Cutest moment

I experienced the cutest moment this morning when coming down the stairs. Normally, the boys get up before us and go down stairs where at some point a fight will break out over who had which toy first. This morning i came down the stairs and saw this:

To be clear, Stoney is reading a book to Monty. Despite the fighting, it seems to me that these two brothers love each other.

Christmas

Well, it has come and gone.
We went to see the lights in the city and the nativity by the city hall. The figures in the nativity are statues, the sheep on the other hand, are real.




We made some Gingerbread houses, which actually were made of sugar cookies, because i couldn't find the ingredients for real gingerbread over here. I must say that i had no idea how much work it was to make Gingerbread houses from scratch.



Note how there is a little lego man climbing the roof apparently assisting in the construction of the ginger bread house.

Stoney 's eight birthday

Stoney turned eight today. It is frighting how quick time flies. Man I love that little boy.
Here are the standard Birthday pictures.





Stoney with my mom...

It was also still a great day to be out in the snow. The snow we got earlier last week was to dry to make snowmen, but today Stoney finally got to make his.

First there was one...
Then we had two...

Then there were three
And eventually we had an entire family of snowmen...

ward Christmas party

We had our ward Christmas party on Friday and the boys played in a little nativity play/little drummer boy act.
Stoney was one of the three kings and Monty was a shepherd.





And here is a picture of Leland at the end of the Christmas party.

Snow

We got a snow storm! Yeah! Call me crazy but i just love snow. Love to see it fall, love to walk in it, love to see the world being covered in the white blanket.





Of course, it being Belgium, the schools don't close for anything. Not even a delayed opening despite the six inches of snow this morning. Stoney rode his bike to school anyway. (Monty was sick and stayed home)

Sinterklaas

First of: our computer resurrected. Well, sort of. We had to buy a new hard drive, but that was still cheaper then buying a whole new computer. A friend of Leland was good enough to fix the whole thing. He had to take the entire computer apart, but in the end, it is now up and running again. Yeah!

As every year, we celebrated Sinterklaas day in the beginning of December. Sinterklaas (saint Nicolas) is a cousin of Santa we tell the kids and he comes on December fifth or sixth (depending if you are in Belgium or in the Netherlands)
Since Sinterklaas is a total separate holiday from Christmas, there is no Christmas tree yet and no tree to put the presents under. Usually some bags of presents just 'magically' turn up outside the front door in the traditional Sinterklaas bags.

We celebrated this year's Sinterklaas with Oma and Opa and of course the boys got spoiled again. Little did they know that Sinterklaas got some help from people in the ward.


Monty got a much needed bike helmet.

One of the great presents they got was a little table hockey/billiards/football game.
It's great fun, but they get frustrated because Daddy plays to well. (he probably should let them win sometimes...)

what can I say...?

I haven’t been blogging lately because our computer died… It is still dead to be exact. We got a virus, which turned out to be a rather nasty one. Not just a virus but a ‘worm’. And not just one ‘worm’, three ‘worms’ There are also 17 execute files on the computer, whatever all that means. In my day to day language it just means: the computer is toast.

We are borrowing a tiny little notebook of friends from church for the time being, but we are looking at something more permanent. Of course a new compute costs money, which we do not have. Sometimes it seems that life just never changes.

Leland still doesn’t have a job, but is following Dutch class four days out of the week. We are praying and praying and praying that he will get a job soon. It’s been a year and a half. Enough with the trial already.

More ordinary day to day news: Monty has the stomach flu (that is, we hope it is just the stomach flu and nothing more serious like the Mexican flu or something) and of course, Monty being Monty, he milks it for all that it’s worth. He is so melodramatic. This morning he said: “I have had a stomach pain for years and years and years….”

Whatever kid. Just go take a nap.

