Jet Lag Be Gone!

Ah, the joy of being home and seeing our two precious boys is tempered by the fact that we're not as young as we used to be, and international travel is not as easy to get over the jet lag as it was before! :) Amy's feet and legs hurt for two days after getting back from all of the walking that we did, and neither of us have been sleeping well! The first night we were both awake at 2A, and the second night was 3A. That night, Amy actually got up and started paying bills at 4AM just to be somewhat productive! It has slowly been working its way back to normal, but jet lag is just not a good friend! Oh well - small price to pay for all of the fun that we had!

As promised, we thought that we'd post some of the cute happenings that Grammy shared with us via email from the home-front while we were in Europe (most are these all relate to Zachary as Kaleb was feeling under the weather for part of the time that we were gone, plus he's not yet verbal!):

Who gave Zach his driver's license anyway? Bad enough he is bossy now he is telling me how to drive! "The light is green Grandma--GO!" (doesn't matter that there are 20 cars in front of me and the line isn't moving yet) Or "Grandma the light is red, you didn't stop" (even though I am at a dead stand still - and worse yet, when I turned right on a red-boy did he yell at me!)
We were singing and I keep singing "Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam"--except I can't remember all the words, so I started to sing it -- again and Zach said,"Grandma, you can't remember the words!" I about died laughing. He said,"Well what else do you want to sing Grandma?" He always asks to sing 'Jesus Loves the Little Children' which was one of your (Amy's) favorite songs (done in the southern twang).
I asked him what he was doing up and why he wasn't taking his nap. He said "I did." "Well," I said, "no you didn't, you weren't in there long enough." He replied, "I tried and tried hard, Grammy - I just couldn't sleep!"
When I was putting Zach down and we were singing, I had read the story of David and Goliath so thought we should sing that song, so I started singing, but forgot how it went, so kind of hesitated, and Zach pipes up and said "Grammy, did you forget the words again" Smartie pants! It started to thunder so he had to check and see if it was raining. "Yep, it's going to rain pretty soon! I don't like funder, he makes me cry, right Grammy?" I assured him it just startles us. After we were singing, laying in bed, I forgot again to pray, so left the room. He got up and came out and said "Grammy, we forgot to pray!" So we did and he now prays for you to be safe and for Kaleb to be better from his fever! God must enjoy hearing those sweet innocent prayers.
I get so tickled when he gets so excited to tell me something, but his mouth goes faster than his brain, and I can't understand a word he is saying, but then he will say, "Right Grammy?? Hmm I could incriminate myself agreeing with him!! or he'll say, "Does that sound like a good plan?" (especially if he knows I will say no - to video,etc.)
Zach went into the kitchen to get his water and brought it back into the bedroom and put it beside my glass (he usually drinks mine). I was carrying on a conversation(between the 2 waters) and Zach was just laughing his head off. Thought it was quite funny! Never know what will entertain them!!
We have added verses to 'Night Night Zachary' and also 'Jesus loves the Little Children' and he wants to sing it over and over. I was starting to sing 'This Little Light of Mine' and he started singing 'Jesus Loves the Little Children', and we started laughing so hard neither one of us could sing. These are the precious times to remember.
We have altered a few of the songs he sings for bedtime, so don't be surprised if he continues on with new verses!! and a few action songs in high speed! Crazy kid. He laughs so hard I hate to sing them as it wires him up instead of calming him down. When we were praying, and I added the "Help Zach sleep good." He said, "Why do we always have to say Zach have a good sleep -- EVERY NIGHT??" I said, "Because I want you to sleep good so you won't be crabby tomorrow". He said, "Well, I might be crabby today!!!"

"Cool" Kaleb with Auntie Kelli's sunglasses

Amy's Cousin Erin, husband Shane and baby Morgan

Zachary on his maiden voyage of taking his trike actually out in front on the sidewalk (our deck has been the extent of his world thus far!)

