Oscar finishes 1st grade

AAFES gives students who get good grades a booklet with some nice coupons in it.  We picked up Oscar's booklet on Friday.  They gave me a hard time about him not being enrolled at the American school but I don't see that requirement mentioned in their press release.  Oscar got a free slice of pizza.  I threw in some Fruity Bussi candies for dessert.  Then we walked over to the bookstore where he picked out a free magazine.  He wanted a race car magazine but most of these have half-naked women on the cover.  We settled on something a bit more appropriate.

Frankfurt Natural History Museum

Oscar and I made the short 20-minute drive into Frankfurt today to visit the Natural History Museum.  We had a great time looking at animals, bones, and fossils.

I gave Oscar an old digital camera and told him to take his own pictures.  He was so busy taking pictures (coming soon) that he didn't complain when I slowed down to take a photo.

Schloss Heidelberg

My brother and his girlfriend flew into Warsaw a few weeks ago and have been touring Europe.  I picked them up at the train station here in Wiesbaden on Friday.  They are staying with us until they fly home on Wednesday.  Yesterday we drove to Heidelberg for a day trip to its famous castle.  The day was overcast but I didn't think it would rain so I suggested that we should leave the umbrellas in the car.  Naturally, it started raining after we had been walking around the castle for about an hour.  We got a bit wet but were not soaked.  Oscar used the rain as an opportunity to spike up his hair.

Farewell, Shumways

One of the unique things about living among Americans overseas is that almost all of us are here temporarily.  Although the length of time spent overseas can vary, most families come for three-year assignments.  This  means that about one third of our American friends and acquaintances will pack their household goods into boxes and fly home this year.  To minimize the impact on school-aged children, most of the moving happens between May and September.  In this respect, 2011 is no different than any other year.  We are sad to see our friends in the Shumway family fly home to Utah on Friday.  Since we arrived in Germany in July 2009, our families have shared memorable experiences at church, church activities, birthday parties, dinners, lunches, movies, and more.  Oscar and I met the Shumways at the bowling alley tonight for one last get-together.

Cleaning the Odyssey

Oscar and I washed and waxed the minivan yesterday.  This was long overdue -- it had not been washed in at least a year.

Before:

After:

Strawberry Picking

Oscar and I went to the local pick-your-own strawberry farm yesterday.  The strawberries were yummy and cheap.  We filled our bucket for €1,20.

Separation of powers

Tina got home from her adults-only trip to Bavaria on Tuesday afternoon.  On Thursday, she left again -- this time to the States for four weeks (mostly with her parents in Las Vegas).  Calvin and Sara went with her but Oscar stayed in Germany with me (he still has two more weeks of school).  We looked at getting tickets after Oscar was out of school but leaving a few weeks later would have cost a lot more money.  So Oscar and I are by ourselves in Germany until the evening of July 6th.

Father / Son Camping Activity 2011

Each year in May (or early June, as was the case this year), the six English-speaking LDS military units in Germany (Baumholder, Bitburg, Heidelberg, Kaiserslautern, Ramstein, and Wiesbaden) combine for a fathers and sons camping activity that commemorates the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood (15 May 1829).  Last year we went to Manderscheid Castle (Google Analytics tells me that the blog entry I wrote about last year's trip has become the second-most visited page on this blog).

This year's trip was to the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg.  Before the location had been announced, I did not know that the United States had a cemetery in Luxembourg.  I have since learned that the American Battle Monuments Commission maintains 24 permanent military cemeteries on foreign soil (there are 124,909 U.S. war dead interred at these cemeteries; 30,921 from World War I, 93,238 from World War II, and 750 from the Mexican War).

Last year I took the boys in my car but this year I took the minivan because we had some extra passengers in the car.  The boys' friends in the Shumway family were going to miss the camping because their parents scheduled a cruise (without the children) that would have them somewhere off the coast of Italy on the night of the camping.  I thought my boys would enjoy the company so I volunteered to take two of the Shumway boys along with us (they have four boys; Ryan Green brought the oldest boy with him and the youngest boy stayed in Wiesbaden with the family that is watching the children during the cruise).   Zach and Rex are very close in age to Oscar and Calvin so they have a lot in common.  A few days before the activity, I heard that somebody else from our unit would also not be able to attend because of some ongoing car trouble that was not likely to be resolved before the weekend.  Paul Woolston and his wife are empty-nesters with five grown children so I offered him the passenger seat in the van and he accepted.

The plan was to camp on Friday night and spend Saturday morning helping with an Eagle Scout project (cleaning grave markers and repairing the ones that have been damaged by lawn mowers).  The church people who organized the activity brought pancake batter and sausages for breakfast on Saturday but campers were responsible to make their own arrangements for dinner on Friday and lunch on Saturday.

