Sorry, i just don't have the time....

Here is a blanket announcement. I have a long list of all the things that I love to do but do not have time for:

• I do not have time to make Christmas cards
• I do not have time to scrapbook
• I do not have time to write
• I do not have time to be a decent RS president
  
• I do not have time to be sociable
• I do not have time to read anyones blogs anymore
  
• I do not have time to bake cookies
  

And related to those on facebook:

• I do not have time to be kidnapped to Cancun, London or any other place in the world
• I do not have time to build an army of Snowmen
• I do not have time to receive "cupcakes" or "Flowers" by facebook
• I do not have time to play scrabble online

Unfortunately the working full-time, being a Relief Society pres, having two young children and being out of money all the time is really getting to me. I have been sick, tired and sick again and i feel like i am about to keel over all the time.
I do however have time to love my children and am grateful for the smaller things in life: a Christmas tree, candles burning and my husband cooking me dinner after a long day. I am especially gratefull for Monty not choking to death on the marble he got down his troat the other day....

On a little brighter note: We celebrated Sinterklaas with my family on december sixth - as they do in the Netherlands and Belgium. We even got a special visit from Sint Nicolaas in Oma's and Opa's house!!

Is it a monster? Is it madness? Is it menopause? No it is Monty

(happy halloween)

Forget about the terrible two's, meet the ferocious fours... Good grief, the temper tantrums that that boy throws. I don't remember Stoney being this bad at four... but maybe i have a selective memory. It is just temper tantrum after temper tantrum. And all this yelling that he does! The "funny" thing is that he has some manners during his tantrums. Stamping his foot on the floor, yelling: "Alsjeblieft!!!" which means "please". Well honey, i am glad you are saying "please", but the answer is still no. He has clearly picked up some phrases that his teacher uses: "Onmiddelijk" which means immediately. So Mommy, you need to get me my cup with milk IMMEDIATELY! And it is the same everyday. I don't want to get dressed (temper tantrum), I want chocolate milk for breakfast (temper tantrum), i want to watch tv (temper tantrum), i don't want to brush my teeth (temper tantrum) And i want a chocolate chip cookie right now, immediately, IMMEDIATELY, IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!!
You'd think that by being consistent and making rules clear and establishing a set pattern of doing things, he'd settle down. After all, if you throw the same temper tantrum every day,and you never get what you want, then why spend the energy? But i guess he is not in full control of his temper tantrums, by which i mean, he hasn't learned to let logic dominate his immediate feelings (which is why i compare it to menopause).

Meanwhile, he still has his pooping problem. "I don't want to sit on the potty! EVER!"
We tried all forms of bribe, but he won't even do it for lollipops, which are his favorite. We tried threatening him. He always goes and hides somewhere to sit on the floor to suppress the natural process instead of going to the potty. So Leland said: "I am going to take a toy away when you do that." Monty hides under the desk to do his "suppressing" and yells: "you can take a toy from me." Then we said: "we are going to spank you if you do that instead of going to the potty." Monty hides behind the couch to suppress this nr 2 movement and yells : "You can spank me later." Deep, deep sigh.
Very, very slowly there seems to be a little improvement. Sometimes, when he is in the right mind set, he surprises us and goes to the bathroom all on his own and shouts: "Mommy i did kaka!" I am afraid he is just going to have to outgrow it.... Hopefully SOON.

Meanwhile some more, he is slowly getting a little better about staying in his bed at night. Not every night though. Most of the time he just wakes up very early in the morning lately. Last week he was on the 5.30 schedule. And then of course throwing a temper tantrum because he has decided that it is morning time and is highly ticked off that we won't get up yet.
Last night he pulled a new one: he started sleep walking. He has not done that before, but he did last night. He came marching down the stairs, having a complete conversation with someone who wasn't there, and then crawled in bed with us. He laughed and giggled, all while being sound asleep. It was strange. How do we get him to stay in his bed when he starts to sleep walk? It is hard enough to keep him in his own bed when he wakes up, let alone when he is sound asleep!!!

The child is going to do me in.
Luckily all is well with Stoney most of the time, he is starting to grow up some and to be a little less of a mommy's boy and a little more responsible. He got a really good report card right before their fall break ( i think they get 4 reports a year here) and i am very proud of him.

