What the heck and Holy Cow!

"What the heck and Holy Cow"
That is Monty's favorite expression lately. He says it whenever he is surprised. As a matter of fact, he said it a couple of week ago when we were at my parents house in Nederland and my brother Marijn nearly peed his pants laughing about it. It is such a fun thing coming out of such a little boy.

There are some other fun 'language' issues that I should report on. Stoney is pretty much bilingual and doing well at it. He know the difference between both languages and knows who to speak which too. (he actuallty claims that he speaks three languages, because he has one hour of French a week at school - LOL) For Monty, he just mixes both up half the time. Especially at home, because we speak both English and Dutch at home. I think at school he is doing better. His teacher says he is not significantly behind at school when it comes to language comprehension compared to the other kids, although he does get some extra help.
Meanwhile, his Dutch is a lot better then his English. he speaks English with Leland, but still has some funny mispronunciations.
Let's see if you can figure out the following word:
Monty: "It disappeared by mackage" (pronounced like package, but with an M)
We: "It what?"
Monty (impatiently): "It disappeared by mackage!!"
"What?"
Monty (very impatient now): Mackage!!!! Like in Harry Potter!
Ahh... Magic....

And then there are some other typical little kids mispronunciations. "Yellow" is "Lellow"
"Monty; it's YELLOW"
"That's what I said: LELLOW!"

Another funny thing: since we live in Belgium, the boys are speaking Flemish-Dutch and I speak Dutch-Dutch. Frequently I find myself correcting their Dutch ("that's not a real word in Dutch!") only to find out a couple of weeks later that it indeed is a word in Flemish-Dutch. Oh well - I guess we can learn from each other. ;-)

Here are some pictures of the boys playing at school.



Monty has been riding his bike to school lately. He still has the training wheels and he doesn't go nearly as fast as Stoney, but it is a start.



And this is Stoney's latest trick: Sliding down the pole with no hands

The white peacock and the flowers...

This is post of mainly pictures. Leland and I left the boys with Opa and Oma for the day and when to the Keukenhof - for those who don't know, it's a huge flower garden. They had this albino peacock there. Very unusual. It was nice enough to pose for a picture.

2 days at the beach....

Well, on Monday we went to the beach and it looked like this:



Even though the weather inland wasn't great that day, it was at least halfway decent. But when we got to the beach, there was this marine layer of fog and the water temperature was about 40. Brrrr!
Regardless, the boys went in the water and in no time were completely soaked and frozen to the bone. So we went home. (to Opa's and Oma's house)



On Wednesday we went to the beach again, with much better results. The outside temperature was in the low seventees. The water temparature was not much better, but at least we could warm up after getting out of the cold water. Mind you, we didn't actually SWIM. The water was just too cold for that. But we had a fun time.

Kasteel (castle) Muiderslot

We are visiting Opa nd Oma this week and weare having a marvelous time. Today we went to see the Muiderslot castle, which is over 700 years old!



























Monty had his obsesions today. When he fist saw the castle, he said that he didn't want to go in there because there might be 'bad peoplé' in there and once we were in the castle he kept saying that he thought he heard 'bad people'. He also asked about a million times if the 'bad people' were in jail. This boy lives in his own little fantasy world that he can't always pull himself out of.


























They had so much fun stuff to do for kids, it was unbelieveble. They had trails to follow and computer animated games where they could pretend to throw stones at the approcing enemy. They played dress up and even had a jousting contest. Unfortunately all the jousting pictures have come out blurry. (because they wouldn´t sit still - go figure.)






























There also was a falconery and though we didn´t get to see the birds fly, Stoney did get to pet one. Monty didn´t want to, he was scared.






After we visited the castle, naturally the boys did some knight reenactments.






In a nutshell, we had a great day !!

Daylight savings and other problems

How could day light savings time possibly be a problem? (for the record, I am not slow in posting this, western Europe just went to Daylight savings time this last weekend). It so nice, having it staying light a little longer… Well other then the fact that the nature takes care of that on it’s own (it is always light later in the summer, you don’t need to move the clock for that – duh!) of course or kids are not adjusting so well to this ‘Spring ahead’ thing. Actually, it is almost like they did the reverse ‘ Fall back’.

One little clock change, and their schedules are all messed up.

Normally we they start getting ready for bed at 7 and are asleep by 8. Now… It’s 9.00 or 9.30 before they finally fall asleep! And then of course the next morning they are insufferable because they are so tired. And it’s not just the time change, we are saving daylight and it’s suddenly light till 8.30. We still don’t have curtains in the boys bedroom but we have two towels practically stapled to wall to cover the window and there is indeed very little light coming in. But no dice. Monty comes out of his bed every 15 minutes wanting this or that, Monty will just turn the bedroom light on and play with cars, and Stoney figures, oh well, the light is on, I might as well read a book. One time I came to check on them because some ominous noises were coming from upstairs and they were playing tag…

Needless to say… They are driving us crazy. Hopefully they will get used to the new schedule soon and go to sleep on time so they are not so tired the next day and make everybody miserable.

On a related note, now that Spring is finally here (we have been enjoying gorgeous spring weather all week) and we can enjoy the trees butting and flowers starting to come out… well, the cats have Spring in their heads too. Every night, there are concerts a plenty of love sick cats. So Leland and I are not sleeping that great either…

So in a nutshell: Spring is here, welcome insomnia.

It was time for curtains... And who made the curtains? Leland made the curtains. Not without any pain, in Leland's own words: "Well, it only took me four and a half hours, one trip to the store, many questions wondering if I had screwed the entire thing up, one series of seam ripping, and several times of stretcheing my back, but the curtains are finished. I also made two pillow cases for the boys out of extra material."

And look how pretty these curtains turned out!! (It was tricky too because its a roof window.

Is he the son of a home-ed teacher or what?



















Tonight we actually had the first barbecue of the season! It reached the high 60's today and we decided to have a barbecue. Little mishap: I burnt my eyebrow during teh barbecue. How did i do that you may wonder? Flying ashes.




Picture of the sunset from our backyard.