Catching up (May)

So obviously I'm really bad at keeping up with our blog.  In the next few days I'm going to try to catch everybody up to what's been happening in our lives.

In the spring, Marcus participated in Start Smart Baseball through the military.  There are no games, but instead they spend the season teaching the younger kids basic skills like throwing, catching, and hitting the ball.

Daddy even made it back to help out for a few practices at the end of the season.

 Dominic even got in on the action.  I think he might have enjoyed it (and learned) more than Marcus.

Mother's Day was pretty low key here.  Eric was in the states for a class, so it was just me and the kids.  (Eric always seems to be out of town for holidays like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and my birthday.  Not sure how he manages it, but I'm pretty sure it's not all luck.)  The boys each made a card for me at church and Dominic decorated this jar of flowers.  

We have this cool shop here on post called Freecycle.  Instead of having a thrift shop, we can donate to Freecycle and then whenever we have time, we go in and take whatever we're interested in for free.  In May we scored a Sit 'n Spin for free!!  The kids all love it and play with it all of the time.

Lauren is finally old enough to play down in the playroom with Marcus and Dominic, which I love.  It makes it much easier to keep everybody happy and playing throughout the day.

While we don't have a zoo in town here, we do have a Wildpark.  It contains animals you would likely see in a petting zoo and a few animals you would be surprised to see.  Everything from moose to owls, as well as goats, bunnies, chickens, and even a lynx.  The boys love it because they can feed the bunnies and goats.

With the weather being pretty miserable 9 months out of the year here, they have a lot of indoor play areas.  There is one owned by a hotel nearby that we had been wanting to check out and we had a rainy Memorial Day that ended up being a great opportunity for it.  It's not as large or involved as the one that we went to in Switzerland, but that was okay with us.  It was definitely a hit and we will be going back as the weather starts getting worse again.

They have all different kinds of ride-on toys around the play area and the boys had fun figuring them all out.

We've discovered that they don't do anything easy here.  You would be hard pressed to find a slide with a regular ladder here in Germany.  There's always some challenging way to get up to the top.  This bridge was 4 x 4's on chains that would swing when you stepped on them.