winter wonderland

I think i may have figured out the slide show thing now. (thanks Tammy)Now i just need to figure out how to make these pictures bigger.
These are some pictures of our winter wonderland that we had here this weekend. There was no snow involved. It was just foggy and freezing at the same time. The moisture clung to everything and then froze.

Sinterklaas

It's that time of year again. And in the Netherlands and Belgium that means that we celebrate Sinterklaas. The official date is december 10th, but we celebrated it on the 8th, because my brothers, sister-in-law and parents were coming from Nederland. We had a great time. "Sinterklaas" brought packages in some big bags and as you can see in the pictures: Monty about crawled into the bags.



The boys were spoiled -as is the case when there is lots of family around and they had a great time. Funny how Monty was so excited about the presents in general, that he was just as excited to hand presents to other family members as he was to open them himself. One of the things they got was the play-dough Octopus. (that is what they are unwrapping in the picture below) Don't know if they are advertising that heavenly in the States too, probably do. Sinterklaas figured that it would be a good indoor activity during these cold winter months. Indeed they have already played with it a lot.




They also got this puzzle of the world that comes with a little woind-up plane that 'flies' over the world. Monty got very excited every time the plane made it over all continents and got back to it's starting point.
Stoney also got some bike supplies. He is really into riding his bike now and usually rides it to school (which is a 15 minute ride at his speed) a lot of days. Sinterklaas gave him a bell for on his bike and a tall orange flag so he is more visable.

We will keep Christmas kind of low key, because we did most of our presents at Sinterklaas-time. That way Christmas will be more about Christ and less about all the new toys. At least, that is the plan of the parents. :)
We will go visit my parents the day after Christmas for a few days and hopefully go to the Temple while we are there.

By the way: someone really ought to tell me how to do that 'slideshow' picture thing. It would be nice to use sometimes

Ikke don't

Well we are another week or so further. I am finally getting used to my job and actually start to enjoy it some. We'll see how i feel in a couple of weeks.
Stoney speak Dutch really well now, but he sometimes gets help from a remedial teacher at school, just because he is a little behind of where he should be -compared to his classmates. All in all i think he speaks it really well. Today we went to the bank (which is bank in Dutch) and Stoney was all indignified because he found out that the Dutch word Bank can also mean couch or bench. He thought it was the most ridiculous thing he ever heard. How can it mean such different things? He decided that the language should be changed. Bank should either mean bank or couch/bench. Not both.
Monty's Dutch and English are in the stage of such an utter mess that even I have a hard time understanding him, and i speak both languages. He totally uses them together. Like: "Ikke first" (me first) or "I gestopt in Mommy's oortjes" (I put it in Mommy's ears). When he just uses them togteher in one sentence i can most of the time figure out what he is saying. But unfortunately he also starts to mix up the languages within the words. How you ask? Well, in Ducth you can put '(t)je' behind any word and make it smaller. "Aap" is monkey, but "aapje" is little monkey. Like Leland says: Monty figures that if you put "tje" behind a word it makes it Dutch. So now he is saying things like: Bridge-je, paper-tje etc. And he gets the plural and stuff mixed up too. IN Dutch plural is usually with (s)en on the end of a word. So Monty talks about "cow-sen" (which means stockings in Dutch) and "horse-en". I am hoping that this speech thing will fix itself as we are here longer.

These pictures are off a couple of weeks ago when we went to the Netherlands.

week in brief

This is our week in brief:

• Stoney learnt that to much of a good thing is not good. He ate eighteen (large) carrots and got sick.
• I picked up the boys late from school one day and they were dissapointed they couldn't stay and play with the other kids in after school care
• Monty 'only' pooped in his pants twice this week
• Monty also slept through the night twice this week. It is such a surprise to wake up in the morning and find that you have slept all night long.
  
• Leland and the boys got drenched in a great outpour when he went to pick up the kids from school. Then Stoney had forgotten his stuffed animal at school so they had to go back through the 'monsoon' rains.

