Papa, Look at Me!

Lorelei is a genuine girly-girl, that is in the sense that she loves her dolls! She’s got a lot of doll stuff and plays with it pretty much every day. They are her babies… They laugh, they cry, they sleep, they go poo… everything :-). Anyway, all that stuff accumulates in a corner of our house in a big basket. Of course, sometimes the stuff is all over our house and the basket is empty. And when the basket is empty you can sit in it. And when you sit in it you can cuddle with your dolls. And when you cuddle with your dolls and call out: “Papa, look at me!” Papa will get his camera and take a picture. And when Papa takes a picture that is so unbelievably cute he puts it on your blog….

Well, that’s what happened :-).

What Do You See?

Last week on Wednesday Tobias had a friend over and usually when that happens Lorelei kind of follows them around the house. Sometimes she interferes with their play or acts annoying, but sometimes it is just like: Tobias plays in his room, I play in my room. So, when Tobias and his friend were upstairs I assumed that Lorelei went after them to play in her room. I was downstairs, but at some point went to check on them. Well, no Lorelei in her room… So, I went to look for her and had a hard time finding her, even though she was not hiding… not purposely anyway.

This picture was taken in our room… what do you see?

Well, Lorelei, obviously, but what else? She is sitting there behind our drawn curtains with a book in her lap. That black thing is Jip and she is reading to him. That’s how I found her and she was actually reading (that is: turning the pages and kind of telling the story :-)).

That gave me a good laugh!

TV Junkies

Like I told you, while we are in the US we usually let our kids embrace some of the American culture and heritage. Well, what is more American than watching TV!? I also told you that our kids were spoiled. Result: there was a lot of TV watching. Tobias got Transformers DVD’s as a gift and Lorelei watched a lot of Elmo (a DVD that was already there). I am not much of a TV fan myself, especially not for the kids, but hey, what can you do… we were in TV Country after all…

We also watched a lot of Christmas Ice Age, Despicable Me and classics like Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I guess Christmas time is kind of TV-time anyway…

As you can see there were no complaints from the kids :-).

Favorite Gift

It is always hard to determine what gift is going to be the favorite in advance. Sometimes it turns out to be no gift at all, but something trivial like wrapping paper or a box. This time there was definitely a favorite gift for Lorelei: her computer! She did not even seem interested in opening any other gifts after opening that one and during the vacation alone it got quite enough play-time to make it worth it’s while…

There were many other gifts that got significant play-time, but this one was by far the favorite. This picture was taken right after opening it.

Christmas

 
Christmas has come and gone, as has our jet-lag… So, time to start blogging again. I thought I’d start of the new year with a very very cute Christmas picture (and believe it or not, it took only one shot to get it… :-)). You can see a couple of things in this picture that kind of sum up our vacation in Dickinson, TX:
- The kids were very happy to be there (and so were we)!
- There were lots and lots (too many?) presents
- There was lots of candy (canes) (and an equal amount of legitimate spoiling of kids)

In addition to that we did some travelling to visit family, went to some sports games, played a lot with the toys (but not so much in the pool, that was a bit too cold, even for Dutch people), we played baseball, we drew, colored, baked cookies, we…. well, lots more fun stuff!
There was definitely some jet-lag going there, but the jet-lag coming back is always much worse, especially since Lorelei has a hard time getting back into here normal schedule. Tobias had hardly any at all, we had a couple of nights more than Lorelei…
But like I said, that’s all come and gone and now we can look back on a wonderful two weeks in the US, and look forward to our next visit!

Out for Dinner

It is not very often that we get to go out to dinner with just the three of us. In fact, I think last year’s Christmas Dinner at Tobias’ school may have been the last time. Well, tonight, while Tobias had his Christmas Dinner, we took Lorelei out to dinner as well. It was a nice dinner with a really sweet girl. Oh, and Lorelei and I got to share some ice-cream :-).

Ice Skating

The ice-skating rink is in town. Today we went out there and Lorelei had her first ever ice-skating experience. In this picture it does kind of look like ice-skating, but I can tell you, it is not, not yet anyway. She was able to stand on the ice, and she was able to move a little bit, but I had to keep a firm grip on her the whole time. She did seem to like it and we were out on the ice for quite a while… Both my ankles got poked by a skate and keeping that grip kind of broke my back, but I had a good time nonetheless…

Notice Tobias in the background. He went skating with school on Monday. He was on the ice without anyone’s help. That’s a first too… last year he still needed my support pretty much continuously, but well, when you’re with your peers I guess you kind of have to do it by yourself… Today he had to as well, because I needed all my attention for Lorelei. He did fine. He started our holding on to the railing, but after a while he just went around and around. It is not very confident yet and not very fast either, but he is doing it, and, he is proud of it (and so am I).