Happy Birthday, Ethan from Legoland

Ethan's been saying since we moved here that for his birthday he wanted to go to Legoland. So off we went...
On the way home from Garmisch, we stopped at the Land of Legos. Many structures throughout the park were made almost entirely of legos. Pretty cool, huh?




The kids (and the adults) loved this Miniatures Village, with entire cities built to scale from Legos. Munich, Berlin, Venice, Lucerne, among others.

We all agreed that for an amusement park, it was very manageable (not gigantic) with rides both cute and thrilling for big kids and little. Can't wait to come back.

Happy Birthday, Ethan, my big, big, big kid! Thanks for sharing such a fun day with the family!

Happy Fourth of July from Wet, Wet, Wet Garmisch

This weekend we headed down to Garmisch-Partinkirchen, a little ski town in Bavaria, nestled on the German side of the Austrian Alps. Mostly it reminded us of Colorado, with the tallest mountain in Germany located here, the Zugspitze and a view of the alps from all angles. We stayed at an Army resort, The Edelweiss which seemed like a good idea at the time, but then it felt odd to be surrounded by Americans all weekend in and out of town.

We passed on the $200 fee to ride up to the top, figuring that we've seen the view from plenty of 10,000 ft. peaks that we don't really need to pay all that gelb to just "ooh, ahh" from a chilly, snowy top in Germany. Instead we stayed low and walked around this pretty lake, the Eibsee, at the bottom of the mountain.






Then a quick view of the Ski Stadium, built by Hitler for the hosting of the 1936 Olympics. It remains mostly unchanged in the past 70 years, except for the updating of the ski jump, where Garmisch still hosts winter events.
Most of our weekend was on and off rain, so we traveled with umbrellas each day in the backpack. And usually had to pull them out at least once.

There was one break in the weather for just a couple hours, enough for Ric to build a fire. What camp-out is complete without the S'more?


And we were happy to be sheltered from the rain in this little cabin. We'd toyed with the idea of tent camping this weekend, and with the daily 4-5 rain showers, I was mainly SO GLAD that we went with the cabin.


Plus, this "rustic cabin" had a microwave, refrigerator and a TV. So on the first night when Ric went back up to Munich to see Bruce Springsteen, the kids and I got a dose of "America's Got Talent" and "Extreme Makeover, Home Edition." When the kids went to bed I continued the TV time-suck with old episodes of Sienfeld, House, and the marathon coverage of Michael Jackson on CNN. By the time I went to bed at midnight and wished I had just read my book instead ("The Help"-an awesome read!), I was realizing why it's good that we don't have TV at home.
And one day we hiked into a nearby gorge.

Ric and the kids stop to look at the gigantic snails living the forest.



And we got in one ride down an alpine slide before the rain interfered (again).

No picture of the fireworks on that rainy night. We stayed at the cabin expecting them to be cancelled for rain, but hastily pulled chairs (and umbrellas) out at 10:30 when we heard popping to view them through the trees from our campground.

Last Day of German Kindergarten

Now for this little girl, school was memorable this year and so were her teachers.

Evelyn went to this German Kindergarten up the street from our house, completely immersed in the language with only a couple other English-speaking children in her class. Despite sometimes feeling out of place in the beginning (noting that when her teachers spoke, she heard: "WAA WAA WAA"), Evelyn adjusted nicely and really liked going each day. With four or more hours a day of complete language immersion, she progressed quickly to understand basic instructions and also able to speak a little German. Often at home after school while she and I would work on a puzzle quietly, she'd babble away in German with a combination of actual words and made up German-like gutteral sounds.

Here children go to Kindergarten from ages 3-6 and then start 1st grade, so I tried to convince her to stay another year at this K, knowing that with 12 more months at this school, she'd likely be fluent in at least her understanding of German. But with 2 big brothers at the "big kids school" on post riding the bus each morning, the draw to go with them was too strong. And too, as sweet as it is that this developmental school lets the kids play and play and play until they're over 6 with virtually no curriculum instruction, I also know that Evelyn is ready to learn and ready to go to American Kindergarten. So her short year at this school has come to an end.

So with us traveling most of July and the Kindergarten closed in August, her last day was June 30. This is Evelyn with her primary teacher, Frau Deuschle:



And here she is with her "German teacher" who teaches the English-speakers German, and Evelyn's favorite teacher, Frau Gradinger:

Bye-bye Kindergarten Tilsiter Weg!