Springtime in Germany

We got all of our bags...no small feat loaded and arrived early in the morning in Frankfurt.

We loaded up our rental car and headed for our friends house.  Everyone was on the countdown to seeing our buddies...all happy to pull up in front of their house!  They cooked us a great lunch and we all sat outside on their deck to enjoy the nice day.

 They were wonderful hosts and kept all 11 of us well fed for our entire visit! No small feat!

 The bigger town next to them has a claim to fame of the narrowest street in the world...here Katie is right in the middle of it!

 We try real German food, pretzels everywhere, great beer and sausages!  

Charlie is in love with the YouTube videos of this crazy Scottish bike rider named Danny Macaskill.  When I looked at Danny's website I saw that he was in Zurich for the Urban Bike Festival the same weekend we were only 2 hours away in Germany, so we loaded up our rental car and headed for Zurich.

 Charlie's hero Danny is the middle guy, he signed his toy bike ramp and his hat...Charlie also says he touched his left shoulder!

 We learned that food was SUPER expensive in Zurich, luckily the festival was free, our burger lunch was more than a nice dinner out in South Africa!

 Danny getting ready for the show, setting up a jump ramp for the end.

 They did a bike high jump contest among the three riders...here is Danny going over.

Charlie checks out the pump track...

Our friends knew all of the great places to take us, here we visited the city of Tubingen where they had gone to college, it has a beautiful river and we rented paddle boats, look at the view!

Katrin and I had the little paddlers, the big kids all got a different boat and the Dads stayed at the local beer garden to sample all the brews.

Our friends also took us to a very cool old castle, what made it even cooler was that there were beer gardens at the top of the castle hike and at the bottom, tough to go wrong in Germany.  I did take some photos but can't find them yet...will try to add later!

Here is a final photo that Greg snapped, called Couch Meeting...the kids really had a ball and enjoyed each others company, so fun for everyone! We were sad to say goodbye, but happy that in a few months we can all visit again somewhere in Europe!

I am happy to report that I'm writing this post from the good old USA...we landed last night and we are all super excited to be home!  We can't wait to see all of our family and friends!  Next stop our NH place!

A Flurry of Farewells to Finish a Wonderful Three Years

The last few weeks have been crazy busy from a logistics side, and hard emotionally, as we say farewell to so many wonderful friends we have met.  We hope to see many of them again in the US one day or in Europe.

Here are some highlights of the fun stuff...we will leave out all the tears!

Kelly's Friends that attended her Sweet 16 Birthday party.

I always wanted to do a movie night for the kids at the orphanage and my amazing neighbor Grace said she would cook for the kids.

 Her daughter Naledi helped all day and they made a traditional meal for over 100 kids.  We helped where we could and taught them some American shortcuts.  These ladies work WAY too hard, for instance to make gravy the shred the tomatoes.  Katie and I shredded a few then we busted out the blender and pureed the rest!

The kids LOVED the movie and the slideshow Kelly made, the slideshow had all pictures of them from previous visits, very sweet!  One boy said, "It was more than just a movie"...all because we brought popcorn and candy!

Athletics day at Charlie's school, or Chariots of Fire day, as Greg refers to their outfits!

 Last rugby game at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg where the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup in 1995.  We saw the Johannesburg Lions play the Durban Sharks in a close match.

Charlie wouldn't be in the picture because he was sad his Sharks lost in the final minutes!

We did a final egg hunt for the orphanage and had our best turnout of volunteers yet. The morning before we stuffed almost 1000 eggs in our empty house.

They had a master plan to hide eggs in various places and sent the kids to different areas based on age.  Guess how that plan worked?  CHAOS!

However the kids LOVED it and we loved seeing them enjoy all their treats.  We left happy to know that a wonderful group of Americans will continue to stay involved and assisting them with fun activities for the kids.

 Charlie got to perform in his Grade 2 Play, Kung Fu Panda, and he was Crane.  The boys are so sweet and do such an amazing job with all of their lines, I am still in awe of what the teachers can get them to do!

We have had many wonderful dinners with friends these last few nights and we are sad to go but thankful for all the great people that we have gotten to know these last three years and for all the amazing adventures we have been on as a family.

There is a rugby song that goes "South Africa we stand as one, we stand together with the green and gold."  I know that our family will always stand with South Africa and think fondly of our friends here and we sincerely hope that wherever we are in the world we will get to see many of them again!

We will board the plane in a few hours with fond memories!

Surfin SA!

For our last big trip here in South Africa, we headed to Jeffrey's Bay.  Jeffrey's Bay is the surf capital, where they host an annual surf championship.  It made headlines a few years back when the Australian surfer punched the shark.

We did attempt a surf lesson, however the real purpose of our visit was my shell collection.  I had read that it was the best beach for shell collecting.  Since we have been here I have loved collecting shells, the ones you find here are really amazing!

Everyone came to the Shell Museum, some under duress, but the museum was worth the trip.  The majority of their shell collection came from a lady who had lived in Jeffrey's Bay and collected shells from the 1940's-1960's.  They had an unflattering writeup on Charlotte where they called her an eccentric old spinster that referred to the shells as her children.  The girls read this and started asking me if the shells would be my children...gotta love teenagers!

