The difference between Hannah and Kristal

The metros were closed today and Hannah had to find her way home. So, she jumps on any old bus and navigates through the city and finds her way home without a problem.

I, on the other hand, have the worst luck with this. I don't have a problem with the metro system. It seems very simple to me, but you throw in the bus and train system and that is where all of my street smarts go out the window.

I have been on a couple of buses and gotten lost with the greatest of ease, but then there is the train and that is another story...

When Chris was in Prague and I had to navigate my own way to church funny things begin to happen in my mind and I get this terrible panic where I have to get off at every stop because I think that we are going to go too far. It took us an extra hour to get home from church because I did it twice. The kids were really loving me then. Luckily, it was a fairly nice day, so no one was freezing to death. On my way to the airport to go and meet Chris I did the same thing and almost missed my flight. When I arrived in Prague and met up with Chris to go out to lunch with his work friends they thought it was quite funny. I guess Chris was walking around the office talking frantically (and very loudly I might add, can you imagine that) on the phone to me trying to work things out and they knew something terrible was wrong:)

By the time we leave here, I might actually have things figured out. Luckily, I have plenty of time to do that. As for Hannah, she will probably be able to go anywhere in the world and get to where she wants to go without a problem:)

I was attacked by a crane while on my walk today...

Just kidding, I really wasn't but I do see a lot of them when I am out and I was just thinking that if I did get attacked by one it would make life quite entertaining. I figured that I could really write whatever I wanted since there are only 3 people who look at our blog:) This is what is up with us lately:

We are officially moved into our new house and have been for a while. I still have a little bit of painting to do before we have any visitors from the US soon but are feeling at home and liking most things about our new area. Maybe, I will even get some art work done for our walls so we don't look so transient. Chris has made some really nice furniture for us that is making life a little more comfortable, but he can go into more detail about that if he wants since they are his creations. We have some 'wonderful' neighbors from India who think that we walk up our stair too loudly and are constantly banging on the wall. It is 'fun'. Besides that though, we love it here. We are close to just about everything that we could possibly need. There are several families in our neighborhood that are in our ward which is a nice change.

The 3 youngest kids really like their new school and have all made friends and are feeling more comfortable then they have in a long time. Abby even told me that she doesn't want to go back to the US until she gets married, that is how much she is liking it. Don't ask me where she got the 'get married' part from, but that is Abby for you, always planning ahead.

Hannah has moved to an international school to get some intensive language lessons. She loves the school and is very happy to be hanging out with a few American kids again. It is also an easier level of education and she is just happy to be doing something that is not incredibly hard for the moment, huh Hannah? As soon as she is done with the program, she can go back to Codarts if she wants to continue her dancing. We are now in the process of finding somewhere else for her to dance while she is away from the school.

Chris is in Prague right now for work and has been for the last week. I will be joining him on Wed and staying until Sun. He may or may not be coming back with me. He may have stay an extra week, but we will see what Novell needs him to do. I just talked to him on the phone and he says that where he is staying it is pretty dumpy, but he has been to city center and says that it is amazing. I am very excited to go and see everything. It ought to be fun! We actually have our American friends' 3 year old boy staying with us while his parents and baby brother are in Spain until tomorrow. He is a pretty easy kid to deal with, but it is wearing me out and I think that he is ready for his family to get home. Anyway, our kids will be staying at their house while I am in Prague.

So, now everyone is all caught up on our lives and I will have to come up with more crane attack stories later because I have a RS lesson to prepare for tomorrow. Tot ziens! Till later!

Parent Observation Day at Codarts

I have been wanting to post some pictures of Hannah for a while and I finally had Chris put them on my computer. This is Hannah's ballet class. I really ought to figure out how to use my camera to take action pictures because these are pretty pathetic.
Isn't she beautiful?

Check her out!

This is a fabulous picture of all the parents that Hannah was so kind to take. Looks like we are having a blast.
Hannah and her friends. They are extremely camera shy, can you tell.
This is Hannah's folk dancing class. Like I said, I really need to get the camera thing down. She is the blurry one on the left that is the second row from the front.
They put a lot of emphasis on the character dance in Europe. I don't know why. Hannah is not that fond of it. This is the class that they made the parents get up and dance with their kids. I have to say it was a lot of fun.