The Z family (including Amy this time!) preparing for a bike ride

Paris - "Tour de France"

Wednesday

The first day in Paris continued our whirlwind tour - we started off with the iconic Eiffel Tower. It is huge up close - pictures that we've seen just don't do the size justice. We went all the way up to the top of the tower, which gave us amazing views of the city although it was early so the horizon was kind of a brown haze (yuck!), so we weren't able to see the entire 40 miles promised to us in the Rick Steve's guidebook! :)

Next, we walked over to Napoleon's tomb and went through the World War I and World War II museums. We hadn't been Napoleon experts, so learned quite a bit. The Rodin Museum was close-by, so that made for an easy second stop on our day. It was really neat to see all of his work, and to learn more about the process of making statues. The day was hideously hot (about 95 degrees) - one of the most hot days of the year in France. Amy was fortunate that she had brought some skorts, but Kelli was overheating, so ended up purchasing a very cute Esprit skirt in order to survive the next day's events in the heat without completely melting away!

Lastly for the day, we headed off to the Louvre with its signature pyramid entrance. The Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, Mona Lisa were all on display. The crowds and the sheer mass of the museum were crazy. After finally completing the marathon day, we headed for home - only to get turned around, and instead of walking home, we walked the OPPOSITE way home. This made the walk home super long - which took us about 2 hours in total to get home which should have been a quick trip - needless to say we all took an oath that we'd be very careful in the future to be sure that never happened again! Our feet were so exhausted when we got home, we weren't sure they'd ever stop throbbing! Our apartment has air conditioning, so we were very thankful to enter in a cool environment for sleeping!

Thursday

After a deep restful sleep in which our feet thankfully recovered somewhat, we started off again on Thursday. To Karis' delight, we found a wonderful tiny bakery called "Moulin de la Vierges" where he could experience French pastries!



We started off by joining a hop-on, hop-off bus right around Paris, of which one of the highlights was the Notre Dame and the St. Chapelle. The St. Chapelle has stunningly beautiful stained glass windows. It was kind of strange, we've noticed that many of the churches do not enforce quietness/reverence in the churches - some of them even have gift shops in them! In the afternoon, we hiked up the Arc de Triomphe (more steps!!!) and looked down the Champs-Elysees.

A note on this picture - we'd walked so much this day through dusty streets (there is a lot of gravel/dust in Paris!) that Amy's black leather shoes were more grey than black by the end of the day!

Our meals this day were absolutely fabulous - we wandered over to Ile St. Louie and found a "deliceux" restaurant called "Cafe Med" for lunch and then finished off the meal at a wonderful Italian gelato shop. We ate supper at a famous bakery called "Laduree" which had the most amazing pastries we've EVER seen.

To finish the day, we went through the Orsay Museum and saw the Impressionist artists, which was very fun to see. Monet is a favorite! The final tourist event of the day was a Batobus ride on the Seine - we noticed a TON of people along the river - some in groups with food, and some just enjoying "each other" (to put it mildly!!) The last stop was the Eiffel tower at night, which was very beautiful indeed at the City of Lights.


Friday

We finished the "hop-on, hop-off" bus tour on Friday morning (Amy and Karis both had trouble staying awake throughout the entire bus-rides - so we had a few naps in the warm sun!) and went through the church Sacre-Coeur. After the church, we wandered through some very quaint streets in Paris on the hill-top and found another recommended restaurant - where we sat out on the patio under grapevines! Amy had a "salade de fromage" which is basically green lettuce with a mixture of French cheeses. Can we say a "plate full of mold"? Amy loves cheese, but the French take it to such a high level of sophistication that she just couldn't eat half of the cheese because it was so strong! But, you have to experience it, so she did!