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is getting more popular in Europe. When I was little, no one had ever heard of Halloween, but now it is come over this way. They don't really celbrate it properly though, for some reason people seem to think you are only allowed to dress up as something scary. They don't do the trick or treat thing, but the kids get to dress up for school. Stoney and Monty both went as Dracula.
The boys' school actually did a Halloween dance on the playground on Friday (forgot my camera, darn it) to the ultimate Halloween song; Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. It's also the beginning of their fall break. They have a week off, very much needed for Stoney, who seems to be exhausted lately.

What is wrong with this boy?

This little man threw up at school. His teacher asked if she should call home so we could come get him, but he said: "Nah... I am okay. It's just my tummy that is upset."
"Like Leland said: "when I was his age, I was trying to throw up so I could go home."

In any case, he didn't develop a fever so maybe it was just a stomach bug. Like very fall/winter Stoney seems to be very tired again - he just gets that way I guess. He is pale and clingy. Luckily the boys have their fall break coming up and have an entire week of. Hopefully he'll recover some. Like every year I try to fight Stoney's fatigue with multi-vitamins. Unfortunately he doesn’t like the ones that we can buy here. They don't taste exactly like the Flintstone vitamins. I make him eat his anyway.

On a completely separate note: I discovered this black swan in the pond by the abbey near our house. I thought black swans were indigenous to Australia. I don't know how this one got here.

(PS, i don't know why the font chnages half way through this post - it won't change for me...)

He's got it!

Well, after much, much practicing, he has finally gotten the hang of it: riding his bike without training wheels. It was high time, because the training wheels had been bent so often that the metal actually started to crack.
At the same time, he is getting really heavy to carry on the back of our bikes.

The evidence:


Of course the question is, will he still remember tomorrow morning what he did tonight?

What's with the big brown spiders?

Honestly, i think i should charging rent to all those spiders that are setting up shop in our house like it is totally okay. Especially the big brown ones. The daddy-long-legs I can deal with. I don't mind smashing those myself. But the big brown ones? They send me in hysterics. We had one living in our celing lamp for a while and of course I was to scared to even walk underneath the lamp, and Leland didn't want to get it because he really didn't feel like this spider falling on top of him. Even the missionaries chickened out when it came to removing it. You can't tell very well from this picture, but trust me, it's huge!


The spider couldn't get out of the lamp, (the glass is to slippery to climb up to) so we figured we'd leave it alone till it finally kicked the bucket. We got a picture of the dead version of the spider, the shrivelled up version, but it really doesn't do it justice. (It's next to an American nickle by the way).



We found another big brown one in the bathtub one morning. (so glad Leland found it and not me as i was stepping into the shower) and another one in the lamp in the bathroom. I guess all spiders are coming inside for winter...

More monkey business

Is he hanging upside down by just holding on with his toes? Absolutely!



A little update on Stoney: He is in second grade and according to the American system and the Dutch system, this is were he should be, but because Belgium has a different system, he really should be in third grade. But when we got here to years ago we found it better to give him a year of kindergarten first rather then putting him in first grade when he barely spoke the language.

Anyway, he is doing well in school and enjoys it somewhat. He complains about to much work and to little playtime. :-) He is good at match and reading. About writing (in cursive) well... he is getting better.
Biggest problem for him is that (like his mother at that same age) he has a hard time concentrating and gets distracted really easily. That means that sometimes he takes ages to do something. Luckily he is in a class with only twelve kids and there are not as many distractions as there would be in a big class. We talked with the teacher about having him tested for ADD, but she doesn't think he has it. But who knows, there maybe something that can help him stay focused. Meanwhile... he is playing monkey.

back to square 1

So after I have been steadily doing better the past weeks to recover from my second and third hernia, the doctor okayed me going back to work in two more week for half days. Happiness on my part, but more about the fact that i am doing better then the going back to work part.
Of course the before dismissing me the doctor did do some rather painfull test to test the nerve reflexions in my legs. It like getting shocks from an electric wire. Also, after that wanted to check the attachment of the muscles to the nervesystem. The way to do that is evidently to make a tiney little echo by sticking a needle at the stop where the muscle is. Well, 20 needles later, i was happy to get out of there.
But then... One day later. Not doing anything to crazy, just hanging up some laundry, it suddenly returned. All my hernia pains that have been absent were back. The killer pain in my leg, my foot, my toes. The nerve got pinched again by the hernia. Somehow. I am again on the strongest painkillers that are not actually morphine yet and they don't even make the pain dissapear, just tolerable...
What next? Well, go back to the doctor...