A look at the last few months...

I feel like we missed a lot in the last few months because we were so worried about the whole moving thing, so I wanted to show a little bit or what has been going on in our lives lately. I am going to backwords here, I can't get things to move where I want them to be without a fight and I don't have that kind of time...This first picture is our first and pretty much only snow of the year. The kids are trying to have a snowball fight. It was a very short battle. They ended up leaving our postage stamp sized backyard and dragging in snow from the parking lot to throw.
This is the snowman that they built. They were pretty pleased with themselves and Chris and I were surprised that it was as big as it was.
I think that we have already posted this picture, but it is one of my favorites. You can see that Isaac refused to wear his zwarte pieten hat. It is usually something that only little kids want to wear. The last day of school before Dec 5, all the little kids come to school with the whole outfit on. It is very festive and lots of fun. They always have Sinterklaas and his 'black pete's' visit the school and it is one big party. The zwarte pieten are quite the trouble makers and leave the classrooms in utter chaos. Most kids here probably think it is great fun, but my kids were quite annoyed that they had to clean up black hand prints off of everything and put the classroom back together. They thought it was 'dumb' to give an exact quote.
Here the kids are at the market square where Sinterklaas ends up. You cannot see this in the picture but Chris insisted that Isaac wear the hat even though there were some older kids behind him that thought it was really funny that Isaac was putting up a stink about the whole thing. I am sure that Isaac was completely mortified, but Chris' main goal in life is to embarrass our kids as much as possible.
These are Alex's teachers. The young one is actually a student teacher. The one in the front looks a little crazy, but she is a great teacher. She is 'very' enthousiastic about everything and it makes it fun for kids. She actually heard about our Halloween decorations in our front yard (not really much, a couple of head stones, some cobwebs and a skeleton in the window, but for here that is a big deal) and decided to bring Alex's whole class to our house so the kids could experience some American culture. I happened to be baking sugar cookies for our Halloween party that we were having later that night so all the kids got to try a cookie. They aren't big cookie makers here, so they thought that was great fun. Down below is a picture of some of the kids waiting their turn to ice their cookies.

This one is of the kids putting their shoes out for Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas fills their shoes with candy and small presents. Everyone always gets a chocolate letter too. I (I mean Sinterklaas) waited too long to get the candy and almost couldn't find the right letters. What a faux paux!
We put up a spiderweb forrest for the kids' birthday party and for our Halloween party and hid pumkins in it for the kids to find. They all thought it was a lot of fun. This one is actually of Hannah and her friend DeeDee. They were having a race to get through it first but it ended up being a great wrestling match. Very comical. I looks easy, but it really is an adventure.
We had DeeDee over for the birthday party because we were in serious need of a translator. You have no idea how crazy it is with 1o little girls that speak no English and try to keep telling you things that you really should know, but for the life of you, can't figure out.

This is our little Abby unwrapping presents. And down below is one of Isaac doing the same thing.

Something other then political nonsense...

I am supposed to be doing homework, so I thought that my best plan of attack was to post something on our blog first.
I went out to explore our new neighborhood the other day and brought our camera just in case I saw something fun. There is an area just north of where we live that is a really big recreation area. There are all sorts of really nice trails for hikers, bikers and I even saw some cross country skiers (there is not a lot of snow here ever, so they put wheels on the bottom of their skis and go crazy). Mostly people out walking their dogs.

This one is a huge climbing wall. The picture does not give it justice because it really is enormous. I took this one from on top of the hill, so I was looking down on it. I am not a good judge of height or anything, so I could not even guess how tall it is. There are also a whole bunch of teepees and a place where you can rent kayaks, canoes and who knows what else. There is also several acres of obstacle course stuff.


This some sort of sculpture of, I am guessing, an upside down mountain. It is very random being the only thing on top of the hill full of sheep, but it does make the scenery interesting. You can also climb up into it, but there was water in it.

There is also a ski slope. Also a lot bigger then it looks in the picture but not real big just the same.


Here is the mountain biking trail with lots of sheep. The sheep are actually inside a portable fence. You can see the sculpture in the background.

Here is just another view of the 'valley'.