A Fix It Party & Some Unique Belgian Weekends

We celebrated Charlie's birthday with a great theme for 3rd graders...a party where we collected old electronics and let the kids take them all apart we called it a Fix It Party, but it should have probably been called a "How Stuff Works Party"  We invited the whole class and got quite a crew...

Artsy photo by Kelly...many of the screwdrivers looked a bit worse a few hours later!

Charlie had fun shopping for all of this stuff at a neighborhood yardsale  (called a brocante here an excellent way to practice some French numbers!)  Charlie arranged it all with numbers and drew out of a hat to see what kids got to take apart.

Those are chocolate tools that they sell in the chocolate shops here-Greg thought they were rusty tools!

All fun stuff to take apart!

I am holding the "MOTHERBOARD" from an old computer!

Everyone got called upon to help!

 We had a great day and the kids had fun, some of the kids even wanted to take some of their broken treasures home!

Here a few Belgian observations first...damp here again...

I walk in the park almost every day, look at the size of this mushroom that I found on the trail, I stuck my foot in the photo so you can see how big it is!

 Occasionally on a weekend morning we will hear circus music in the neighborhood and wonder what in the heck it is.  A few times we have found the source...an organ grinder walking the streets.  Charlie loves to find him and take him a little change to see the monkey tip his hat...not a real monkey-sorry!

Here is a little video so you can hear the music!

We also celebrated our second car free day here.  For an entire Sunday they close the roads to car traffic and bikes, skateboards, etc take over.  It is Charlie's favorite day of the year and he went on about six different bike trips that day.  His favorite was to a little festival close to our house where he played all these cool handmade wooden games 

 Greg had me take pictures so maybe he could build some of these games in the future!

Charlie's favorite part was where they had all these cool bikes you could try out, each one worked a little differently.  I thought this one could be called a Kangaroo bike...

Here are the girls on the same team again...Katie (#10) has Kelly's back as she is kicking the ball..

Stay tuned for more adventures, the kids have some school holidays coming and we are excited to see something other soccer fields!