Below are some pictures of them by the pedestrian bridge just behind our house. Here we go and watch trains go by. The train track runs just behind our back yard, but there is a dirt wall with trees in between us and the tracks, so we can't see the trains from our house too well.
So we go here and watch trains, and then one more, and one more and then just one very last one, and just one very last one for Monty. Monty can sit there for hours....

Fall 2008

Well, it's been a long while... First we were super busy, then the computer broke, then my camera had no batteries so I couldn't transfer the pictures and suddenly we are in the end of October. For the record, our computer got fixed. The IT student services of the university did it for free, a week before Leland's one year membership ran out.

Some developments: Stoney is pretty much toothless now. He lost his first tooth a while ago and then lost three more in a period of ten days. He looks like this:




Fall has started here. It’s not super cold, but it is pretty chilly in the morning when we bring the boys to school. We already dug out the mittens just for the frosty mornings. What also comes with fall is the amount of spiders that uses our back yard as hunting ground. You can see one of us in the morning sticking a broom out in front of us like it is a jousting pole, to get rid of all the spider webs when we are making our way to the trash can. And then I haven’t even talked about the slugs yet. I mean, you are watching the broom stick, watching for spiderwebs the size of a small car… so you don’t look at the ground and then step on one of the hundred slugs that seem to reappear every night. Smash. And then you end up tracking slug guts all over the house. *headache*

Meanwhile we are getting settled into the school routine again. Monty and Stoney are both in a class of just 11 kids which means a lot of personal attention. Monty is enjoying kindergarten a lot more then he did last year. Stoney does enjoy going to school again, and is learning to read very quickly i think, but he is not to thrilled about the lack of play time in 1^st grade. They are learning cursive writing from first grade on (not sure how they do it in the US) and he thinks practicing letters is just the most boring thing to do. But other then that, he is excited. They go swimming once every two weeks and have PE every week and those are some of his favorite things.
In Stoney’s school –which is a non denominational school – they get religion education from 1^st grade on but they have a large choice of what religion education they want. Obviously, LDS is not one of them though. The choices were: Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Islam or non conventional (which means pretty much the philosophies of men – god is not supposed to be mentioned in those classes) So after a lot of agony, we decided to have Stoney take the Protestant classes, because we figured he might at least have some bible stories taught to him. Most of the kids in his class are either Islam (there are a good number of Muslims at his school, probably because they offer Islam) or Catholic (but we didn’t want him to be with a large group of kids who all will do their first communion next year). So anyway, we ended up with prostestant. Well, turns out, he is the entire kid in the entire school taking that class ! But they have a teacher especially for him. It is kind of strange. So far he has enjoyed it.

Here are some fall pictures of the boys.

From okt 2008

From okt 2008

From okt 2008

From okt 2008

I am also posting some pictures of the Abby close to our house. There are a lot of water birds living in the lakes right there as well and a group of cows. I have given them names: Virginia, Triangle, Horizon, Freckles, Gorbatsjov and the five white ladies. Naturally, Leland shakes his head at me and reminds me that they are just cows that will end up on someones plate some day.

A cow related question from Stoney: if cows make milk from grass, why can't we make milk from grass?

Moving #2

Well, we moved.
Naturally, it was the hottest day of the year when we moved: 32 celcuis, that is about 90 Fahrenheit. Leland and the missionaries in our ward did most of the lifting and moving. And you have to realize that in our new house the stairs are rather steep. I mean, they are almost like a ladder.

In any case, we have been here for about a week now and just love the house and the little yard it has. We have also been blessed with great weather (not quite 90 luckily, but in the seventies) We have been eating dinner outside for almost every night since we got here. (which works out good, because we don't have a dinner table yet) It's wonderful just sitting outside in the yard in the evening till ten. (It doesn't get dark here till ten in August, of course on the flip side, in December and January it stays dark in the morning till nine and gets dark again at 4.30). The back of our house borders on some train track (which the boys LOVE) and behind that is real quiet countryside area with an Abby that plays beautiful bell music every half hour. Ah, it has been heaven.

Here is some photo proof that we have had nice weather:


Of course, it being us, nothing can go too smoothly for to long. We got a washer for free from some other American student here that went back to the states. Well, third load of laundry it short circuited and we lost power. End of that washer. (We bought a second hand one a couple of days later - that one actually comes with a 6 month warranty.) Same day we short circuited again and lost power again when the pan on the electric stove majorly boiled over. I actually think it happened a third time but i forget when...
Then we had no internet or land line for the phone yet and the phone people had to dig the street open to attach us to the network.
And, most pressing, the bathtub turned out to be leaking and we had a curtain of rain in our living room second day we were there. But, the rental company send someone to fix that, so hopefully there will be no further problems.

