overnight so it was definitely a bit chilly in the tent. We were awakened at 5:50AM by some fool (adult) singing loudly "Oh What A Beautiful Morning". Oscar was cold so he climbed into my sleeping bag to warm up. People started stirring a little after six. I made Oscar stay in bed until 7:00 but I didn't get any extra sleep out of it -- he asked me every five minutes if it was time to get up yet.

The church provided breakfast -- all you can eat pancakes, sausages, and Tang. Oscar really liked the drink. He called it "Orange Juice that tastes like soda." Here are some photos of the boys eating breakfast.

After breakfast we went to explore the castle.  One of the rooms had a deep hole that was covered with a metal grate.  At the bottom of the hole was a (fake?) skeleton.  The boys really like the skeleton -- we had to go back and see it three or four times.  The room was dark so you could only see the skeleton by the light of a flashlight.

There was a lot to see.  This castle was big!

From the top of the tower we could look down and see a nice field for playing games.

From the tower we could also see something else off in the distance:

Another castle!  Manderscheid is actually two castles -- a lower castle (where we camped) and an upper castle some ways off.

After exploring the lower castle, we packed up the tent and loaded the car with our belongings.  Then we headed down to the field for some games.

Oscar and Jakob wanted to have a race.  Jakob won.

But after further review, it appeared he might have gotten a bit of a head start.

The races were lots of fun.

Here is a photo of the lower castle's tower as viewed from the grassy field.

The boys wanted to hike to the upper castle.  I thought it might be too hard or too far away but they insisted on going.  I told them that I was not carrying anybody up to the castle and that if they wanted to go they both had to walk.  The hike was steep and the trail was only three or four feet wide.  The trail also ran along a cliff edge that dropped fifty to a hundred feet into a small stream.  Oscar noted several times that the path was "not safe".  We did not have enough room to walk next to each other so I led the way and the boys held onto my hands from behind.  Each time the boys started to complain about length or difficulty of the hike I offered to turn around and go back to the car so we could start the drive home.  This was immediately followed by a renewed determination to continue to the second castle.  We stopped at an observation point along the way.  It had a nice view of the lower castle.

It took us about 30 minutes but eventually we made it all the way to the upper castle.  Then we climbed the stairs all the way to the top of the tower.  There must have been about two hundred stairs.  The boys were tired but they wanted to get to the top.  They wanted to touch the flagpole to prove that they were there.

From the tower, we could see the lower castle in the distance and the grassy field below.

Here we are at the top of the upper tower with the lower castle in the background.

After we were done exploring the upper castle, we walked back down to the car and ate lunch.  We had bananas, apples, and some bread from the bakery by our house.  We were supposed to have peanut butter sandwiches but I couldn't find the knife so we just skipped the peanut butter.

Once we were on the road, the boys fell asleep after about ten minutes.  They were exhausted so they slept the whole way home.  The German countryside is still full of fields of yellow Rapeseed plants (I first wrote about this a few weeks ago).  I took another photo:

The traffic was light and there was no speed limit most of the way so I had the car cruising above a hundred miles an hour.  I guess I had it up to 124 MPH at some point:

We got home a little after 2PM.  I got the car unloaded and then Tina gave the boys a bath while I hopped in the shower.

A report on my complaints: The insects weren't too bad (Germany doesn't really have mosquitoes), the bathrooms were definitely primitive and disgusting, the sleeping conditions were subpar but not horrible, the grass was definitely very wet in the morning (but somehow my socks stayed dry), there were lots of children that were absolutely out of control lacking appropriate adult supervision (not mine), I stayed away from the fire so the smoke didn't blow in my direction, the food was edible but not great, we went to bed at a reasonable time but got woken up way too early, I didn't get a shower until I got home, and lots of dirt was transferred onto clothes and into my car.

Notwithstanding my complaints, the camping trip with the boys was still a lot of fun.  We all had a good time and the boys are already looking forward to next year's father / son campout ("no girls allowed").

Immer wieder kommt ein neuer Frühling...