On the way back to our next stop, we wandered through some souvenir shops during which we experienced our first very rude French person - the rest have been very hospitable and friendly. Amy was looking through some pictures, and at the front of the wire rack, someone had stuck postcards. Without thinking (which one shouldn't do, and is not recommended) - she picked up the postcards to move them out of her way to look at the pictures, and just tucked them BEHIND the pictures (instead of in front of them). The shop-owner saw this, and started banging on the window, and ran outside yelling at KARIS (?? he had nothing to do with this?) and started to insult him (!?? luckily we don't understand enough French to actually translate everything that she was saying, but the gist of it was still coming through loud and clear) He was totally flabbergasted as you can imagine (especially as he had nothing to do with it!). Sadly, we had intended to buy a picture from the store but after the "scene," we decided to take our business elsewhere.

Saturday

Our last day in Paris, we trekked out to the Versailles Palace. To say that it was a stunning palace is an understatement – everything at the palace was ‘over the top’ complete with entirely gold gates as you arrive. Apparently the original gates went “missing” so last year the France government replaced them – for a paltry 5 million euros! The hall of mirrors was one of the most well-known rooms in the palace, but the gardens in the back were the most spectacular portion of the estates.
King Louis XIV created extension gardens, complete with a “Grand Canal” that you could boat on, and a myriad of water fountains. The water fountains had a “water spectacle” at noon, and then again in the afternoon – accompanied with classical music playing throughout the gardens. It was a beautiful way to spend Sabbath as we were able to walk around and enjoy the green spaces. Marie Antoinnete also had a house built a ways away from the main palace, and the king had a “summer home” (aka smaller palace) built on the same grounds – kind of crazy to have such a HUGE palace and then have to build more homes so that you can “get away” that are on the SAME grounds!? Apparently the main palace was approximately 50% of the country’s GDP in the year that it was built. While at the gardens, we ate lunch at a small café outside – of which two things will always remain fresh in our memories.

The first is that we had amazing crepes for dessert – Amy had a nutella and banana crepe, which was FABULOUS. It was so delicious! The second thing that will remain etched in our memories is the fact that there were tons of bees flying around our table – and Kelli and Amy are both afraid of bees! Needless to say, there was lots of commotion at the table as the two women freaked out each time a bee came our way while Karis and Kent remained ever so calm – telling us that if we didn’t bother the bees, they wouldn’t bother us! Sadly, their calm words didn’t keep us calm – to the point where we had to laugh at our ridiculousness!

We enjoyed our stay in London and Paris very much – but are happy to be at home to see our boys! Zachary and Kaleb were excited to see us - we weren't sure if we'd get the "cold shoulder" for leaving them at home, but they were full of smiles and laughter, so we were thankful. The flight home on Sunday was long, but blessedly uneventful! There have been lots of funny stories from Grammy on the homefront, so we’ll try and post some of the funny stories after we’ve had a chance to get settled at home. A huge thanks to Grammy for taking time off of work in order to watch the boys - it made this 10th anniversary trip actually possible, and much more enjoyable (although we missed our boys dearly, we saw many kids overseas that were entirely miserable and were being drug from place to place - and we felt immensely thankful that we weren't doing that!)

Europe Trip - London & Paris Day 5

**Sorry for the lack of posts - we couldn't get Internet connection the first few days in Paris, and then we've had some late nights, so now we're trying to catch up!**

The last day in London, we went off to the London Tower where the Crown jewels are housed (again, crazy opulent!) and where several famous executions happened as it was also used as a prison. It was kind of sad to learn about how brutal the English history (and others of course) was.

It was then time to check-out and head over to the Eurostar for our trip to Paris when the REAL FUN began. We had pre-purchased our tickets, and had to print out the email in order to board the train. Well, Amy printed off the email but didn’t realize that there were two links in the email that were the actual tickets themselves – and the email states very clearly that if you don’t have your tickets printed, you’ll not be getting re-prints! So, now sick to think that we’d miss our train to Paris, we rushed in and began a harrowing experience in which we were fortunate to have a very helpful ticket agent who let us skip ahead of a very long queue in order to help provide us with a manual ticket, and then took us through security so that we didn’t have to wait in line (angel in disguise!). Then, Amy tripped off the security check-point because of magnets that she had in her pocket (last minute souvenir shopping!). After clearing security, we only had one last point to try and get through – passport security, at which point Amy realized that she couldn’t find her passport so had to unzip her luggage and start digging through to find her passport. Thankfully, it was located and we rushed onto the train (where Kelli and Kent were sitting offering up a much-needed prayer that we’d make it on!!) with 3 minutes to spare before we left the station. We are extremely thankful that we made it on the train – it wasn’t going to be fun to be left behind or have to pay a second time for the tickets!