Then there is the issue with the lamps. All lamp fixtures looked like this:

So needless to say, we needed to do something about it. But if you have ten lamp fixtures like that, it can get kind of expensive to buy lamp covers for all of them. But we found so cheap deal and got about half of them covered now.

I will put up some more pictures of our new house when we are a little more settled. We are still in the boxes a bit simply because we don't have closets and bookshelves yet to put everything.

Moving...

Just a quick note.
We are moving August 1 and will be without internet access till at least the 8th of August. Our home phone number should be the same, but in case something goes haywire with the transfer of the number, we can be reached at our mobile phones.

Questions....

Okay, let's play a little jeopardy:
Here is the clue:
This was the reason Leland used the vacuum cleaner on the roof of the house.
(i am making it multiple choice)
What is...
a) The roof was just dirty and he was in a cleany mood
b) He wanted to scare the cat that was on the roof making a lot of noise
c) He used it to suck up the water from the gutter
d) he used it to suck up the umbrella that Stoney had dropped in the gutter while 'fishing'.

And the correct answer is .... d (allthough I must say that b is not all that unlikely)
The boys have great fun with the skylight in our attic. On this day they had taken their umbrellas upstairs, hung them out of the sky light dangling on their cords and of course Stoney's umbrella got hooked behind something and didn't make it back up. So Stoney comes back downstairs and tells Leland that he went fishing and lost his umbrella.
Leland tried to reach out over the roof, but couldn't get the umbrella. He tried hooking it on to something, but still couldn't get it. Finally he got the ingenious idea to use the vacuum cleaner. He hung the vacuum hose out of the sky light and abracadabra ... Back up came the umbrella.

An couple of days earlier the boys had also played with the sky light and -unbeknown to us - opened it up all the way and then left it that way. Then a huge rain storm came over and next thing you know, a puddle the size of lake superior on our bed. (our beds are right under the skylight)


Other questions
These are all question Stoney has, that usually seem to be in need of an immediate answer right at bed time:

• "Do Daddy kangaroos have a pouch and if yes, why?"
• "Do sharks eat Octopusses?"
• "What happens when snow hits fire? What if it is a lot of fire and just a little bit of snow? "What if it is the other way around?"
• "What happens when water hits the sun?"
• "If ham is meat from a pig, how do they get the blood out?"
• "What happens when paper gets wet? what about plastic? what about metal? what about rubber?"
• "How does a caterpillar know how to build a cocoon?"
  
• "What happens when lightning hits water?"
• "Why does Santa not get dirty when he goes down the chimney?

And on and on....

Then there are Stoney's other questions in the category "I don't know". Meaning, that that is the only answer i can give to the question.
"Why is the bus late?" (I don't know)
"Why has the train conductor not come yet?" (I don't know)
"If we are not stopping for a train station, then why is the train slowing down?" (I don't know)
"Why is that car going faster then the train?" (I don't know)
"Why does that cloud have a silly shape?" (I don't know)
"Why is that man riding his bike so fast?" (I don't know)
"Why didn't they make a bus station closer by?" ( i don't know)
And on and on... Like Niagara falls, going on and on.
At least in the first category, i could look up the answers in an encyclopedia or the internet or something if I wanted too.
Monty got a "big-boy-bike" for his birthday and this weekend he finally rid it. He was a littel afraid of it because it is so much higher then his trike. But now he likes it.
Here is the first pictures:

Leland Graduated!!

In the category ‘weird’ :

• I finally have ten nails on ten fingers again. Long story, I got an infection under one of my nails several months ago and it fell off. Well, it finally grew back.

• Most absurd find in the fridge: A live caterpillar crawling on the inside of the door.

THE BIG NEWS
As many of you may know by now, Leland passed all his exams and is now the proud owner of a master’s degree in European politics. (He will not get the actual paper diploma till march or so - but that is an entirely different story)

As to the question if he would recommend anyone else to take classes here he would say that when studying a topic like he did, it’s definitely worth it. You wouldn’t be able to study the European Union in the depth that he has studied it here, back in the US.

