Keukenhof with the Nana and the Papa

Just one week after the Lemmons left us, my parents arrived for a two week visit of their own.  We didn’t give them much time to adjust because they got in Friday afternoon and early Saturday morning we were in the car for a trip to the Netherlands to see the tulip gardens at Keukenhof.  It was a four hour drive there and luckily Reese’s ipod battery lasted almost exactly that long so we didn’t have to hear much out of the way back until we were almost there.  Keukenhof was really beautiful but unfortunately we were at the very end of the season and we’ve had an unusually warm spring so most of the tulips had already died and been cut off.  There were still a lot of other beautiful flowers though and the park itself was very peaceful and we had fun just wandering through it.  There’s a little pond there that has these steps just underneath the water so that at the right angle it makes it look like you’re walking on water, Reese loved it and after she walked across it with Nate she had me do it again with her.

      

And of course what trip to the Netherlands would be complete without posing in some wooden shoes.  Apparently my kids are so cute that other people want photos of them to because when they were sitting in the wooden shoes an old man got up from the restaurant and came over and took pictures of them too.

 

Going to the tulip gardens was what I had wanted to do for Mother’s Day so I could take my annual Mother’s Day photo with the tulips and since my parents were coming at the end of that week we’d held off on going so they could come with.  Reese was very upset about taking photos at first so you can see her eyes are all red and watery but I still got some cute pictures.  I especially like the one of all of us with our vans.

Reese had a lot of fun at the gardens as well.  Nate had let her pick out a wooden tulip from the gift shop and she had fun comparing her tulip to the other tulips around the park.  There was also a playground area with a zipline like thing that she would ride on and then make someone else go get in line with her so she could ride it again, and of course there was a petting zoo that she had fun with like always.  Here’s just some more random photos from Keukenhof.

     

A Visit From the Lemmons

Just after Easter we had some very exciting visitors…..THE LEMMONS!!  The Lemmons arrived in Germany about the same time we did and were one of our first friends out here.  Sarah and I were pregnant together and had our firstborns 7 weeks apart so needless to say we’re very close with them.  Unfortunately Sarah’s husband felt that going to the Air Force Honor Guard was more important than extending in Germany (just kidding) so they moved to D.C. 2 years ago.  I’d been able to go out and visit them after they had their second child last January and they were able to take some time and come visit us now that Finn was born.  They caught a military hop out and spent almost two weeks just hanging out with us around here and it was so much fun.

 

Reese and Lukas were instant friends once again, they played so nicely together and I had so much fun just watching them run around outside and play with each other.  One time they were pretending that there was either a goat or a ghost on the other side of the fence, I really don’t know which one it was, so they’d run over to the fence and shout “there’s the ghost/goat” and then run back to the driveway and hide from it in a box.  The funniest part was when Luke would shout to Reese “Run my friend, run” it was hilarious.  They were having so much fun playing with one another that my attempts to get pictures were not appreciated as you can tell by the lack of nice smiles in the photos.  These pictures show pretty much what they did every single day, we had such nice weather and the two of them could not get enough of playing outside together which was convenient because then they weren’t making a huge mess inside.

    

While they were here we decided it would be fun to take the kids to Eifel Park in Gondorf which is only about 10 or 15 mins from our house but in the 5 years we’ve lived here we’ve never once gone.  When the day was over we were kicking ourselves for never having gone before because it was so much fun and it would’ve been fun even before we had kids.  It’s basically a wild animal park that also has a couple rides and slides, stuff like that.  We invited Robyn and Max to come with us so we had 3 two and half year olds, 1 one year old, and a  2 month old…the three 2 year olds had a blast with one another.  All the kids bought a box of food for a euro to feed the animals with and then they fed bunnies, goats and deer plus we saw a bunch of birds and some wolves.

 

The playground at EIfel Park was a lot of fun for the adults as well as the kids, they had this mini ferris wheel type contraption and it was powered by up to two people peddling on the bicycle next to it so Robyn and Justin hopped on the bike and peddled Sarah and I around the little ferris wheel.

They also had a giant slide that the kids (and the adults) all really liked, we must’ve gone down it 20 times but everyone was having so much fun

Even though all of that was fun, the highlight for most of us was the coaster.  Technically the kids were too young to go on it because it said they had to be 3 but we figured close enough and they all loved it, Lukas especially wanted to keep going on it. 

 

After we’d done some rides we walked around to see some of the other animals and we began to wish we hadn’t, it was a long walk and we got to where we were over halfway done but the rest of it was uphill and the kids were complaining about being hungry and Finn was screaming and luckily just at that moment the “train”, which was a tractor pulling some compartments, started coming around so we flagged it down and caught a ride the rest of the way which was much better.  The animal walk wasn’t all bad though because we did get to see a particularly interesting species….the mother daughter 80’s combo which you rarely see in nature

Oh and of course Finn did his usual thing, he rode around in his stroller and smiled like the big cutie that he is

Now for the next part of their trip you need to know all little of the back story.  Aside from our honeymoon trip to Berlin, the first trip that we took in Europe was to Belgium with the Lemmons.  Nate had gone TDY for a few days in Belgium and thought I would enjoy seeing it so we went over Labor Day weekend to Brussels and made a side trip to Brugge and Oostende as well.  So we thought it would be fun to go back to Brugge now that 5 years and 4 kids had passed.  Here we are as two young couples in our first year of marriage:

   

and now here we are 5 years later and each with two kids (Devin is a little less visible behind Justin and Finn is kind of hidden by Reese, but they’re there):

 

We didn’t do much in Brugge that day, we just kind of wandered around and enjoyed making a return visit.  It’s a beautiful city and of course we were able to get some waffles as well :)

 

 

Also, a picture from Brugge was on the very first Christmas card Nate and I sent out together, so we had to take a photo of our updated family in the same spot.

 

A lot has changed in 5 years.

Eventually their two weeks were up and it was time for Lemmons to head back to D.C. but not before Nate got a chance to torture Devin by shoving things in the back of his sweatshirt and then watching him try and get them out (it’s a game he plays with Reese too). 

Side Note:  Finn turned two months while the Lemmons were in town so we had to measure him up against his monkey again, he looks have changed quite a bit from when he was only one month old.  At his two month check up he weighed in at 14 lbs 9 oz which put him in the 100th percentile, he was 24.5 in long which is the 98th percentile, and his head circumference was 16.5 in which is the 97th percentile.