Picture of our apartment building from the outside

Picture of the London Tower

Tower Bridge in the background

Europe Trip - London Day 4

As only true tourists can do, we started off another jam-packed day of site-seeing by heading off to the Churchill Museum. However, instead of finding the entrance to the museum, we instead tried to gain access to the British Foreign Office – whoops! :)

The War Rooms and the Churchill Museum was very interesting – more so than Amy originally expected. After spending too short of a time at the museum, we rushed off to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guards – along with several thousand of our closest friends! It was fun to see the marching band and the guards in their red uniforms and beaver hats, but other than that, it was too far away to see anything so was kind of a let-down sadly.

We did go through the Royal Mews and and the state rooms of the Buckingham Palace – it was striking how opulent and ostentatious the royal rooms, possessions and carriages are (such as the all gold carriage used in the coronation). After that, we went to the St. Paul’s cathedral and hoisted ourselves up the 500'ish steps to experience the whispering gallery and the dome – very tiring and at times extremely hot and claustrophobic. The whispering gallery was really neat how you could hear a whisper across the dome from one end to the other – but only if you used the right technique!

After St. Paul’s, we supped in a restaurant pub called the “Counting House” from Rick Steves’ recommendation. The food was quite good (Kelli had a traditional dinner called “Bangers and Mash” which is vegetarian sausages and mashed potatoes, while the rest of us had fish & chips and a shepherd’s pie-like meal).

To finish off the long day of aching feet and exhaustion, we end to “Shakespeare’s Globe” to see “As You Like It,” a Shakespearean play – it was something we all agreed was very fun and entertaining – even if we only understood every third word! :)

No trip to London would be complete without at picture in a signature red telephone booth (with the Westminster Abbey in the background)

The marching band of the Buckingham Palace during the changing of the guard

The front of St. Paul's cathedral

Shakespeare's Globe where we went to the play - the only thatched roof left in London!

Europe Trip - London Day 3

Today, we started off the day by jumping on the hop-on, hop-off bus tour around London - which is a very relaxing way to enjoy a lot of the sites without having to worry about getting from place to place, and is a wonderful way to rest your aching feet!

Partway through the day, we detoured off of the bus tour to go through the British Museum. The museum was fascinating, and had so many interesting things from our earth's history. There were mobs of people, so it was hard at times to be able to get close to the more popular exhibits (the Rosetta stone and the Egyptian mummies). But, we did the highlights tour (racing practically from room to room) and made mental notes that this is a museum that we'd need to spend more time at our next visit (we're certain that sometime in our life we're coming back!)

One of the stops on the hop-on, hop-off bus was Hamleys toy store - it is a 7 story toy store. Again, there were mobs of people in the store, but dedicated parents that we are, we did manage to find the Thomas the Tank Engine section of the store and picked up some books and two more trains for our boys. Now, we'll have four trains, which means that we have more trains than Zachary has hands, so he'll have to allow Kaleb to have some trains! :) We've also bought a really cute book "Katie Goes to London" for the kids in our circle about a little girl and her brother on an imaginary trip around London on top of a lion (a lion statue that comes to life in front of the National Gallery - see picture of the lion below). To date, we have purchased only gifts for our kids - no souvenirs for ourselves yet, so we need to rectify that!

To end the day, we went back to Westminster Abbey to hear an organ recital - it was very lovely, although the choir that we briefly heard on Friday was superior! :)

We're thankful to be back at our apartment, resting our feet and recuperating from our busy day.

