Hoover craft lawnmower

This is our latest gadget, (well, our only gadget actually). Courtesy of my parents. It's a lawnmower without wheels. It sort of hovers over the grass.

Hernia # 2

For those of you who not read facebook...
I have been diagnosed with a second herniated disc this week. Probably caused by carrying all the tabels outside for the ward BBQ.
On Monday night I slowly developed an excruciating pain starting from buttocks till toes in my right leg. I didn't think it was my hernia, because the hernia i already had, is on the left. And besides, it feels differently. This pain can be best compared with a cramp in your leg. You know how much that hurts and how you want to get rid of it as soon as possible? Well, that's what it feels like, except i can't get rid of it.
I went to the doctor on tuesday morning, who gave me some painkillers, but unfortunately, they didn't make a dent in the pain at all. So on wednesday Leland called the doctor and got something stronger. I am still not pain free, but it's bareable now.
I also had a CT scan done on wednesday, which confirmed what the doctor already suspected: I ahve now two hernias in my back. The first (old) one is between disc L3 AND L4 on the right side of my spine, the second (new) one is between discs L4 and L5 on the left side of my spine. Yeah me!
The doctor prescribed rest for now, because often with a hernia the body will addapt and you'll be able to live pain free most of the time (which is true, because the first hernia has only bothered me a couple of times during the last ten years) So we are going to see what my body does. If it's not adapting in the next cuple of weeks or so, they'll probably do some version of an epidural, which will take the presure of the nerves for a long time.
My family doctor has a hernia herself and she has had this epidural like shot and hasn't had any problems since. She also said that if you talk to a surgeon, they'll probably talk you into having surgery, but she has seen in het many years of practise as a family doctor, that people who do have the hernia surgerically removed often get it back within a few years, so she doesn't recommend that, unless i start to loose all feeling in my legs.
So here is your update on me. I am on sick leave at least till next friday (4 sept) and then we'll see. Luckily the boys are with their oma and opa this week and net week they'll go back to school. I would be hard to be laying on th couch all the time with them demanding attention constantly. I do miss them, but luckily they call me every day. They sound so cute on the phone. Monty even sounds like a normal five year old. An Stoney is finally getting over his phone fear.

"My precious!!!"

So Leland swears that he didn't show the 'Lords of the Rings' movies to the boys, but for some reason we had the following incident happening:
We were at large park and the boys were off climbing and playing. After a while Monty comes back with a bunch of sticks (no surprises there) and a piece of plastic with a hook, which looks like it may have been part of a clothes hanger at some point.
He holds the plastic hook to his cheek and says: "This is my beloved, this is my precious."

What the heck? As if this kid doesn't do enough crazy things yet.

monkey business

We went to the zoo yesterday, me and the boys. Leland had Dutch class.
Both boys had been to this zoo on a schooltrip this year, but Monty hadn't gotten to see the giraffes and Stoney complained that there was lots of stuff he didn't get to do with school, so we went together. First stop were the giraffes, because Monty really wanted to see them this time.

This zoo has twin baby giraffes, which wouldn't be caught in the same picture, but here is one of them:


It was a very warm day and most of them wouldn't cooperate for pictures. They were all laying in the shade and going "we'll be cute again another day."

We did get a lot pictures with stork, of which the zoo had about 20. They were everywhere.


This zoo had a lot of play area's for kids, which let to a lot of monkey business on the boys' part.





There were also a couple of little pull -boats that the boys went on.

And then of course, there were the trampolines:



In other words: we had another great day ;-)

More vacation pictures

a post about lighthouses, strong winds and horses pulling a rescue boat

We had a lovely time going on holidays. It was us and the boys and my parents, we went to the Dutch island called Ameland for a week. It's just to the north of the country and you have to take a ferry to get there. We had an amazing time! The weather was not always great, and the wind often cold, but still we enjoyed the trip so much!

On the first day at the island we visited the lighthouse. It was built in 1880. You could climb it (236 steps) and we all did, except my mom who doesn’t like heights. The wind up there was tremendous. Stoney nearly gave me a heart attack when he stuck his head and chest through the railing to look where Oma was down there.

climbing the lighthouse...

very windy up here!!

This picture is taken from the top of the lighthouse, viewing the North Sea. If you look carefully you can see the wizard prison Azkaban in the distance.

view in the other direction

After we climbed the lighthouse we went for a walk in the lighthouse area, where there were several kids’ playgrounds along the trail, resembling a whale, fisher’s boats and a rescue boat. Of course Stoney could be found at the highest point: the crow’s nest.

In the evening we went to a demonstration of the ‘horse rescue boat’. Back in the days when there were no moterized vehicles – and for a long time after that actually – they used to launch the rescue boat into the sea with horses. They did a demonstration of this at the beach.

The horses first pull the boat where it is going to be launched and then they get roped to the sides.

While we waited for the demonstration to start it took the boys’ all of one minute to be soaked to their waist. We had put them in boots and jeans because it really wasn’t that warm, mid sixties and there was a cold wind.

In between, we also we ran into Jack Sparrow.

And then there was a chaotic hour when the launch of the boat kept getting postponed, because they didn’t dare do it at the spot they had originally picked. A number of years ago there was a big accident when horses could not get back to the shore and all drowned, because they got into the sea too deep and the current was too strong. Since then, they are always very careful. The Dutch coast is really treacherous, because it has many sandbanks with deep trenches in between. Anyway, in the end they decided to move the boat launch about 300 meters to the south-west, but in all this chaos, we all lost track of each other. Monty and me stuck together, but everyone else got separated. Leland stayed stationary at the spot where he was, hoping that someone would spot him sticking out above everyone. Eventually he found my mom – or she found him – and then they ran into my dad. Meanwhile Stoney had been lost for over half an hour but he didn’t seem to mind. In the end he just popped up and acted as if nothing happened. He wasn’t one bit concerned about being lost. “What do you mean lost? I was just playing.”

In the end we all found each other back again and stripped the boys of their soaked pants before we got in the car. The combined four boots of them were good for about a gallon of water.

I am going to post more pictures, but I will do it in a separate post, because otherwise our computer will crash trying to upload such a large blog at one time.