Welcome 2018!

We had a nice relaxing Christmas, Charlie was thrilled with his visit from Santa.  We enjoyed our visit to the Netherlands on Christmas night to see the Barata family.  They live in a small town there and all the houses have big front windows, with very cool, unique Christmas decorations.  Next year I plan to visit some small towns with my camera in hand...future window photos to follow!

We had a pretty quiet week, the highlight was a trip to our local ice rink, which looked amazing and smelled even better, there was a waffle stand in the back corner.  One thing about Brussels is there are always wonderful waffle smells wafting in the air!

 Beautiful!

Dutch & French-no sign was needed- you could smell them the minute you came in the building!

The little kid area even had a house they could skate through with bears inside!

We welcomed the Barata family to our house for New Years Eve, we had a great game and puzzle night,

We had some American style Raclette

We headed to the Grand Place to see the buildings all lit up...

Katie and James welcomed in the New Year with a basketball game in our backyard...Greg made them stop about 1AM...he thought it was too loud, but the fireworks around off went on for hours!  We could get occasional views from our highest windows, we learned Belgians like their fireworks on New Years!

We hope all of you had a great New Years- Happy 2018!