The week in not so brief:
I started a job and i am not sure how i feel about it. I will work 4 1/2 days. I got wednesday afternoon off because the boys have early dismissal that day and the after school care only goes till 2.00 pm. I can bring the boys to school in the morning at 8.30 and then go straight to work. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday they'll have to go to afterschool care for an hour or two. I am having a real hard time with that. I KNOW that they actually love to play after school with the other kids and i KNOW that they are not going to die of neglect by going to afterschool care for 5 hours a week - but i am still having a very hard time with it. Not sure why it is freaking me out so much. Maybe because i don't like the job that much... Maybe because it's been a while since i actually worked five days a week (okay, 4,5) It is just hard for me to go pick up the boys after 5.30 when it is already dark, and then come home, feed them dinner and put them straight in bed. It is really ridiculous, since the time between school and dinner and bedtime is usually the time when they are most obnoxious. Constantly picking fights with each other and not listening to a word i am saying. So i get to miss most of that by being at work. But still, it is kind of hard on me.
Leland can pick up the boys from school on thursday and friday and probably on some of the other days next semester, because he won't have as many classes then. He picked them up last thursday and friday (and got drenched) and both days they were driving him crazy. They fought over who was the one that got to the car first, they fought over who got into the car first, they fought over who got out of the car first and on and on. SO actually, that kind of makes me feel better. Then i don't feel so bad that I was at work.
About the job: My titel is project coordinator, which sounds very fancy, but it really kind of boring. It is mostly administrative stuff. The company i work for (SDL) coordinates translations. I my case i work on a project for Renault ( a french car company) and every thing that they need translated, goes through SDL. The manuals for their cars, the repair manuals, the commercial flyers etc etc. I need to keep track and outsouce some of the translations. There is a big problem with the Romanian translation office, because almost all translators went on strike and walked out on the company. The only remaining person in that office is in the hospital. Anyway, we need to find freelancers in Romania to do the translations, and then send them the work that needs to be translated, make sure they keep their deadlines etc. As i am writing this down it really doesn't sound that boring, but i assure you it is.
Anyway, i am working on an temp basis right now. After two months they might give me a year contract, if i want it. We'll see.
The main benefit is that it is really easy for me to get to. I bring the boys to school in the morning (by bike, obviously) and just continue along the same road and get to my office ten minutes later (five if i ride really fast). So it is convinient, just... I don't like the job that much. but hey, as they say in Dutch, "he who doesn't work, won't eat." and it was high time i got a job and we got some cash.

Monty's girlie curls

So we went to visit my (anne's)family last week and my mom thinks we should cut Monty's hair, because he is really starting to look like a girl with his long curls. Indeed a lot of people who don't know him have been revering to him as a girl. ("Your daughter is so cute." "Thanks, but he is a boy.")It is true that Monty's hair (washed and wet) reaches between his shoulder blades, but in the curled version it barely reaches his shoulders. Besides, doesn't he just look so darn cute with his curly hair? I realize that at some point he is going to realize that people are calling him a girl, but i figure then it is early enough to cut his hair. I'm just afraid those curls will never come back when we cut his hair.

Traffic violation on a bicycle...

Well, there is a first for everything. I got a ticket the other day for riding my bicycle the wrong way on a one-way street. I honestly had not seen the sign. And it would have been okay, if i hadn't met a cop's car on the way down the street. He braked and pointed to the sign. So i made an apologetic face and said "sorry." I thought that was the end of it. But then a street or so later the cop caught up with me again and yelled at me. "Why did you think i was pointing to the one-way sign? So you could ignore me?"
"no," i said, "i thought you pointed to it so that i would know for the next time."
Anyway, he was not amused. And then i didn't have ID on me which was another violation, but at least he didn't give me a ticket for that. I don't know yet how much this is going to cost me. I will get it in the mail.

The boys are making great progress. Stoney has finally learned to swing by himself (i thought i was going to have to push him fro the rest of his life) and he also learned to ride a bike without training wheels. Monty has finally gotten the hang of peddeling on the tricycle.
Stoney's Dutch is pretty good. Monty speaks a mixture of Dutchlish. "Ikke want the auto" and "Monty heeft 'wonnen." Ther are a couple of sentences that he's got down pretty well: "dat mag niet" (that is not allowed) and "Foei, foei, foei" (naughty, naughty, naughty) I suppose he hears those at school a lot =)

The temperature has dropped drastically here. It has been freezing overnight and it only warms up slightly above freezing during the day. It's not normal to be this cold this early in the season, it's just a cold spell. But meanwhile, we are bundeling up and even with that, the boys are shivering in the bakfiets in the morning.

