Waiting

When we left Grandma and Grandpa Geels in Bruges, they were planning on taking a slightly more leisurely route to Switzerland, lingering in Belgium and then spending a few days in Luxembourg before joining us in Zürich for a five-day visit.  Today was the day that Grandma and Grandpa arrived, and the kids were beside themselves with excitement.  I channeled some of that energy into making some welcome banners for the Grandparents Geels, one per kid.

Her spelling might be slipping, but the message
comes through

But all three kids were still slap-happy, and Joey was suffering somewhat because of it.  He was wearing one of my favorite shirts, the one that says "Hug me."  When we were walking around Paris, Joey had a whole group of beautiful French teenagers offer him hugs: he's going to be very sorry, when he's fifteen, that they didn't make that shirt in larger sizes.

But his brother and sister are a little more aggressive with their affection, and they were pouncing on him with squeezing hugs all morning.  Finally, Joey had enough, and started barking at them "NO! NO HUGS!"

So Ella decided his shirt needed a slight alternation:

With Grandma and Grandpa soon arriving, they thought maybe they should clarify their own hugability status as well.

We finally ended up working off most of that excess energy at the sandbox, inviting one of our neighbors with a little girl Joey's age to join us.  I wasn't aware of how good this neighbor's English was, and I painfully stumbled through ten minutes preschool-level conversation.  ("Oh, ja! Das ist gut! Sehr gut!")  I'm sure she thought she was doing me a favor, letting me practice, but I was so grateful when she revealed that she'd spent a year living in New York and a summer in Oregon, and that her English was, of course, impeccable. The latest in a running gag of encounters over the last four months.

Building tunnels

Joey painstakingly watering
each of the thousands of
daisies dotting our yard.

I've come to realize that there is an unexpected advantage to living in a brand new building, aside from the perfectly sparkling rooms.  

Every book I've read about the Swiss characterizes them as being perfectly polite but also perfectly reserved, very slow to make friends or to invite people into their lives.  But many of my neighbors aren't Swiss, and I think they're suffering a little in this culture. Everyone who lives here seems a little lonely and is eager to make new friends.  

My neighbor is German, but she's lived in Zürich for ten years, until recently living on the shore of the Limmat River.  She loved her old neighborhood, and each summer, all summer long, she'd flaunt Swiss modesty and would run across the busy street in her bathing suit to hang out in the beach by the river. She knew everyone in her neighborhood, which, she described as less suburban, and, therefore, less child-friendly: they moved because they had their little one.  But it was less grown-up–friendly as well.  She and her husband even went to the lengths of buying a large picnic table to put in the building commons, hoping to draw people outside and bring them together.

Well, the boys and and I, at least, are happy to have new friends, and we played out there until dinnertime, when we heard some familiar voices in the courtyard.

"Grandma! Grandpa!"