Everyone pitched in and helped me add to my collection, Charlie was an eager hunter and Kelly was always happy to go to the beach with her new camera in tow.  Look at the pile of shells we get to sort through!

We stayed right by the beach called SuperTubes and on my morning shell hunting trips I'd head down with the surfers.  There were sometimes about twenty of them out there and they really were fun to watch.

The old lady in Jeffrey's Bay would drag out boxes of shells to show visitors, I promise I'll not do that to any of you when you come to visit!

We visited St. Francis Bay and the lighthouse at Seal Point which is the most Southeastern Point in all of Africa.  The waves were really crashing against the rocks and made it lots of fun to climb around.

Check out this African beach house in St. Francis Bay!

Boogie boarding!

We finished out the trip with Greg and the kids taking a surfing lesson.  I took a million photos and videos in the hopes I'd get one of them riding the perfect wave.  Charlie had the best luck of all.  Sadly, Kelly hasn't shared any of them with me yet...so I"m putting in the post...maybe someday she will share them!

We headed home with two big things on our horizon...Kelly's 16th birthday party and our pack out...more updates to follow on both!

Fun February

Charlie was so excited to go to his first "kissing booth", his favorite puppy Isaac who is a guide dog in training was in a kissing booth at the mall, so we went to support the cause.

Blue Man Group came to South Africa and we were happy to take the kids to the show at Monte Casino, which is about half an hour from our house.

The show had changed a bit since Greg and I saw it in Chicago in the late 90's.

Big balls at the end...

Our kids loved it and Charlie (with the drummers) said he is going to take his kids when he is a Dad.

Our friend Erica came back to visit after she finished up a volunteering trip in Tanzania.  Our other friend Sarah flew up from Cape Town.  Right after they arrived we went to a friends fabulous 40th Birthday Party, here is Greg and all of us!

We needed to do something fun and we decided that the only thing better than one houseboat was two houseboats...so we headed back to the Vaal River.

Ladies boat!

Greg also had a friend from work in town and so we had a boy boat.

We had fun racing up the river together and anchoring out at night.

We dropped one anchor and moored the boats alongside each other for the night.   I loved seeing Erica's smiling face out the window in the morning!

We awoke to a nice rainy morning, where the only one moving was Charlie trying to fish.

We had a lazy breakfast and sadly turned our boats to head back.

Swatch buddies!

So sad to say farewell, but we look forward to seeing Erica & Sarah somewhere amazing next!

Proud to be an American

Our recent American politics have made for interesting discussions with all of our South African friends and those from other countries that are also stationed here in Pretoria. Everywhere we go people want to talk about all the political news from the USA. 

This is not a post about politics, but an appreciation post of a beautiful trait that I see in Americans at home and those stationed with us here.  Americans care about kids.  I saw this when I worked in schools in the US and I continue to see it here.   When a link goes out to a fundraising site to raise money for the orphanage we help out at here, donations come pouring in from all over our the US, for children that people in the US have never even met! I have done two fundraisers now, one to ask for funds to help build more bedrooms at the orphanage and a second to ask for funds for school supplies for the kids.  I am blown away by your generosity!

Last weekend we made another trip to the orphanage and before our visit, the orphanage sent us a list of food staples and most needed school supplies.  I created a shared spreadsheet and sent the list out to about 15 American families here in South Africa.   Throughout the week my garage began to fill up with donations.  On Sunday, we visited with about five of the families and unloaded piles of stuff.  (It took a few of the guys almost an hour to carry in all the donations!)


After we fed the kids some pizza for lunch, we played!  Everywhere I looked there were happy kids and awesome volunteers...

 there was a group on the soccer field, sweating it out and playing soccer with the kids

Tracing the kids with sidewalk chalk-they LOVE this!

 a dance party with some of the little girls.

A friend brought her dog, Ellee,  for the kids to play with, and Ellee is so popular when she leaves for the day, the kids all help load her in the car to say goodbye!

Ellee's well wishers- saying goodbye!

A Nelson Mandela quote that I really like is:

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

I'd like to tweak Mandela's quote to leave out the "its" at the end, from what I see our American soul is devoted to children, no matter where they are in the world and I couldn't be prouder to call myself an American!

Savoring a warm January

Next year when we are freezing at this time we won't believe that we were doing these things in January...

 Slip & Slide with the neighbor kids in the backyard!

Charlie testing out our friend Olivia's Mermaid tail...she got the biggest kick out of him wearing it!

Here is what swimming at school from 12-1 in the heat of the day and forgetting sunscreen looks like!!

When Charlie was about two he was totally addicted to hockey and he would play for hours every day.    His latest obsession is BMX biking.  We are regulars at the skate park and he builds jumps in our driveway.

I recently learned what a "Pump Track" is and we have visited two of those now.  For you non-bike riders (which I still consider myself) it is a track that is designed so you just keep going over bumps and pumping your bike, if you ride correctly you shouldn't have to pedal.  I have tried it and just keep trying to not get hurt!  Here is a video of Charlie doing the "jump track", which had even bigger drops than the pump track! (I did NOT attempt the jumps)

He begs to go to the pump track every day!