By the same token though, the classes here have turned out much harder and more intense than any of the master’s classes he had previously taken at George Mason. Add to that the professors here are not very predictable. They say they want you to use your own brain, but then grade you down when you disagree with their personal opinion.

But one way or the other, thoughts about hiring a hitman for certain professors aside, he passed!!! Yeah! Now the job hunt is getting started. (well, it already started, but now it is getting up to speed in earnest.)


Meanwhile....
The boys have their summer break which covers the months July and August. Since we are moving and stuff, we are not planning on going anywhere. Because I have to work most of the summer (which I hate, by the way) and Leland will go crazy if he is home with the boys for two months straight, we enrolled them in a summer day camp. The kids have been three days last week and really liked it. We love this summer camp thing. They are really focused on different age groups and have very fun activities. Plus, it is an absolute steal. They get snacks included in the price and have a bus pick them up at the end of our street and drop them off at the end of the day. All for 3.50 a day(euros of course).

I was kind of nervous about sending the kids there, but it turns out that several of their school friends go there as well and we are happy they have a good time.

In a couple of weeks they will go stay with Oma and Opa for a couple of days, which will give them a nice little get-away too

This weekend they stayed with some friends from church who have three boys about the same age and it went really well. Monty didn’t pee or poop in his pants and didn’t wake up screaming for mommy in the middle of the night. Very good. If he had done any of those things, the people probably would have said: "we’re not having this kid over again." But now they may actually be invited for a sleepover again some time.

Here are some pictures from the boys' "end of the year" school party. The kindergartners did a dance, (even if the pictures look somewhat stationary.)

POOP!!

Well, that is what our live evolves around right now: poop. I would like to say that it is just dog-pooh on our side walk, but no. Unfortunately. It is Monty's poop. Good grief. The child is going to do me in.
We had a long period where he just didn't want to go and got terrible constipated, but since the last constipation was resolved about ten days ago, he has been pooping in his pants around the clock. Seriously. We went to my folks in Nederland for the weekend and he pooped in his pants about thirty times in three days. We ran out of clean underwear for him.
Luckily, on Monday he didn't poop in his pants at school at all (big sigh of relief), but on Tuesday he did again, and on Wednesday, and on Thursday. On Friday they had a field trip and he produced an enormous amount of poop in the bus on the way over to the place. Those teachers must HATE us.
Today in church, one of the primary teachers came to get us. He was covered in poop from toes to belly button. There were two more blow outs at home. Needless to say, we are also doing laundry around the clock.
Have we worked with bribery? Yes, no results.
Have we tried getting angry? Yes, but no results.
Have we put him back in a diaper and make him feel like he was a baby again and wouldn't he rather be a big boy? Yes, it doesn't face him at all.
Have we tried to make him understand that it is gross to poop in your pants? Yes, he completely agrees. "It's bah!". But no results.
Our family doctor has referred us to a child psychologist, but it will be a couple of weeks before we can get in.

This is monty's "I'm trying not to poop face"



Meanwhile...
Leland is doing exams, looking for a job, Anne is working full-time and losing years of her life being the relief society pres, we are preparing to move and the temperature has dropped back to the low 50s and we have gotten completely drenched several times in the last week riding our bikes on the way to and from work or school.
The biggest catch about the moving is that right now we live in a completely furnished house and the house we go to is unfurnished. We only have a limited amount of money to spend. We have rounded up a whole bunch of things from people in church and some from Anne's work, but we still need some things like a WASHER! We wouldn't survive without one in the current circumstances. But we haven't found the Belgian equivelent of Craig's list yet and even if we do find a second-hand washer... How are we going to get it here? We don't have a car anymore and i can hardly put in in the bak of my bakfiets.
We will probably need to rent a truck to pick up all the stuff all over town that we need to bring to our new house, but i would prefer if we only needed to rent it once.

We are moving August 1st. Mail me if you want our address. (for security reason's i don't want to put it on the internet)

Monty's birthday

Before I tell some things about Monty’s birthday some statements about week 19:

1) Finds in the washer this week when taking out the laundry:
- one stick
- one rock, size of a golf ball.

2) Leland has become a true Belgian/Dutchie. He had his first bicycle stolen. A very special moment.

Anyway, about Monty's birthday He had a great day. He doesn’t remember his third birthday, but he has been looking forward to his fourth birthday since December when it was Stoney’s birthday. He was very miffed he had to wait over four months before it was finally his birthday. He has been asking on about a weekly basis since December if it was his birthday now. (And then of course he had to bare the fact that it was mommy’s and daddy’s birthday before his. But then finally, it was HIS birthday.

