A Monkey and a Fairy...

Even though we prefer a morning church schedule to an afternoon church schedule; we do enjoy our lazy Sunday mornings. Here are a few pictures of Audrey the past two Sundays just monkeying around:And then here's a picture of our dress-up queen:

On Sunday morning Andy and I were both upstairs getting ready. Rachel was downstairs, like usual, just playing away. The next thing we know she comes marching up the stairs all dressed-up with her baby. She definitely brought smiles to our faces! :)

Haarlem

We spent yesterday afternoon in Haarlem, which is a town about 20 minutes away from us. We've gone to Haarlem before to enjoy the beach, but we've never spent time in town. So, yesterday we walked around and enjoyed Haarlem. Audrey was able to get a good morning nap; we got some lunch, and then headed out.

Haarlem Train Station: Here's the Saint Bavo Church, which has an organ that is 30 meters high. The organ concerts are free and we would like to return, just Andy and I, some night to attend one. There was one yesterday afternoon, but it was during our museum tour. As we were walking around after the museum tour we could hear some of the organ music.

A is for.... Andy and Audrey:
Our main purpose for going to Haarlem was to go to the Corrie ten Boom Museum. At least a decade ago (boy do I sound old) I read the novel, The Hiding Place, and I highly recommend it. We were able to visit the home where Corrie ten Boom and her family saved numerous Jewish lives during WW II. We enjoyed an English tour with 4 other people. Personally I enjoyed this museum much more than the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Here is a picture of the actual hiding place used by the Jews: After our tour of the museum we walked around Haarlem some more. We treated Rachel to some ice cream because she was such a good girl during the tour. Our guide kept on commenting on how good our girls were! :) The center of Haarlem was quite busy. There's lots of shopping and an outdoor market was also going on. A random cool building:
Amsterdamse Poort, old city gate of Haarlem:
Audrey finally taking an afternoon nap:
Rachel giving loves to Audrey:
The Adriaan Windmill:

We had an enjoyable couple of hours in Haarlem. Now we can check one more place off in Holland that we've had the opportunity to visit! :)

Three Amigas!

The past six months have been so wonderful for us as some new families have moved to our town. We now have friends that live within 5 minutes from us and we have so much fun with them. It's great for me to get some much needed "adult time" and it's been great for Rachel to have friends nearby. Yesterday we all rode the tram into Amsterdam to go to Amstelpark. We played, had picnic lunches, and played some more. All of the girls (adults included) had a great time. We are definitely grateful for our friends! :)

Giethoorn & Staphorst

This past Saturday we went on a little Holland adventure with our friends, the Rasmussens. We drove 90 minutes to the village of Giethoorn, which is known in the Netherlands as "Venice of the North", because there aren't many roads in Giethoorn and to get around you have to navigate through the canals. As I was talking to Rachel Saturday morning about what we were going to do, she quickly asked if a pirate was going to be on the boat. I guess she gets that from her Dora show... :)

Once we arrived in Giethoorn we enjoyed a picnic lunch and then rented out a "whisper boat" (quiet motor boat) for two hours. We all laughed as we were boarding the boat because life jackets were not provided - not something that would fly in the U.S. Anyhow, here are some pictures of our adventure on our little motor boat as we toured through the town of Giethoorn: Audrey was so happy the whole boat ride. She enjoyed being held and playing on the floor of the boat as well.

Rachel and Talynn enjoying the view. Rachel was so sweet to share her sunglasses with Talynn. :)
We came across, what we assumed, were some wedding boats docked by a church:

About halfway through our boat ride we emptied out into a lake.

And what more could we ask for - a boat ice cream stand! :) We all enjoyed some ice cream and Jon did a fabulous job of guiding our boat to the side of the ice cream boat.

After our boating adventure in Giethoorn we drove about 20 minutes to the town of Staphorst, which is famous for people wearing traditional Dutch dress. We've been to another town that claimed this in the past, so I wasn't very hopeful. But this time Staphorst pulled through. We saw several women and one man dressed in traditional dress. While we were driving through Staphorst we accidentally happened upon a demolition derby. We decided to go investigate and lucky for us it was almost over, so we got in for free. We definitely felt a bit out of place, but the kids enjoyed it. We discovered that red necks do exist in Holland. Instead of cowboy boots they wear wooden shoes:

We were a little out of place since we weren't smoking, wearing filthy jeans, sporting some wooden shoes, enjoying a Heineken, and sending our children around to collect empty glass beer bottles to recycle. But, we did enjoy ourselves. I think the adults enjoyed people watching and the kids enjoyed watching the cars go "crash-bang" (as Rachel would put it).