trashbags: 2 euro a piece

Trash management is interesting here. Recycling and trash separation is mandatory. There are different colored trash bags for different kinds of trash. And you have to buy the special trash bags from your city. If you use a different kind of trash bag the waste truck just won't take it. The white trash bag that collects everything that doesn't go into any other the other bags costs 2 euros a piece!!! (in case you wonder it is about $2.50) They make it so high to encourage you to recycle i guess. The blue trash bag is a lot cheaper, it takes empty plastic bottles, empty cans etc. Last week i saw a whole bunch of blue trash bags by a house that the waste truck had left behind. They had big red stickers on them: REJECTED. The blue trash bags are a little see through and i guess the waste collectors just leave it behind if they see something in there that doesn't belong there.
Such are our trash adventures in Belgium

On an entire different note, Monty is being a royal pain in the butt lately. (i guess the topic is related, cause i wonder sometimes if i should put him in the trash...) He is going all out to make everyone's life miserable. Whenever we say yes, he'll say no, regardless of what it is about. He has been hitting Stoney and then completely unimpressed when you scold him about it. He did well with being potty trained for a while, but last week -and this- he has been having accidents on a daily basis. (and again seems completely unimpressed when you get angry about it). And then there is the sleeping issue. This sommer, oh happy day, for a while he would go to bed at seven and not wake up till 6 am. Six is still earlier then i would like, but hey, it is improvement. But since we are in Belgium he is back to what he did a year ago: waking up every four hours. That means, waking up between eleven and midnight and then sometime between 3 and 4 am. And it would be more tolerable if he would just go back to sleep within ten minutes, but he doesn't. He prefers to have temper tantrums at these ungodly hours. Every night there is something. Sometimes he'll have a fit because he wants to get in bed with us, and he is not allowed. Sometimes he'll have a fit because Leland gets up with him, instead of Anne. Or he'll have a fit because he wants you to come lay in bed with him, or because he wants his milk cup filled and you are not doing it quickly enough, or because he has decided it is morning time and wants to get up....
It is very, very tiring. We are praying every night that he'll please, please, sleep through the night, but so far, no dice. The only silver lining in all this is that at least Stoney is a pretty deep sleeper and usually won't wake-up when Monty goes at it.
We are very grateful he is going to school full-day, because we're not sure we'd survive having him home all day long. He loves school too, so that is good. I often wonder what happened to my sweet little boy. I guess the only explanation is that he is 3...

Belgie (Belgium)

Here is another picture of the bakfiets for the fans...
I should tell you the funny story about how Monty thinks our house is called Belgie (Belgium). He always refers to it as Belgium. "Are we going to Belgium?" or "I don't want to go to Belgium..." I think it started when we were getting ready to move down here and we kept telling him that we were moving to Belgium. So when we finally got here he decided that the house was Belgium. So now it's name is Belgium.
Too funny!


We have a picture supply problem, because Leland didn't bring the connector cable from the camera to the computer. He says that I told him not to bring it, but I can't remember saying that. Maybe I did, I might have had a moment of insanity. In any case, i need to find a place where we can just plug in our memory card and it will put the pictures on a cd or something, but haven't gotten to that yet. The bakfiets pictures were taken by my mom and the picture of my mom with the boys was taken by her camera. My parents came to visit us a week or so ago. It is nice to have them so much closer.
Monty is obviously tired in this picture.

Comment about the background: There are electrical cords everywhere in our living room. The house is about 100 years old and my guess is they put in the electrical outlets later. But every electrical socket has only room for one plug-in, and with today's modern equipment... We need one for the computer, one for the modem, one for the cable box, one for the tv, one for the charge cord for the phone, etc. So we have several power strips in our living room.

Bakfiets

I have to tell you about this bike that we got. I hope I can get the picture to show up on the website. It is great.

This type of bike is called a “bakfiets” which means, box bike. They are fairly common in the Netherlands but still a novelty in Belgium. We get quite a few stares, especially the time when I accidentally rode into an underground parking garage! Luckily I don’t embarrass that easily.