He had a great day. Of course Grandma and Grandpa were here and they gave his a Peter Postman (or Postman Pat in England) set that he absolutely loves! He also got a digger, and tractor a very noisy animal bingo and a game to learn facts about animals. (with among other things a question identifying which animal creates which poop. Needless to say this was a European creation) It was Stoney’s idea to give Monty a ‘big boy bike’. It is just a second hand, fixer upper, but good enough for him to learn to ride a bike. Unfortunately Monty is scared to death of getting on the thing.

Other then Grandma and Grandpa, Oma and Opa came and uncle Fredo and aunt Nicky. Luck had it that it was a bank holiday in large parts of Europe, so everyone had the day off. (Second pentacostal day - i know the giving of the gift of the Holy Ghost is important, but is it something to celebrate two days?)

Here are some pictures of his birthday



The day after his birthday we went to Brussels with Grandma and Grandpa. Stoney and Monty were very impressed with 'manneken Pies' (little peeing boy statue) Don't they look proud in the picture? Stoney wanted to go back to Brussels the next day to check what kind of outfit it was waering the next day. (the statue is dressed differently everyday).




Before we made it to Manneken Pies though, we went to the Atonium. It is this molecule type structure that was build for the 1958 world fair in Brussels. Stoney had wanted to go there for a while, but we sure picked out the wrong day to go. We stood in line for about three hours, meanwhile Stoney refused to eat lunch and had several meltdowns. As you can see on some of the pictures, they were not very happy campers.(nor was I for that matter) But eventually we made it in, and they enjoyed it. (Grandma didn't enjoy it as much though, because it turned out that halfway some of the spheres there were no more escalators and she had to take the stairs, with her sore back, not a good experience.) I know Grandma had a picture of the four of us in the top sphere, but i don't have that one yet. So here is my pictures.





PS Sorry for the small font, but for some reason there is this one section of this post that won't change into a larger font, no matter what i try, so i decided to put it all in smaller font

Bike race

Well, it is May 1st. Monty is turning four today. I will give an extended update on his birthday some other time (since it is only 9.15, his birthday has barely started).

Before i go on with the story about the bike race i would like to share a little something in the category: "One of these things is not like the other."
We were at the market last week with Bill and Carol and there some little food stands - what would be a hot dog vendor in America. And it is selling the following: (now you see which one just doesn't belong)
a) hot dogs
b) hamburgers
c) escargot (which is French for snails)
Need i say more?

About the bike race
Boy did we have the time of our life! There was a bike race right through our street. As a matter of fact, the start and finish were in our street. It was on sunday afternoon and after we got home from church (it was gorgeous weather) we just opened the windows and let the boys look at the bicyclists and follow cars pull up. We are right on the street, so we had a good view.






And then the waiting game began. The racers were going six loops of which the first one was the largest. There was about an hour after the start before the racers came by for the first time. So meanwhile, the boys decided to test the quality of the "race track". Our road is normally very busy, so we don't let them ride their bikes on there, but this they it was all blocked off, so they had a blast. For good measure they went over the finish line too.
And then finally, the bike racers came by again. 6 times.



Stoney had so much fun, he has been asking multiple times since Sunday if there is going to be another bike race in our street soon.

Let it be known...

Let it be known to all kindred, tongues and people that Monty pooped IN the toilet last night....

Just an update...

Just thought i give a quick fill in on the Big Problems Of Our Life...

1. Immigration problem in Belgium. Resolved for the moment. After I wrote a somewhat frantic email to my boss at work I had the year contract within 24 hours. Didn't become effective till April 1st, but it was good enough for the immigration office here in the big cosmopolitan town we live in. That is, they extended my temporary residency for another month, so they have a month to pull a blue card out of a drawer, type my name on it and put an official looking stamp on it. That blue card should make me good in Belgium for another five years, and with me, the boys and Leland
2. Monty's Constipation problem. Feel free to skip if you could care less about these details. Well, the laxatives work. Usually it takes a day or two, then he produces a couple of brick like poops (in size and consistency) and then we get a lot of Very Sticky, Extremely Messy Poops for several days. After which we stop giving him the laxative, after which he gets constipated again and so perpetum mobile. Right now we are in the Very Sticky, Extremely Messy phase.
   