May is more than half gone and it is still pretty cold here.  We have had rain and high temperatures in the mid-50s for several weeks now.  The Germans tell me that the weather is unseasonably cool.  Spring will come eventually.  Oscar's German class at school must have had a lesson about Spring (der Frühling):

German children like to sing a little jingle about Spring.  The words were written on the back of the coloring sheet:

Immer wieder kommt ein neuer Frühling.
Immer wieder kommt ein neuer März.
Immer wieder bringt er neue Blumen.
Immer wieder Licht in unser Herz.

Rough translation:
Always again (or "again and again") comes a new spring.
Always again comes a new March.
Always again it (March) bring new flowers.
Always again light in our hearts.

I found a YouTube video of some children singing the song.

Some of Oscar's schoolwork

I suppose that most of the readers here know that I was a full-time missionary for the LDS church in southern California from 1996 to 1998.  If you didn't know it previously, you do now.  Anyway, one of the things that we seemed to do with some frequency was help people move.  I recall, almost like it was yesterday, moving boxes from people's basements and attics into rented moving trucks.  While moving the boxes, it was basically impossible to not read the labels that people had written on the boxes to describe their contents.  I realized almost immediately that people had a lot of stuff they didn't really need or use.  The fact that each family seemed to have a whole room full of boxes that had not been unpacked from the last move only served to underscore my point.

If there was a common theme that tied together these rooms full of sealed boxes, it was that almost all of the rooms had several boxes full of school work, trophies, and other trinkets from the children.  In some cases, the children whose lives had been memorialized in these boxes were now old enough to have children of their own.  So why did the parents still have the boxes?  Because the children didn't want them and the parents (usually the mother) refused to throw them away.

I promised myself then that I wouldn't stockpile years worth of papers and projects.  But now that I have children of my own, these items mean more to me than I thought they would ten years ago.  I still plan on keeping my promise to myself.  But I also want to be able to save some of their work.  I thought about this a bit and decided that the best way to meet both goals is to scan and/or photograph snippets of their work.  That way I can keep a memory without having to physically hold on it.

Oscar started Kindergarten last August and I have been meaning to save more of his work but I haven't yet gotten around to doing anything about it.  Here are two things he brought home from school today.  I hope to scan in some of his work at least once a month.

Oscar's handwriting has improved a lot this year but he still has problems with some letters.

Oscar likes counting and coloring.  He still has a hard time getting the hat on the number 1 to point the correct direction.

The Netherlands -- Day Four

Day Four: Saturday, 01 May
As we saw last time, April 30th is a national holiday in the Netherlands.  Not to be outdone, May 1st is a holiday in virtually all of Europe.  Fortunately, both of the places we wanted to go were open for business.

We got up around 7:30 and finished packing the trailer into suitcases and laundry baskets.  I loaded our stuff into the van in a steady drizzle.  Around 9:30 we said good by to Eurocamp and made the 60-minute drive to see 200 year-old windmills at Kinderdijk.  It started to rain a bit harder once we were on the road.  I was driving and the Greens were following right behind us.  We got within a mile of the windmills and then the voice inside the GPS sprung a surprise: "Turn right and board ferry."  Um, what's this about a ferry?

Sure enough, I was looking straight at a little river with no way across except a ferry at the bottom of the ramp.  All I could think about was our friends Nick and Aubrey.  They took a trip to Scotland last year and the Tom Tom had them take a $40 ferry without warning.  I had no idea how much it cost to ride this boat and to make it worse, the Greens were behind me.  I spoke briefly with the Greens; their GPS was set to avoid ferrys (who knew such a setting even existed?) so their voice kept telling them they were going the wrong way.  They thought I knew a shortcut!  Anyway, the ferry had just started to pull away from the dock but when the staff saw our two vans, they backed up to wait for us to board.  So at that point we really felt like we had to get on.  In the end it wasn't that bad -- the ferry only cost €3 and the trip across the river took about three minutes.  I paid for the Green's trip on the ferry since it was basically my fault that we were on it in the first place.

As you can see from the photo, the drizzle was pretty steady.  Kinderdijk is a series of windmills built to prevent flooding.  One of them is open to the public (for a small fee, of course).  We had a nice time looking at the windmills and going inside the one that accepted visitors.