On a happier note: Stoney has taken to massaging my schoulders (picture taken before my back acted up again yesterday and i was actually able to sit up). Except he calls it marching my schoulders. LOL.
I am not sure if this is just a sign that he loves me very much, or that he will become a physical therapist when he grows up.

Not now, not tomorrow, not ever!

See this cute little boy? Well, he has a new saying: "not now, not tomorrow, not ever." And you can be sure he doesn't say this with a smile on his face. Pretty much converstations go as such:
"Monty, put your shoes on please."
"Not now, not tomorrow, not ever!"
So when exactly are the terrible two's supposed to be over and done with?

All in all Monty is doing well in school. There have been no more poop-incidents in the new school year (fingers crossed) and he is adapting fairly well. His best friend from the last two years moved and is no longer at this school. We were afraid Monty would be devastated, but he is doing okay. He has a found new best friend and seems happy. He also loves his new teacher and said he wants to invite her to his birthday - never mind that it's not till May.

the fair

The fair came to Leuven, and Oma and Opa gave the boys some money to go, so.... we had a blast!

Pack-rat!!

Stoney has always had a tendency to collect things and a tendency to sort things. I remember him being three and sorting out this box with different colored blocks or something like that at preschool and his teacher was so impressed. I was not surprised, he always has done things like that.

He is still really good at sorting things, but is becoming more and more of a ‘collector’ if I put it nicely, a pack-rat some others would call it.

Last year he started collecting rocks –anything from one inch to five inches. The result: we have a large box with rocks in the back yard. Can’t tell you how many times we have found rocks in the washer, because he had forgotten to empty out his pockets.

Both boys have a habit of bring all kinds of sticks home – they are just like dogs. And we are never allowed to throw them away, because this stick looks like a boat, or this one like a sword and on and on…

In the fall we collect chestnuts and acorns (which we are not allowed to through away till they get moldy). Over the last year Stoney also started collecting feathers – okay, I may have gotten him started on that one – and we now have a large collection of all kinds of feathers: pigeon feathers, duck feathers, swan feathers, chicken feathers, seagull feathers and some special ones that we are not quite sure of which bird they came. We can’t quite fill a pillow case with them, but we are getting there.

And now, this summer he has started a new collection:

That is right: (beer) bottle caps.

a Saturday in September

On Saturday me and the boys spend some quality time together and went for a walk (while Leland was singing a Book of Mormon song at a Catholic funeral, but that is an entirely different story).
We went to feed the swans,


studied the little frogs living in the gutter by the road,



and found lots of chesnuts...




At one point Monty and I didn't see Stoney anywhere and found him, not surprisingly, in a tree.

Back to school

School started again here on September 1st, so life is sort of back to normal. Appropriately enough it was still a gorgeous summer day the day before on 31st of august, but September 1st was dreary and drizzily.
Wait a minute, you may say. September 1st was a Tuesday, why did school start on a Tuesday? Well... Because in Belgium the summer vacation last exactly two months. The first day of vacation is July 1st and the last day is August 31st. So regardless of the day of the week September 1st falls, that's the day they start back up again. (unless of course it falls in the weekend). When in Belgium, do as the Belgians.
Stoney started 2nd grade and Monty is now in 3rd kindergarten (they have three years of kindergarten here, starting at age three).
Monty came home the first day saying that the teacher locked him up... When applying the always necessary "Monty filter" on the story, we finally realized that he was put in time-out in an empty classroom because he wouldn't stop shouting. (Go figure, this kid has only one volume: extra loud). A story which we confirmed with the teacher the next day.
But other then that, no hiccups on the first day. Fingers crossed for the rest of the week (i am not holding my breath for the entire rest of the year).