3. No puking on the part of the kids this week. It's almost funny. Often when i get to work my co workers ask: How are you? and the second question is: no puking kids today? Week 14 has been a good one on the puking front. Now we'll see what week 15 brings.
4. Sticking with the health issues though: Stoney seems extremely tired lately. Kind of strange for a child who just had two weeks of easter vacation. And the problem is that when he gets tired, he get EXTREMELY whiny and starts talking like a baby. "Me have... me want..." And this is not a language barriere problem from him learning Dutch. He is perfectly capable of saying "Monty won't cooperate", in both languages when he is not tired. Being a mom (that is I assume that all mom's are like this) i immediately start worrying that he has some terrible and life threatening disease when he starts being tired all the time like he is now. But i also remember that he has had spells like this before, when he just was really tired for a couple of weeks and he has always resurfaced healthy as a horse a month later. Maybe he just has low iron.
5. Still on the health front: Leland has been hit by some nasty cold virus. He first thought that he had bronchitis, but the doctor said it wasn't. His lungs are hurting an awful lot when he coughs and he has been running a fever on and off for the past week. Not very well timed since he had baby-sitting duty all week long. Strangest symptom to him is that he has no apatite. That has never happened before, he laments, except when i had kidney stones. Hopefully he will recover soon and hopefully none of the rest of us will get it.
6. We have been driving a borrowed car for about 6 months now and it has been great, but it has been dying on us lately. Sometimes it wills start and sometimes it won't. It's not the battery, it is the starter. It makes it very unreliable. And since it is a borrowed car, we can't really go to the owner and ask him to fix it, since he never drives it wants to get rid of it in the first place. But are hesitant to spend money fixing it since it is not our car, and we would rather get a car of our own. We'll have to see. To tie this point to point 1: when we went the city hall to take care of my immigration mess the car wouldn't start again after we left the city hall. And this is in the middle of nowhere, mind you. We pushed it down the parking lot a couple of times hoping that would start it, which it didn't. All this was not beneficial to Leland's lung situation which was mentioned in point 5. Luckily some guys working on a building near by came to our rescue and help push it some more and it finally started.
   

On a completely separate note and not in the 'problems category' but rather in the 'Small Joys in Life' category: we have some hyacinths in our living room that smell just splendidly!

Disney Land Paris

Well, we had our first family visit to a Disney park. We had hoped that the end of March would bring some warmer weather, but alas... We didn't get a white Christmas, but we did have a white Easter. None of the snow stuck though, but i must admit that Leland and the boys had a snowball fight in the attic (scooping the snow of the roof, with the added bonus of it being warmer in attic then outside).
Anyway, make a long story short, we didn't have any snow while we in Disney itself, but it was very cold at times. Specially for Monty, who in all excitement forgot all his potty training skills and kept peeing in his pants. Cold wet pants on a cold day... not good.
But we did have fun. Peter Pan's flight was the boys favorite, we actually did it twice. They also liked the Lightning McQueen ride and the train that rides through the park. Least favorite part was the standing in line... Well, no surprises there. They also were not to excited about the star wars ride that we went on. It's one of those simulator things that bounces and rattles and stuff. Monty was actually very scared. When the simulator made it appear as if we were sucked into the 'death star' he started screaming: "I don't want to go in there, I don't want to go in there!" Poor thing.
Of course one of the other memorable moments was Stoney vomiting in the Pizza Hut. One minute he was fine and the next... BARF!
YUCK...
The boys are already asking when we will go back again. We went for three days and could have easily spend another, but by day three they were just exhausted, so it is a good thing we didn't.

Immigration and stuff...

Okay, so here is the situation:
(The complete one for those of you who don't get the family emails)

Immigration problem #1
Anne checks with American Embassy in Belgium about the status of her Green card. Rumor has that even though the Green card doesn't expire for another 7 years, it will become invalid when out of the country for longer then a year. Embassy confirms this and says she needs to file for a "reentry permit" that will give her the right to come and go to the US even when out of the country for more then a year. After about twenty emails back and forth with the Embassy, they confirm that she has to go to the INS office in Washington DC in person to file this form. Anne bites the bullet, buys a plane ticket and goes to the INS office in DC.
Thursday: She shows up at the INS office and it turns out: first Thursday of every month, the office is closed. It doesn't say this anywhere on their website, but oh well, there is always Friday as a back -up.
Friday: Anne gets to the office, speaks with an immigration officer and is told: "No, you can't file that form here, we have never ever taken those forms. They have always needed to be send to Nebraska, pretty much from the beginning of time, since the days of the Pilgrims.... Reentry permit, file it in Nebraska. Oh and by the way the price went up from $305 to $385 just yesterday. But have a nice day ma'm."
(Anne considers toilet papering the American Embassy in Brussels)

