Auf wiedersehen

In other words...Goodbye in German. The first week of June was a school holiday and also the last opportunity we would have to visit with our amazing friends the "McHendricks" (as we like to call them) before they move back to the US. They have been living in Germany while we have been in England and we have really enjoyed meeting up during the past 1.5 years. Even though we don't really live that close, it feels like our neighbors are leaving us. We had a perfect week of visiting and tried to be easy house guests since Megan had just barely delivered her baby, Leif. I'm not sure what part of 'our family' and 'easy house guests' went together in my mind, but it was a lot of fun.

The plane trip was typical - many diaper changes and the likes - but the kids traveled really well and it was Nell's first flight...so exciting!

After planning the trip, we realized an amazing coincidence - my brother and his family would be in Germany at the same time visiting his in-laws. We flew in, rented a car and drove 4 hours to Chemnitz to visit with them. It was so much fun to have cousins play and get a chance to catch up with my brother, his wife and her family. They are such great people. The second Clara saw her cousin Tara, she broke into a run and Tara gave her a huge hug. I always loved seeing my cousins when growing up and I am glad to see Clara developing those same bonds that I had with hers.

It was also fun to see Tara and Marie get so excited over new cousin Nell. I thought this spontaneous moment was perfect.

The next day we enjoyed in the family garden. Jonas had everyone wrapped around his little finger and used his charm to get Tina's family to take him around on the various adorable toys.



Clara enjoyed playing on the swing...


and I especially loved this picture of her and Nell.


We also took some family pictures in an attempt to make my mom jealous...did it work?

After a relaxing day we headed back to Megan & Rijen's house. It was great to see them and time went by far too quickly. Clara & Jonas adore Fiona and loved being able to play with her. Here are some examples of the many things they did together...

Eat chocolate donuts on the balcony,

color and play together,

do some relaxing of their own,

play at the park,



draw with window markers on the glass walls (doesn't Clara make you think of some mad mathematician? She had the entire wall covered as if teaching "maths and lit-racy" - as she would pronounce it),

(and with the help of Rijen, they also spent a morning cleaning off the windows...)


had a few "sleepover" nights,


and my favorite, pretend to be sisters.

Aside from nursing our babies together on the couch (one of our favorite past times), Megan and I managed to get out one afternoon and go shopping together. Times have changed. We came home with absolutely nothing for ourselves (granted post-baby bodies aren't as fun to buy for) and instead bought a few things for our children. The most fun were the matching clothes for our girls - living vicariously? Maybe.

Our goals for the week weren't much. They consisted of talking, relaxing, nursing babies, feeding children, playing games, eating well, taking pictures of our babies and going to a huge toy store in town. Check and check. We managed to do them all.

We've always thought it would be fun to have babies close in age, so here it is - Leif and Nell!


Watch out Megan - I especially love this picture of the guys relaxing on the couch while Nell pulls out all the stops to get Rijen's attention, complete with a huge grin. Or maybe she's just trying to get in good with her future father in law.


Once the kids were in bed, we enjoyed playing our favorite games together. Ticket to Ride is a mainstay!


Everyone had a turn winning something and while I may get a bad reputation for being OCD while playing Ticket to Ride, Rijen gets the award for making sure the lines were straight for the memory game we played with the kids.

I was overwhelmed with the toy store we went to and it made me want to completely overhaul my kids toys. Hardly any colorful plastic anywhere in sight - all beautiful wood. Those European toys were so nice and I had no idea you could spend so much time in a toy store. Thankfully there were some activities for the guys to do while Megan and I browsed the many aisles.

As for the eating well? It was out of control - but absolutely delicious.


How many things can you do with one batch of cookie dough you might ask? You can eat it plain (plenty of this was done), bake it into delicious cookies (again, plenty of this accomplished), make a giant cookie based ice cream sundae to share (felt completely ill after this one)...


or for the very adventurous, bake an oreo inside of it (good but not worth repeating, in my opinion).

We also managed to get some fun pictures of our children and families. Our families were very patient with us as we experimented with different poses, settings, etc. Although it is hard to believe, here is a small sampling of the pictures we took together...






But then, Nell decided that enough was enough...however, if you look closely, that didn't deter Devin from continuing to smile with his wax figure-like pose. He's been trained well....

That's when Megan and I decided to just take some of ourselves since we are usually behind the camera and from all of our travels together, we don't have any good ones of just us. Unfortunately, it felt a bit like high school glamor shots when it came down to it, but it was fun anyway.

I am so glad we were able to make this trip work. Seeing them is always wonderful and we are grateful to have such a meaningful friendship.


Thankfully Jonas snapped me out of my pitiful state right after saying goodbye at the airport by throwing up all over everything and then once that was cleaned up we realized our flight was delayed. We finally made it on just in time for Nell to poop alllll over us both and I had the pleasure of changing her in the airplane bathroom during horrible turbulence. Still, I only have happy memories of this fabulous week!

**Post-edit: Apparently Megan and I were working on very similar posts at the same time without realizing it. While the pictures we chose are mostly identical, her writing is much more clever and so for a better take on the same week, go here.