Staphorst was a very quaint town. It reminded me of a very strict HOA. All of the houses were built out of the same color brick and all the shutters were painted green. Each and every house was angled at a diagonal to the street. We enjoyed driving around Staphorst and here's one of the many houses that all look the same:

A perfect ending to a fun Dutch day was dining at a Pancake House. While we were enjoying our dinner we saw several tractors pulling cars from the demolition derby:

9 months

Saturday morning I got Audrey all dressed up and attempted to get a nice picture of her. I have forgotten how difficult it is to snap photos of a baby once they are busy little bees. So, after taking a ton of pictures, here are a few of my favorites:

Tantrums???

In all the baby books you read it seems like tantrums are introduced or talked about around 2 years of age. Well, I think Audrey is an advanced-tantrummer (if that's what you call it). Not necessarily anything to brag about, but it's pretty funny nonetheless... If she's doing something and you pick her up, or if she wants something and you take it away, or if I put her in her highchair she kicks and squeals like crazy. Rachel's never really been the type to throw a tantrum by kicking and screaming (no worries, she has a different style), so Audrey's come up with this all on her own. Here's a mild example:

Mother-in-Training

This past week Rachel decided she should feed Audrey, so I lowered the high chair to Rachel's level and she did a fabulous job:

Just having fun...

Even though it seemed like we were running around crazy on our Normandy trip, we did enjoy some lazy evenings and mornings at our hotels. Rachel became quite obsessed with Andy's blackberry on this trip: Audrey doing her salute early one morning:

Each night when we got back to our hotel we'd plop Audrey down on the bed and she'd go to town with the diaper bag, lunch pail, and her toys:

Fooling around with Daddy while Mommy got ready one morning:

One of our stops to feed:

Rachel's working on her sandwich and Audrey's examining a blade of grass:

Audrey being a goofball in Rouen:

Giverny & Rouen

On our third day of adventures we headed to Giverny, which has Claude Monet's house and gardens. We had read reviews on the gardens and it sounded like it was worth the extra 90 minutes of driving. Let's just say, it didn't measure up. Maybe it would have been better a different time of year, but we still made the most of our visit to the gardens. One of our biggest complaints was that 90% of the paths you couldn't walk down, so you weren't able to get very close to many of the flowers. It's probably like that for a reason... Obviously I understand why they gated off this path:
Anyone familiar with Claude Monet's paintings can appreciate the lily pond:

We thought we would try to get a cute picture of Audrey sitting on the ground, but all she wanted to do was play with the pebbles. She even threw a fit when Andy picked her up when we were ready to move on.

We were able to coax a cheesy smile out of Rachel and in return she got to take a picture of each of us:

Andy in front of Claude Monet's house:

Cute picture of the girls - too bad there's so many shadows:

From Giverny we headed to Rouen, which was our final destination of our trip. Rouen is the historical capital of Normandy and most known for being where Joan of Arc was executed. We were expecting a small French town, but quickly found out that was not so. Once we got there we went on a search for some dinner. Along the way we found some cool architecture and an astronomical clock.

The underpass of the clock:

A memorial and the modern church of Saint Joan of Arc:

Now there's a genuine smile:
After walking around for awhile we finally resorted to getting Rachel a happy meal from McDonald's. We found several French cafes, but none of them would serve us until 8, so we just grabbed baguette sandwiches at a little stand. And just in case you were wondering Audrey enjoyed the sites of Rouen in the Beco:

We stayed in Rouen that night and then headed home the next day. So, that concludes our adventures in the Province of Normandy. We enjoyed the opportunity we had to see some more of Europe. The girls did really well considering the amount of time we spent in the car every day and the lack of good, quality naps. Our traveling is going to slow down now that cooler weather is coming. It's tricky to travel with two little ones and it's almost torture to travel with two little ones in the cold. So, who knows when our next adventure will be...