Immigration problem # 2
Leland has a visa for Belgium till July. No problem there. Anne is a EU citizen and should have no problem living in Belgium, but for some reason the local immigration office is behind in times. Or maybe they are just overzealous, since we live in a small town with probably 3 foreign families. Anyway, Anne was granted temporary residency in Belgium for six months, on the condition she would find a job.
No problem, been working full-time since October. But the immigration office wants to see a year contract not just weekly overviews from the temp. agency. The company Anne works for told her she would get a year contract starting the end of January, then it became mid February and then finally they found out that headquarters had put a hiring stop for the first quarter. So please wait till April.
Then, mid March Anne receives a letter from the local immigration people saying that they NEED to see a contract by March 23 otherwise she will be asked to leave the country.
Excuse me?
Panic attack.
Anne talks to her boss at work and the HR person will write a letter saying that she will defintely get a contract by April 1st, just hold off for a couple of weeks and please don't kick her out of the country.


Meanwhile....
Monty is not having a good couple of weeks. In week 11 (when Anne came back from her *succesfull* visit to the States, he got the flu, or some kind of virus. Vomiting all night long, (We ran out of sheets for his bed at 3 am, took him in our bed and then he puked some more there...) fevers and a rash. Luckily that passed but he was also constipated (again). After he didn't do nr. 2 for ten days we asked the doctor for advice and she gave him a laxative. This started to work in week 12. Four poopie pants in 6 hours time, I tell you...
Same week 12, Tuesday: Monty was riding on the back of Leland's bike in the little child seat, but somehow got his foot stuck in the wheel. Several cuts, scrapes and bruises and a whole lot of screaming later, he finally let Leland put a bandage on it. (Leland called Anne at work, so she could talk to Monty and calm him down, but he was screaming so loud half the office could hear him)
Still in week twelve, Thursday: Anne picks up Monty and Stoney at the after school care. When walking to the bakfiets, both boys decide to climb on the play equipment. "Watch out," Anne says, "It is wet and slippery because it rained." Naturally, Stoney climbs up and slides down aa pole and it fine. Monty works his way up the steep ramp, realizes that the slide is wet and is to scared to go back of or get of any other way. Anne climbs up the steep ramp to get him off. "Just hold on to mommy," she says optimistically. He puts his arms around her schoulders, she hold him with one arm, hold the railing with the other, moves one foot and.... There lay mommoy and Monty on the ramp, on top of each other. Monty did some loud screaming again and Anne temporarily lost hearing in one of her ears.

But otherwise, live is just dandy. Just Peachy!

To end things, i am going to post the two class pictures of the boys here, which were taken back in the fall, but i don't have any new pictures yet. Noy sure if you can see it on these pictures, but Stoney is touching himself in inappropiate places and Monty is screaming at the photographer.
That's our children!
(but of course we love them like crazy)

Just a quick update.
After the 10 days of bitter cold in December, we really haven't had much of a winter. True, we are enduring frequent storms and some steady rains, but we have also had some really nice weather.

Below some pictures of a day at the park with the boys two weeks ago. There is this great park about half an hour away that has just a huge playground. There is also a petting zoo and water bikes and an outdoor pool, but the water bikes and pool have not been open yet - obviously.