The report from home sounds like Grandma is discovering all sorts of funny things about the boys - such as the fact that Kaleb loves to rip his diaper off if you don't get clothes back on him fast enough, and the fact that Kaleb has a bad habit of "doing his business" in the tub (we have no idea why, but this has happened at least 4 times whereas it never happened with Zachary - ever!!). You have to chuckle though - as Grandma described it, the boys were taking their bath together when all of a sudden Kaleb began to make a grunting noise....Zachary shouts "Grandma, Kaleb is pooping - I have to get out of the tub right now!!!" and jumps out of the tub before she can blink an eye! Poor kid, he's had this happen to him before so he knows the signs now! Ha ha!

Enjoying the top deck of the hop-on, hop-off bus tour

A very British telephone booth in front of Westminster Abbey
Statue of Churchill - strangely enough, this is in a square in front of Westminster Abbey but there are NO cross-walks to get safely across the road - so in order to enjoy all of the statues, you have to jay-walk! Weird!

Picture of Tower Bridge from afar
Check-out the guy on the motorcycle - dressed in a teddy bear outfit! Ha ha!

Picture of lion in front of National Gallery - featured in the storybook "Katie Goes to London"

Europe Trip - London Day 1 and 2

We promised that we'd blog on our trip if we had Internet connection, which we do, so wanted to give an update! We left for London on Thursday night on a red-eye flight but with the help of Ambian, we were able to get a little sleep on the flight over thankfully as we had a full day of sightseeing planned once we got here.

We started off going to Westminster Abbey where we did a self-guided tour (audio-guides are fabulous!) through the church before heading off on the walk from Westminster Abbey to the National Gallery passing by 10 Downing Street where the prime minister lives. The National Gallery was very entertaining as it had several recognizable Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet paintings on display - our Rick Steves guidebook made the rest of the paintings enjoyable as well as he pointed out interesting ones along the way. After completing a jaunt through the National Gallery, we rushed quickly over to the London Eye for our "flight" - it was a fun way to see the London skyline. We then headed back to our apartment by way of Big Ben, listening to the 8 o'clock bells. We are staying in a 2 bedroom apartment in Kensington, which has been very comfortable thus far.

Today, we jumped on an Evan Evans tourbus and headed to Windsor Castle - which was very entertaining to wander through - imagine that it is an active castle for the royal family! After that, we headed to Bath to see the Roman baths - interesting to see the history there but kind of makes you shake your head to learn that the early Romans thought that the baths were "sacred" because the water was hot.

The last highlight of the day was a stop at Stonehenge - while it doesn't take very long to tour the area and take pictures, it is very, very neat to see and take pictures of. That was one of the stops that Amy most wanted to see while here in England! It was also very interesting to wind our way through the English country-side, it is very pastoral and reminded Karis of home on the farm as there were many farms along the way preparing for harvest.

The boys are having a great time with Grandma at home, and we of course miss them! When we left, we were fearful that the departure would be particularly hard on Zachary. We distracted him with a "Thomas the Tank Engine" DVD (gotta love his obsession at times!) - but just before we left, Amy heard Zachary inform Grandma, "Grandma, right after this is over, I'm going on a trip!" She did in fact take him on a "trip" - a driving trip in the car, after he was done to help him get over the disappointment that he hadn't left with Mommy and Daddy. He has been bossing Grandma around already - telling her not to nap, how to drive and many more things we're sure!

Starting one of our many rides on the subway after landing in London

Picture of Westminster Abbey, and another one through a window grate

Riding the London Eye

Pictures of Big Ben Across the River

Another picture of Big Ben

A Portion of Windsor Castle

Glimpse of the original Roman baths in Bath, England (dirty water!). Kelli and Karis listening to their audioguides about the interesting history of the baths

Stonehenge

A few cute pictures of the boys from before we left - Kaleb's mohawk! Zachary and Kaleb playing peacefully together with the ball-popper - what a beloved toy!

Karis couldn't resist taking a picture of a digger for Zachary