Last year I arrived at 6:30PM and had to simultaneously struggle with hungry children and the need to unpack the car, set up a tent, and get everything situated before nightfall.  To prevent a repeat of this situation, I had planned on getting an earlier start this year.  Obviously not everybody can just pack up and leave work in the middle of the afternoon (or take the day off, as I did) so I thought it would be nice to have a group dinner on Friday night for the people that came from Wiesbaden.  Beyond offering a nice chance to eat together, a group dinner would also allow late-comers the opportunity to eat as soon as they arrived.  I wasn't sure how much interest there would be in this but I figured it couldn't hurt to offer it as an option.  I sent the dads an email offering to organize a group dinner with hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, cookies, marshmallows, and soda.  We ended up having seven or eight families participate in the group dinner.  Debbie Woolston added a nice selection of raw vegetables to my menu of fat, cholesterol, and empty calories.

I decided to not go to work on Friday so I could spend the morning loading up the van with camping equipment for my family plus the two Shumway boys.  Once the tent, sleeping bags, and camping equipment were all packed up, I went to the grocery store to buy the food for dinner.  I had quite a bit of food in the car -- 16 frozen hamburgers, 16 hot dogs, 32 buns, a box of 45 bags of chips, 48 cans of soda, two packages of Oreos, 12 1.5L bottles of water, and more.  Needless to say, space in the van was at a premium.  I was pretty full after I picked up the Shumway boys around 1:15PM but I still needed to stop and pick up Paul Woolston.  I wasn't prepared for the amount of camp gear he had planned to bring.  We had to pull a lot of things out and do some creative repacking but we were able to get everything to fit.  The boys all ended up with decreased legroom because of the fold-up chairs, sleeping bags, and tents we stuffed under their feet.

We arrived around 5:00 (later than I had wanted) but discovered we were one of the first ones to arrive.  The plan was to unload the van, get the tent set up, and then get dinner ready.  The unloading part was easy.

5:21PM -- The van has been unloaded and the boys are playing with leaves.

I expected the tent to take about twenty minutes.  I had not used this tent in several years (last year I rented a smaller tent from the outdoor shop on the local army base because we had been told that space at the castle was limited) so I didn't remember how it was assembled.  Tina had used it several times in the last few years to take the teenage girls from church camping so she was more familiar with the tent.  Her comment to me was, "it just pops right up."  It actually did take about twenty minutes to set up.  But that was only after several people spent and hour and half trying to untangle it.  The ladies really mangled it when they put it away.

5:31PM -- A tangled mess...

6:31PM -- Still a tangled mess.  At this point I was thinking we would be sleeping under the stars...

6:53PM -- It should not have been necessary to separate this piece from the tent.  Now we could finally untangle the tent...

7:14PM -- Almost two hours later, I finally had a tent.

Since I was preoccupied with the tent and four boys who were throwing leaves and playing with sticks, I wasn't able to help much with the dinner I had planned.  Fortunately, Paul Woolston (who did not have children to supervise) cooked the hamburgers and hot dogs.  I was able to help slice a few tomatoes and get the buns and chips organized but Paul did most of the work.  Here we are eating dinner a bit after 8PM:

I enjoyed getting to talk with the other dads.  We had one family that arrived after 8:15 -- they were hungry and tired so it was nice to have dinner already prepared for them.  We had a brief devotional meeting about 9:30 and then I got the boys ready for bed.  Unfortunately, the tent was downwind from a campfire and the smoke kept Calvin up coughing most of the night.

The weather on Friday had been really pleasant and Saturday was more of the same.  It was a bit cool on Saturday morning but by 10AM the boys had taken off their jackets and changed from jeans into shorts.  Here they are eating breakfast:

The boys played horseshoes while they were waiting for everybody else to finish eating.

After breakfast, we walked through the cemetery.  There are 5,076 American soldiers buried in the cemetery.  General Patton is one of them; his grave is featured between the two flagpoles but I forgot to find it.

Visitors Center

Jewish soldiers have the Star of David on their grave markers.

Day Turner was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Over 13,000 people of Chinese descent enlisted in the Army during World War II.  Not all of them came home... 

"All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifice and high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally." -- Dwight Eisenhower

371 of America's missing soldiers are remembered here.  The small markers next to some names indicate those whose remains have since been recovered and identified.

We spent about twenty minutes cleaning grave markers and posing for photos but the boys were bored and they weren't really helping so we didn't stay very long.

Here is one that needed to be repaired (notice the chip near the bottom).

Russ Tillett from Heidelberg helped repaired it.

After our visit to the cemetery, we packed everything up, loaded up the car, and drove home.  The boys ate lunch while Paul Woolston and I loaded up the car.  For the second year in a row, lunch on Saturday was supposed to be peanut butter sandwiches.  And for the second year in a row, I forgot a key ingredient.  Last year it was a knife; this year it was the peanut butter.  They ate bananas and chips instead.

Everybody had a nice weekend and the boys are already looking forward to doing this again next year.