It's funny how different these tow boys are. Stoney is a big climber and will always seek the highest point anywhere and then climb it (as you can see in the pictures). Monty is - literally - more down to earth. I am not sure if he has fear of heights or if playing in dirt is just much more attractive to him. He prefers to play in a little wooden house (but not climb on it's roof as Stoney would do) or pretend he is playing "store" or things like that. He enjoys slides, but is not the real tall ones and he can't get to excited about swings. Whereas again, for Stoney it can't go fast enough or high enough. Leland says he'll probably want to climb Everest one day.
Their differences were also very obvious when my parents took them to the Zoo in Antwerp.
(Leland and I went to Brugge for a weekend. My parents watched the boys and we got to have a date for the two of us.) Stoney just runs from one animal area to the next. Always so eager and curious to find out what is more, what is next; while Monty just stands there in awe of every animal. He spend ten minutes looking at the back of a hippo (because it was the only part visible above the water) convinced that it would surface at some point. He had to go back to the turtle cage with Opa because he had to show Opa there were turtles in the left corner of the cage too! He is so funny that way. He is really showing more and more personality now that he is almost four. (Unfortunately, he is also showing quite a lot of temper tantrums)

Something about Brugge: Brugge is this really pretty old town close the the Belgium coast. It was very important in the 14th century, because of the trade and cloth making. I was kind of cold the Saturday we were there, so we went into some museums. There is a nice museum of Flemish primitive painters there - I had been to Brugge before but never gone in that museum yet. We also went on a boat ride. Brugge claims to be the Venice of the north, which i think is a little presumptious, but it does have a lot of water. But hey, Amsterdam or Leiden have a lot more water then Brugge. Anyway. We took a couple of pictures, not a ton, because the post cards are usually nicer, but these turned out okay.

Pirates and Parties

Well, it's been a while. It's because Leland has been hugging the computer. With reason, he had exams and spend a lot of time studying and researching.
This is about how his exams went:





Just kidding. Most went really well. One went rather badly, but if the teacher is grading on a curve, he'll probably pass, cause everyone did bad on that one.

This past week the boys celebrated Carnaval at school. Carnaval is a catholic holiday, that preceeds the week before Lent. It's kind of culturaly depended how it is celebrated. For instance, Mardi Grass is really the New Orleans version of Carnaval. Here it is mostly a celebration for kids to dress up. The boys choose to be pirates, and they looked adorable. Stoney was captain Snotty Nose and Monty captain Goldy Locks








Yesterday We had Stoney's birthday party. Of course his actual birthday was on December 22nd but that is such a busy time period that we decided to do it a month or so later. We held it at the "quick" which is a French version of McDonald's. The kids had a lot of fun. They did face paint and had fries, cake and played a lot.





Other developments... We have finally done it: cut Monty's hair. It hurts me to no longer see the golden curls on his head, but it was just getting out of control. Mostly because he wouldn't let us comb his hair, it was one big rat's nest all the time. So i cut it, and though it is uneven (he wouldn't hold his head still and screamed bloody murder) it's alright. I didn't cut it super short (other then the bangs, because, well... he jerked and that was the end of the bangs.) It is still is a little long in the back. Leland says that it looks puffy in the back and he still looks like a girl... Maybe, but i just don't want to cut his hair that short. Wish i had puffy hair like that... Anyway, below a picture with his new hair cut.

Stoney's birthday

It's been a busy season with Sinterklaas, Stoney's birthday on the 21th, my mom's birthday on the 22nd and then Christmas. On December 26th we went to my family in Nederland for a couple of days. We didn't do anything spectacular while there. It was too cold. But it was nice to spend time together with family.
Stoney's birthday was on a Friday and he had a great day. He of course had his birthday at school and then in the afternoon i had gotten of work and his Oma and Opa from Nederland came. He was remarkable polite and said thank you for every gift that he got. He really feels big now that he is six.
I have some pictures of his birthday, but unfortunately he doesn't photograph as well as Monty, but you'll just have to take my word for it that he is every bit as cute as Monty is.

U-no-poo

U-no-poo! The constipation sensation that is gripping the nation! Well, it is not gripping the nation, but it is gripping Monty. (for those of you who wonder, i have not gone mad, it's Harry Potter reference).
Monty is having some issues. He has never in particularly liked going to the potty for number 2 and in December he started holding it in. He just refused to go, till he had a bunch of bricks in his lower belly. We finally gave him some laxative around Christmas and though that got things moving a little bit, it was not till Wednesday that he started pooping round the clock. Obviously we have since stopped giving him the laxative. In the last three days he has pooped in his pants about 10 times - all to be cleaned up by Leland, because I had to go back to work on Wednesday. I guess Monty figured that since he was now pooping in his pants all the time, he might as well pee in his pants too... Needless to say, we are doing laundry constantly. We really hope that once school starts again on monday he'll snap out of this regression phase and go back to using the potty. Otherwise... we might upset his teacher a lot.

Just to show how cute he can be when he doesn't dirty his pants...