The boys were fine in the rain.  My feet got pretty wet.  I had soggy socks the rest of the day.  Ugh.

We spent about an hour with the windmills and then we drove about twenty minutes to Gouda to visit the cheese museum.  Parking in Gouda was an adventure.  We drove on very narrow streets looking for a place to park.  Finally we found a metered spot.  The Greens were right there with us and they drove off looking for a spot of their own.  We got everybody out of the van and started walking towards the museum where we planned to meet the Greens.  We were also planning to eat the lunch Tina had packed earlier that morning.  We got about twenty feet from the car when the skies opened up and it began to rain really really hard.  So we ran back to the van and ate our lunch there instead.  Tina got the kids in the car.  I was sheltering myself under the rear lift gate of the van while trying to fold up the stroller.  Finally I got the stroller inside.  It was still raining pretty hard so I tried to quickly close the lift gate and run back to the driver's side door.  Everything went according to plan until I closed the lift gate and a gallon of water slid off the door and onto my feet.

Just as I was getting settled into the car to eat my lunch, Calvin announced he had to go pee.  We tried the usual distractions (race cars and Thomas trains) to see if it could wait but they weren't working so he must have really had to go.  It was still raining very hard so neither of us were wanting to venture out to find a bathroom.  In the end, I popped open an empty water bottle and told him to make it happen.  Both of the boys thought this was great fun.  I held the bottle; Calvin filled it with "soda."  Oscar was laughing so Calvin started laughing.  This made his stomach shake which made it hard to keep things contained.  Fortunately, I was able to keep the fountain capped until the deed was done.  With that tragedy past us, we finished lunch and waited for the rain to pass.

The rain tapered off after about 10 minutes.  Off in the distance I saw the Green's van pull into a parking space.  Ryan had been driving around for 25 minutes and finally found a spot about 500 feet from where we had parked.

The Cheese Museum was a lot of fun.  We learned how people in Gouda (the Dutch pronunciation sounds like "How-da") ferment their milk curds (ie, make cheese).  Gouda cheese is made in lots of other places but according to the guy at the museum, Gouda cheese made in Gouda tastes different because of the nutrients in the soil (the cheese comes from milk which comes from cows that eat grass that grows in the dirt).

Outside, the Saturday market was in full swing.  They were selling all sorts of cheese and other trinkets.  We bought some more stroopwafels.

The Dutch have a reputations for liking to ride bicycles.  It is definitely true.  We saw lots of people on bikes and even more that were parked.

We left Gouda around 2PM and started for home.  Unlike Germany, the Dutch highways do not have unlimited speed limits.  Also unlike Germany, almost nobody drives faster than the speed limit.  The reason?  Speed cameras are everywhere.

Fortunately, the Garmin would warn me to slow down.  The voice really saved me.

Once we got into Germany, we headed for the same Esso station we had used to fill the tank on Wednesday afternoon.  Unfortunately, it was closed (for May Day?).  We had to ask the GPS to find another Esso station nearby.  It was a 25 minute drive but they were open.  On the way there we saw some lambs grazing in a field.

The Greens had stayed behind in Gouda to walk around the market for a bit longer.  I was able to call them and warn them not to go to the Esso that was closed.  They arrived at the other Esso station about 20 minutes after we did.  Tina was feeding the baby so we were a bit slow getting back on the road.

Eventually we did get back on the Autobahn.  We had pretty smooth driving all the way home.  There is something pretty fantastic about driving 105 MPH and being passed like you are standing still.  I expect to get passed by the Audis and Porches.  But getting passed by an Opel Astra (think Chevrolet Cavalier) and a Ford Focus really puts things in perspective.  I really like driving on the Autobahn.

The German countryside is really beautiful.  Rolling hills and small towns dot the landscape.  This time of year, many of the fields are yellow.  This photo doesn't really do it justice but at 100 MPH you take what you can get.

So what are they growing?  The Germans call it "Raps" (sounds like "wraps").  In English, we call it Rapeseed (Canola).  The yellow flowering plant is a main ingredient in oil and biodiesel.

We got home a little before 8PM and started unpacking so we could get ready for church on Sunday.  We all loved our trip to the Netherlands and are planning to go back again next year.