We use it to transport the boys anywhere, but mainly to school. Their school is more then half an hours walk away, so we take the bike, that way it only takes ten minutes. It is also very convinient for shopping. I must say that its a little tricky at first finding your balance, and it gets ugly when the boys decide to hang out, but oh well. It can be quite cold in the mornings here, with little clouds of steam coming out of our mouth, so in the morning we bundle the boys up for school in mittens and hats, but by afternoon when school lets out it's usually close to seventy, so ten they can ride in their t-shirts. I am kinda afraid that this fancy bike gets stolen, so we have three locks on it. At home we always put it in our hall, because we don't have a shed (or a yard for that matter).

The mess of getting settled

Well, we are here now. All moved in at our house in Korbeek-Lo (which is just outside of Leuven). As always when you move, especially when you move to a different country, there is a lot of hassle. On Monday we went to Leuven with a long list of things to do, unfortunately, it was a local holiday, and all departments of the university were closed. The bank was closed to, so we didn’t get a ton of things accomplished that day.
Tuesday everything we needed to be open was open, and we went a ton of places: the international student office, the registration office, the social services department for international students, the housing department for international students… Then we went to the bank and opened an account, went to the mobile phone store only to find out that we can’t just put a new sim-card in Leland’s American phone, like you can do with European phones. Most American phones are sim-locked, apparently. Then we went to the place where students can rent bikes for just about nothing. Leland rented a bike for an entire year for only 60 euros!
Anyway, to explain why we had to go to all these offices at the university (by the way, like most European universities, it is spread out over the entire city, so we walked all over town getting this done) we had a little problem arise with the house that we rented.
Our landlady said we couldn’t use the house address to register us. Leland’s visa requires that he gets registered at the local town hall of the city were we live. The landlady said it would mess up the taxes if we used the houses address as our living address. So we talked to all these people at the university to get it straighten out. Nobody really knew what in the world the landlady was talking about and eventually the lady at the housing office said that as long as we are listed as ‘temporary residents’ it shouldn’t matter for the tax purposes of the landlady/landlord.
So on Wednesday we went on a wild goose chase to find the city hall. Don’t get me wrong, the city hall in Leuven itself is smack in the middle of town and you can’t overlook, but since we live just outside of Leuven, we fall under the city limits of Bierbeek. Bierbeek is just a bunch of small villages that are one “city” for administrative purposes. The bus that drives by our house also stops by a bus stop called “gemeentehuis” which means city hall. So we rode our bikes following the trail of the bus. Well, what do you know, the bus stop “city hall” is nowhere near any city hall. Luckily we did find a street map that indicated where the actual city hall is. It was in a completely different town. We rode our bikes for an hour and a half through the middle of nowhere. Very pretty landscape with pretty houses, but mostly accompanied with cow smell. =) Leland says that this was his tour-de-France. I figured that by the time we got to the city hall, it would be closed or something, that would be our luck, but it was open. It turned out though that there is a problem with us living in this house. The landlord lives in a house that is directly behind ours, and officially they are one residence. I am not sure what the rules are in America, but here you need to get permission to divide one residence in two, and the landlord had never gotten that… The city hall people said they will take care of it, but I am a little afraid we are majorly ticking off the landlord by this. I don’t want to get them in trouble, especially after they have been so nice and helpful to us. They had old stuffed animals from their kids and put them in the boys room before we got here, they brought us some little kids chairs and all kinds of other nice things that they are really not required to do. So I don’t want to upset them, but we had no choice of getting us registered here in the town. The students that lived in this house before us, were all from Belgium, and they just left their place of residence at their parents address, but we can’t do that, because we have to have an address in Belgium… Anyway we will see what happens…

The boys' school

Well, we are here =)
The boys start school on Monday the 3rd of september. Monty can go to kindergarten too, because they can start at age 3 here. They do have to be potty trained though and monty is only so-so. I am afraid his teacher will give him back after a week and say: "bring him back after christmas when he no longer poops in his pants." We have hopes that he will be intimidated enough by the fact that he is going to school to actually use the potty.
The boys'school is really small. There is just one class for every age group. That makes it kind of nice. Stoney will be in 3rd kindergarten class and Monty will be in 1st kindergarten class. They are in a small building where the three kindergarten classes are located, right across the hall from eachother. The school is a little ways away, little over a mile i think. We ride the bike there. There is an elementary school just around the corner from us too, but it's a catholic school and we decided to go with the public school instead.

I think this is in Dutch...

Not sure if this is just my computer, or if everyone reading this gets it too: All standard comments are in Dutch. The days, months etc... Well, you can probably figure it out.